Diversity in Your Garden

 

Monarch on fall-blooming aster

When I go to the grocery store, I’m happiest to find a good selection of foods: different choices of bread, more than one kind of pasta sauce, and enough yogurt selections to make one cry (so many choices!). 

In some cases – such as having plant-based milks in addition to dairy milk choices – it can make a difference for specialized diets. 

When wildlife comes to your garden, a diversity of plants helps improve the chances that there will be a little something for everyone too.

Here are three reasons why it’s important to have a diversity of plants.

Different plants support different insects.

·         There are insects who rely on different plants because they have specialized abilities to extract nectar and pollen. Bees, wasps, beetles, flies, and even hummingbirds have tongues long and short to match the flowers that they have evolved to visit. The Southeastern blueberry bee is just one such insect that has a specialized relationship with a plant.

·         Insect herbivores, the ones that eat the foliage of plants, also have specific relationships with plants. Consider our state butterfly, the Eastern Tiger Swallowtail, who needs one of four host plants on which to lay her eggs. Without having one of those host plants in your garden, you won’t be able to support the continued population of that butterfly. Or consider a more extreme example: the monarch butterfly that can only use one plant.

The Southeastern blueberry bee in April

Different plants bloom at different times, providing nectar and pollen to insects whose life cycles vary or who have a life cycle that spans multiple seasons.

·         Choose plants that bloom in spring, as early as late March for the metro Atlanta area and even earlier in the Coastal Plain. Research what is appropriate for your area/ecoregion as those plants will more closely align with insect activity. Here is my spring list for the metro Atlanta area.

·         Choose plants that bloom in the summer. Most perennials have a defined bloom time so you’ll want a variety of different choices. Some of them have repeat blooming, such as the hyssops (Agastache) or you might consider some native annuals. Here is my summer list.

·         Choose plants that bloom in the fall. We have migrating butterflies that need to fuel up as they head south. Bees like bumble bees are active almost until frost, helping to provision the nest with next year’s generation of pollinators. Key plants include asters, goldenrods, and some of those native annuals. Here is my fall list.

 

Blue mistflower (Conoclinium coelestinum)
attracts a lot of butterflies and bees in the fall

Different plants won’t all be affected by the same pathogen or destructive event. Occasionally “things happen” and plants that we carefully set into our garden get damaged (at my house, it might mean deer browsing the tops off a group of plants). So while the coneflower you planted might get set back, the mountain mint is going strong, and the black-eyed Susans are right behind them.

Evaluate your garden during the seasons, and then start to fill in the blooming blanks. Everyone will enjoy the extra diversity.