Our wildlife haven grew out of a single hyssop. That first summer, this inaugural native plant drew many Bombus bumblebees into our backyard. The newly planted perennial hyssop, or Agastache, as it’s known by botanists, had small bluish-purple flowers, arranged in protruding spikes atop tall mint green and square stems. They were prized by the pollinators. The Bombus bumblebees of varying southeastern species would sip nectar from the hyssop’s lip-like flowers, taking time to drink their fill before clumsily bumbling on to the next flower.

Sometimes, Teddy and I would sit and watch them in the late mornings. The sun had risen just enough to take the chill out of the air, and we’d listen to the soft drone of bees at work while sipping our coffee, steam wafting up in curls that faded into the North Carolina humidity. That summer, the bees and their hyssop sparked something and set us on the path to build a place for pollinators and Carolina wildlife.

We soon added more native plants to accompany the hyssop and nurture the bumblebees: sunny-petaled black-eyed Susans, Rudbeckia, whose dark, vaulted centers held nectar in the hearts of myriad tiny florets; and coneflowers, Echinacea, with their pink arrays of petals surrounding domes of orange, nectar-filled spines; and of course, more purple-lipped hyssop.

Unlike many ornamental flowering plants, native plants like these provide food and habitat for a broad range of pollinators—native bees, sweat bees, butterflies like small golden skippers or speckled fritillaries. Many other common insects, like flies and beetles, and a group known as “true bugs,” can also serve as pollinators.

And while there are generalist pollinators like the honeybee that can interact with a wide range of plants, both ornamental and native, many native pollinators are specialists adapted to a specific and limited selection of plants. Gardening with plants native to the garden’s region can support the local pollinators and other wildlife that evolved alongside them. According to Adair Welgos, who worked at Deep Roots Natives nursery in Durham, North Carolina, at the time, where we sourced plants for our garden, growing native plants provides local pollinators with the food and habitat they’ve adapted to survive. In the Piedmont region of North Carolina where I live, Welgos told me that native plants are already adapted to “the soil, the sun.” These plants need certain pollinators that, in turn, rely on them in a great web of adaptation and coexistence. “We’re all nestled in together,” she said.

Back at our home, the pre-existing ornamental plants in our yard were beautiful, but often barren. Our newly transplanted natives, though, were soon teeming with life.

Pollinators impact more than local gardens and ecosystems. As illustrated in Reuters, pollinators and other insects help feed the world by pollinating agricultural crops and acting as a fundamental link in the food chain for wildlife. Providing them with additional habitat and food supports their livelihood. This, it turns out, is critical as insect populations around the world are declining at an alarming rate of 2% per year due to human-driven activities like deforestation, pollution, and climate change. Dr. Annabel Renwick, Curator for the Blomquist Native Plant Garden at Duke University, where I have also volunteered, called it “an insect apocalypse” that can have outsized impacts. In 2022, researchers at Princeton University identified that insect declines can lead to some species of plants outcompeting others, potentially resulting in declines in those populations and impacting the organisms that rely on them, creating cascading consequences across an ecosystem. It turns out we rely on insects far more than many of us realize.

Yet, in the face of declining insect populations, building a garden to support pollinators and other wildlife makes a difference. Renwick emphasizes they don’t need to be dramatic or ugly. As the curator for a public native garden, she is an expert at designing inviting and inspiring gardens that support local wildlife like pollinators. She believes home gardens can start small and be pleasing to the eye. “We seem to like many of the same things the bees like,” Renwick says.

At our fledgling home garden, as August heat gave way to the soothing buzz of September, we began looking beyond our first few native plants to the lawn. Though perhaps pleasing to the eye, the greenspace ground cover around our new home was effectively a dead zone for pollinators or other wildlife—a mowed turf lawn, invasive privet bushes, and two rows of Ligustrum: both ornamental and invasive. Across the United States, mowed turf lawns are pervasive and expansive. They also create “pollinator wasteland,” according to the Smithsonian Gardens. Lawns are often monocultures that support little to no biodiversity.

Keeping our lawns crisply cut and verdant green impacts wildlife too. Mowing keeps grasses from flowering and eliminates habitat for insects and other small animals, while pesticides and fertilizer are often harmful, if not fatal, to pollinators. Turfgrass lawns provide scant environmental services, too. According to the National Wildlife Federation, lawns have poor stormwater control. Welgos noted that this is in part because of their shallow roots. With an individual lawn, the acreage may not seem like much. But a 2005 joint study by NASA and NOAA found that turfgrass covered an estimated 1.9% of the continental US—more than twice the land area of North Carolina.

