It's cool if you love your hosta and daylily collection, however their value to pollinators is minimal even if they are easier than bindweed to grow (oh, bindweed, you scoundrel). Neither plant is a host for butterfly or moth larvae, so we won't be making new pollinators, and the nectar is primarily accessible and suitable to long-tongued generalist adult insects only (think bumble bees).

What could we use instead that would help more pollinators and still be simple to grow? This is assuming you don't care so much how the plant looks in comparison to a hosta or daylily (no apples to apples here), but simply how it acts and how easy it is to cultivate. So for hosta we're looking at plants that thrive in dry shade, and for daylily plants that enjoy medium to dry sun. Plus, if you use all 5 suggested plants for each replacement, you're getting a bigger bloom succession and helping far more adult pollinators.

You'll find all of the below perennials featured more in depth in our plant profiles.


HOSTA

Calico Aster (Syhphyotrichum lateriflorum)
-- dry to dappled shade
-- about 2' wide and 2-3' tall (more moisture means bigger plant)
-- early fall white flower with yellow center that turns pink (turning pink tells pollinators the flower is empty)
-- all asters are highly prized pollen and nectar sources

Zigzag Goldenod (Solidago flexicaulis)
-- dry to moist, shade to part sun (more sun, more moisture)
-- 2-3' and tall depending on moisture, slowly spreads
-- early to mid fall, richly-scented blooms
-- incredible adult pollinator diversity

Solomon's Seal (Polygonatum biflorum)
-- dry to medium soils in shade
-- 2' tall and spreading slowly
-- mid to late spring blooms prized by queen bumble bees
-- smooth foliage like hosta

Early Meadow rue (Thalictrum dioicum(
-- dry to medium soils in shade
-- 2' tall by 12-18" wide
-- wiry stems with airy blooms mid spring with delicate leaves the size of dimes
-- plant in masses for best effect

Wild Geranium (Geranium maculatum)
-- dry to medium soil in shade to sun (more sun, more moisture)
-- 1' tall and slowly spreading for a superb groundcover among taller plants
-- late spring blooms with some rebloom in summer
-- pollen accessible to variety of insects


DAYLILY

Wild Blue Indigo (Baptisia australis & B. minor)
-- dry to medium soils in full sun
-- 3-4' tall and 2-3' wide and 2x2' for minor (there are even more species than the above!)
-- mid spring bloom with large jet black seed pods in winter
-- host plant for sulphurs and prized by queen butterflies

Pale Purple Coneflower (Echinacea pallida)
-- dry to medium soils in full to part sun
-- 2-3' tall and 1' wide
-- early to mid summer bloom
-- a coneflower that has pollen, vs. many of the hybrids out now

Rattlesnake Master (Eryngium yuccifolium)
-- slightly moist to slightly dry soil in full to part sun
-- 3-4' tall and 1-2' wide
-- mid summer bloom
-- highly attractive to adult insects

Smooth Aster (Syphyotrichum laeve)
-- medium to dry soils in full to part sun
-- 2-3' tall and 1-2' wide
-- early to mid fall bloom
-- smooth foliage and gobs of insects

Aromatic Aster (Symphyotrichum oblongifolium)
-- medium to dry soils in full sun
--1-2' tall and 2-3' wide (shrub-like appearance)
-- mid to late fall bloom, tons of flowers
-- one of the last food sources for migrating and late-season insects

There are many garden practices that are so widely believed and preached that they become de facto blanket statements for what makes a successful garden no matter where you live. From fertilizing to mulching to soil amendments, it may be that you're doing too much when you don't have to do hardly anything.

Let's take amending soil. There's this idea that there is only one good garden bed -- one composed of loose, crumbly, earthy-smelling black gold. When we're talking ornamental gardening nothing could be further from the truth (however, vegetable gardens do usually require a "perfect" bed). Even if you stop to think critically about where you find this information, you should start hearing some alarm bells. It's companies, businesses, and products that need you to buy more. Hardware stores get truckloads of bagged topsoil and amendments each spring and stack them up in the parking lots enticing you. Landscapers increase their bottom line by offering additional improvements in the form of soil conditioners, top soil, wood mulch, fertilizer, etc. But most often you don't need all of that. Here's why amending soil isn't as big of a deal as you think.

