Building a Pollinator Garden

As a follow-up to our two tours this summer, our Green Team wrote this article for the Midvale Messenger, offering good tips for building your own pollinator paradise.

If you’d like to support pollinators at home, please avoid chemical pest treatments, which don’t discriminate and kill beneficial pollinators, and consider adding pollinator “superfoods.” The following species and the kits detailed below are a great way to add more life and beauty to your yard:

Spring: Wild lupine (Lupinus perennis), wild geranium (Geranium maculatum), wood betony (Pedicularis canadensis), and flowering shrubs like willows, native cherries, chokecherry, common ninebark, and highbush cranberry.

Summer: Bee balm/wild bergamot (Monarda fistulosa), Culver's root (Veronicastrum virginicum), milkweeds (Asclepias spp.), and giant/anise hyssop (Agastache spp.).

Fall: Goldenrods (Solidago spp.) and asters (Symphyotrichum spp.) provide vital late-season forage.

Suppliers

These suppliers are a great source of high-quality, sustainably sourced, local plants:

• Tend Native Plants sells at the West Side Farmers Market (Saturdays) and by appointment.

• Local greenhouse Two Ferns offers plant kits: Short & Showy, Butterfly & Moth, Pollinator, Rain Garden, and Woodland mixes plus extensive native plant offerings, including trees and shrubs.

• 32-Plant Pollinator Powerhouse Kit from Prairie Nursery (out of stock; check back in fall).

• Easy Street Patch Garden Kit from Prairie Moon Nursery (for low-growing, sidewalk/terrace-friendly plants).

• For 2027, the Friends of the Arboretum Native Plant Sale has curated a number of plant kits for: Shade, Sun, Woodland Spring Flowers, Rusty Patched Bumble Bees, Patio Prairie Containers, and Green Mulch Grass & Sedge, plus offers a wide variety of native plants.