To add ground cover that might benefit pollinators, we sowed a white clover lawn first in the fall, then again in the spring. Both times, Teddy brought home a brown paper bag on his bike, partially full of round yellow seeds. I would scoop the seeds into my hand, where they’d stick between my fingers and collect in the lines of my palm like a fortune—quietly foretelling a verdant yard, a future for the plants. The clover would take root behind our home and in pockets in the front, and the small triplet leaflets and white flowers would bob in the wind of bees’ wings.

But as winter drew in, the green season went dormant. Our plants turned brown or yellow, lost their leaves, and our work with the garden had to change from tending growing things to planning for their future.

Knowing he couldn’t raise a pollinator paradise overnight, Teddy contemplated how to grow the garden so that lizards, snakes, frogs, birds, scurrying mammals, as well as the pollinators could take solace there. His research at the local library revealed much of what experts in native plant and wildlife gardening have to say, including Renwick. At Duke, Renwick has been transforming the botanical garden’s native plant area to support wildlife and public education. She believes there are four components to building gardens for wildlife: niches or places where animals can build habitat, food like flower nectar, foliage, or seeds for herbivory, water, and levels like layers of a natural canopy.

As for selecting plants for the garden, Renwick suggests considering their "ecological functions," choosing plants that native pollinators eat or pollinate. If you were to build a garden, for instance, this could include small rocks or pots for habitat, fruiting natives like strawberry or blackberry, plants with plenty of nectar-bearing flowers (like bee balm for bees, milkweed for monarchs, or asters for everyone), a tree or two with deep roots that can stabilize the soil in wet areas or fix nitrogen to promote soil health, and a bird bath. Your garden would be full of diverse sizes and shapes to mimic the layers of the local forest canopy and provide a variety of niches. Renwick also stresses to vary your selection so that your garden is both biodiverse and genetically diverse. In essence, your wildlife garden would act like a microcosm of a functioning ecosystem. She also encourages backyard gardeners to start small and grow from there.

We had our small start with a hyssop bed. So during the winter, we aimed big. Guided by readings on native plant gardening, a green thumb passed down for generations, and his natural intuition, Teddy planned and shaped the garden with me in tow. In early winter, we planted a white oak, Quercus, in our bare front lawn to eventually bring overstory and shade to our block. White oaks in the eastern United States are also highly ecologically valuable to animals. According to the University of Kentucky’s Forestry & Natural Resource Extension, white oak acorns are especially low in tannic acid, a common compound in plants that makes them bitter, so white oaks are a delectable food source for wildlife like squirrels, deer, and turkeys. White oaks and other oaks also provide habitat for more species of moths and butterflies than any other tree. These moths and butterflies go on to fill their own niches as pollinators for home gardens, wild spaces, and crops, and they in time can be a food source for other wildlife.

When it was time to plant, the small oak sapling was shorter than me, and I could count its branches on my fingers. In its wintering state, it had a handful of lobed leaves, turned a muddy ruby in the December chill. But cold-weather months are the best time to plant young trees, as the arduous voyage from nursery pot to dug earth is less of a shock for a dormant tree. This small white oak would eventually join the canopy of mature willow oaks already nestling the back of our house, and a small flowering fringe tree, Chionanthus, with white, feathery, frond-like flowers that we would plant in a few months     .

Winter moved through its coldest months, and the sun’s low arc lifted higher day by day. With it, the temperatures lifted, too, and it was time to sow seeds. Rather than a potting shed, our squat back deck became the staging site—a workspace to begin growing new starts from seed and an experimental site to learn what we ourselves could grow and which plants would thrive. So far, we’d planted young but already growing plants: starts like hyssop, coneflowers, the trees. But not every start establishes and survives. Growing plants from seeds was an affordable way to have many trials of a species to learn which conditions helped them thrive in our yard.

In this season of seeding, rows of reused pots of all sizes stretched out in lines bookended by seed packets. The earthen scent of soil mingled with the sweet decay of compost and rose up from the potting station. One workday, Teddy grabbed a small pot and gently depressed the dirt, and placed a tiny, dark brown, elliptical seed inside. He covered the divet with dirt, careful not to spill any of the dozen seeds perched in his other palm. The sun sank low in the chilly afternoon, peeking through the trees into our backyard with gentle golden light. Teddy filled the next dozen square pots with the elliptical seeds, silently considering the garden we sowed, hoping these very seeds would grow into more hyssop and coneflowers and new zinnias and milkweed.

