Native plants for native pollinators – Commentary

By Heather Van Duuren

We’ve all heard that pollinators are in trouble. Most of us know about colony collapse and the dwindling monarch butterfly population but did you know that there are over 4000 species of native bees that are also at risk if not already deemed endangered? That is a very large number of diversity in a single species facing extinction.

Many people are unaware that “colony collapse” is for the most part referring to the non-native European honey bees that farmers rely on for mass crop pollination. Is this news still important? Of course it is, but for the purpose of this letter I am going to focus on native species.

What is native? Native refers to plants and animals that are indigenous to a given area in geologic time. Pollinators rely on plants that they have co-evolved with for millions of years.

We rely on an intact ecosystem to grow our food to feed ourselves. Not one of us can avoid the reality that we are a part of a food chain that is in peril due to our appetite for progress. Creatures everywhere are finding themselves increasingly facing starvation in man-made food deserts.

How many times have you travelled the roads to come across a new subdivision or strip mall in place of a mature forest or an old forgotten meadow? Imagine now how a migrant song bird might fail to raise a new batch of birds upon returning to a familiar land left vacant of food and nesting grounds. How a queen bumble bee might struggle with starvation after emerging from hibernation to find the land stripped of all the spring flowering plants she relies on. Trout that didn’t spawn because they were affected by massive amounts of silt from poorly managed stream diversion. When that Monarch butterfly finally reaches Ontario and flutters on tattered wings into your beautifully manicured front lawn and all she finds is some non-native turf grass, shrubs and perennials, what is she to lay her eggs on? She has but one species of host plant that her young can eat and without milkweed you can’t help her.

Without native fauna you can’t feed the insects that feed the birds. Song birds rely heavily on healthy insect populations to feed their fast-developing young.

Local subdivisions may look pretty with their neatly designed landscapes but underneath that beauty is a starving insect population. With each newly constructed house seems to come with it an exotic shrub, non-native and often invasive ornamental grass and some Shasta daisies. These plants do not aid in the ecology of an altered landscape.

There is a huge variety of native tall grasses, perennials and flowering shrubs to choose from that can give us similar visual effects while providing the correct habitat for wildlife. Instead we often choose the most popular exotic plants sold in nurseries and this is no fault of our own since finding native plants in a nursery can be a daunting and often misinformed task.

If it’s not native to North America then it will not be a host plant for any number of insect larvae. Just because you see an insect feeding on nectar from a plant does not mean that the same plant can be a host for that insect’s young. Without somewhere for the larvae to live we do not have sustainable populations. Butterfly larvae need native plants before they emerge as adults to sip nectar from that exotic beauty planted in nearly everyone’s backyard.

I vote that when we strip the land for any purpose we should have to put back at least 60 per cent native plants. I too enjoy some non-native plants but I think we need to treat them as an accent plant rather then the entire garden theme. What you buy at your local nursery to place in your gorgeous garden may serve only the purpose of looking good. The proof is in the news of dwindling pollinator populations.

If every homeowner made an effort to plant a patch of native perennials or even one native flowering shrub, together we could change this fragmented landscape into one large connected garden. A paradise for life to feed on.

Let’s face it, we aren’t just talking about insect extinction here but our own if we don’t wake up and care for the only complex ecosystem that we have. We are not the only creatures that need space and sustenance on this planet and it’s high time we stop treating it as if we are. The signs are there and the time to act is now! I believe we owe it to ourselves and future generations to care for not just ourselves but all living creatures including native fauna. Muskoka is loved for its natural beauty. Shouldn’t we be keeping things natural by using native species in our landscapes?

Heather Van Duuren was featured on Doppler in February. Read her story here.

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