In March, the spring warmth shook the chill out of the air, and Teddy began to build beds where there used to be grass or bare earth. Whether stacking stones or placing plant roots in the earth, he gardened without gloves. His bare hands delicately handled the roots of young seedlings and saplings, and he could feel the texture of rough rock and silky clay soil. His hands weren’t dirty; they were at work, as if to attune to the roots and soil, in search of the connection that tied him to plants, pollinators, birds, the earth. In keeping, Teddy built the new garden beds by hand. To fill the shade bed, we focused on native plants adapted to cool air and low light while for the sun beds, we sowed plants adapted to bright light and high heat. Plants that thrive in wet soil went where our yard floods in the rain, and we seeded a wildflower bed where the old driveway’s broken concrete used to be. Teddy stacked stones around the beds to hold in the fresh soil and compost. He hoped that someday a lizard or a snake might take shelter within the garden wall.

We chose mostly native plants in the hope they would be hardier, adapted to the weather and environmental conditions. But our wildlife garden wasn’t entirely native. According to Renwick and Welgos, adding non-natives that don’t outcompete the natives can have some benefits for wildlife too. Welgos said that selectively adding in a few non-natives can extend the blooming period. Non-native plants can offer some pollinators food sources for a longer period. Across our garden, we planted several dahlias, native to Mexico, because we’ve always loved them. It turns out the bees did too.

By late May, as flowering trees bloomed all over the city, our garden beds bloomed too—in diverse colors of magenta, ballet-slipper pink and canary yellow, periwinkle and peach, ruby red and golden orange. Throughout the summer, flowers blossomed in waves, rising and falling with the daily renewal of the sun. Pollinators filled the garden, coming in crests of their own. Enormous carpenter bees, tiny native bees, jewel-colored true bugs, grasshoppers and butterflies of every hue visit the garden to drink nectar, munch on leaves, or shelter. Even praying mantises and monarchs spent their time here. In turn, these insects also provided food for the birds, squirrels, and reptiles that nest in the neighborhood.

Gradually over the summer, Teddy told two different tales of visiting creatures: the pollinators he had already seen, and the species he wanted to attract to the garden in the future. He dreamed of a pond for frogs, rocks for snakes, logs for salamanders, vegetation for rabbits, nests for possums. And when faced with expanses of lawns and seemingly endless pavement, Teddy began to think of how to help neighbors add pollinator-friendly features to the neighborhood.

On a dog day of summer, a year after Teddy’s first hyssop, he was weeding in the wildflower garden. This bed was an experiment born out of hardware store seeds and a rough, bare patch of exposed ground compacted for years by heavy concrete. Now, cascading thickets of colorful wildflowers gently rooted here. As Teddy tended the patch to give the summer’s late bloomers more room to catch sunlight and water, he spotted something wriggling into the flowers.

“Lou! Oh my gosh! Come look!” he cried.

A slender, ruddy-brown snake slithered into the thicket. Teddy looked up at me with delight and triumph.

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Milesia, C., Elvidge, C. D., Dietz, J. B., Tuttle, B. T., Nemani, R. R., & Running, S. W. (n.d.). International Society for Photogrammetry and Remote Sensing -- Joint Symposia URBAN. In A strategy for mapping and modeling the ecological effects of US lawns. Retrieved October 24, 2024, from https://www.isprs.org/proceedings/xxxvi/8-w27/milesi.pdf.

Munson, O. (2024, September 27). What is the biggest state in the US? the states from largest to smallest by land area. USA Today. https://www.usatoday.com/story/news/2022/12/09/what-largest-state-us-size-states-land-area/8083288001/

Stringer, J., & Morris, D. (n.d.). Understanding the importance of White Oak. White Oak Initiative. https://forestry.ca.uky.edu/sites/forestry.ca.uky.edu/files/for147_landowners_guide_to_-_understanding_the_importance_of_white_oak.pdf

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Additional Sources

Black-eyed susan: Beautiful and beneficial. Penn State Extension. (n.d.). https://extension.psu.edu/black-eyed-susan-beautiful-and-beneficial

Fritillary: A pretty butterfly and a good pollinator. US Forest Service. (n.d.). https://www.fs.usda.gov/managing-land/wildflowers/pollinators/pollinator-of-the-month/fritillary

Janicki, J. (2023, January 18). Insect populations are declining at an unprecedented rate. Reuters. https://www.reuters.com/graphics/GLOBAL-ENVIRONMENT/INSECT-APOCALYPSE/egpbykdxjvq/

The Trustees of Princeton University. (n.d.). Princeton research shows how the decline in pollinators can ripple across ecosystems. Princeton University. https://www.princeton.edu/news/2022/08/08/how-decline-pollinators-ripples-across-entire-ecosystems

Wheeler, J. (n.d.). Plants for pollinators: Giant hyssop. Xerces Society. https://www.xerces.org/blog/plants-for-pollinators-giant-hyssop