1) The perfect or ideal soil is the soil you have right now. Unless your land is poisoned or there are drainage issues undermining a structure, amending soil is often an expensive and back-breaking practice for homeowners (soil tests can tell you a lot, by the way). There are a plethora of plants from around the world -- and of course lots of native plants, too -- that will thrive in sandy, gravelly, rocky, loamy, mushy, or clay soils. In fact, by plethora we mean hundreds available to you right now in the nursery trade. A garden designer or landscaper worth their salt will know these plants and be able to match them to you site. And amended garden areas aren't usually that big or deep; what does a plant think when it hits the native soil beyond its perfect little princess zone? "Uh, no thanks, I'll just stay right here." In the case of perennials this may inhibit their drought tolerance, and for large trees it will increase their likelihood of falling over in a windstorm because they didn't root out far enough to anchor in.

Drive around town and 99% of what you'll see are landscape beds made to need more investment and with little wildlife value. The spaces require herbicides, annual wood mulch applications, and provide little in the way of habitat. Not to mention the environmental impacts of herbicide and mulch production, transportation, and the minimal water infiltration and air-cleaning these sparsely-planted beds achieve.

When folks drive around town and see these "professional" landscapes, they'll probably tend to think this is how their home landscape should look, too -- after all, it's how the big guys do it.

Here are two landscape bed examples that could use some re-imagining as a way to inspire their communities to garden smarter:

You'll notice the first example does at least have a few plants, but even this number is about 10% of what it should be. You can see how rainwater, in part from the sidewalk, has washed mulch away -- meaning it will need to be reapplied probably several times a year. The planting certainly won't help shade out or compete against weeds, and hopefully you agree it just isn't pretty even if everything was leafed out. Where are the layers, the different textures and colors? These plants were doomed the minute they were put in the ground -- spread too far apart in a bed that will fight climatic conditions and lose.  What is an alternative? A mix of native sedge and then forbs that stay relatively tidy, like prairie alumroot, pale purple coneflower, lead plant, butterflyweed, dotted blazing star, nodding onion, and aromatic aster -- a solid layer of plants placed on 12" centers.

This second bed perhaps has trickier issues, being an island in a strip mall parking lot. You can see the landscape company simply put down as much mulch as the bed could hold in hopes of suppressing weeds -- which won't work at all because plenty of weeds germinate and do fine in thick mulch like this. But the larger issues this sort of bed faces is people walking through it and doing damage. What could we do? Perhaps a ground layer of sedge and wild geranium to add spring and summer blooms. At least the ground will be covered and you won't need annual mulch and as many weed control treatments. You wouldn't want to put shrubs in here that would block sight lines or scratch cars. Perhaps a stone pathway through the middle from left to right would also alleviate trampling of new plants.

If businesses added up how much they spend on landscape maintenance over the course of 1-2 years, I wonder how it would compare to a one-time planting with the right plants in the right configuration. Do you have a parking area, business frontage, or neighborhood entrance you'd want grown more sustainably and beautifully? We'd like to see it, and certainly to help design a more wildlife and people-friendly space. Keep in mind there are studies out there that show business beautification in the form of plants can increases consumer spending -- although I hope our goal would also be to provide for pollinators and clean air and water. Plants do so much for us!

When I'm working on a garden -- once I know the lay of the land and what my clients prefer -- I'll create a super long plant list. Maybe it'll have 30-40 plants and I'll end up using half. The point is, you want to have more paint than what the canvas can hold, because in the moment of creation you don't know what you'd like to use until you put the brush to that one spot. Of course, the size of those plant lists depends on the size of the garden.

As for the plants themselves, color, size, texture, and shape matter. So does when the plants bloom. But that's only half the story in designing a low-maintenance, sustainable garden for wildlife where we don't want to use fertilizer or mulch, and we want to keep irrigation to a minimum. The other half is matching plants to each other in how they grow above AND below ground, as well as how they reproduce. You wouldn't put an aggressive self sower in a small garden, and you wouldn't place a tame clumper among more energetic growers. Let's see if I can break it down for you in order of design process when looking at plants:

Sometimes I'll jumble up that order a bit depending on what I'm going for and the garden site itself, but at some point ALL of this is coming together, colliding, mingling, and exploding in my head and on the plan.

Let's look at a simple example. Take a small 100' bed in clay soil and sun, a plant list might look like this:

The Carex is our living green mulch and will be placed on a grid on 12" centers. Since the fastest spreader here is the aster, and it's the largest plant, we'll use just one (it'll have gobs and gobs of flowers). The heuchera needs larger massing both for the leaves, which will contrast nicely with everything else, and has slightly inconspicuous flowers -- a group of 5 at least. As for the Baptisia and Asclepias a group of three for each. We could add Liatris aspera for late summer bloom (it has a corm, like a bulb), which would be a single plant, or one alone with two together elsewhere. Given the wiry form of Echinacea, and its ability to self sow a bit, we may just do a clump of 3, or even another clump of 2-3.

The taproot plants will dig down below the fibrous plants, so there won't be as much resource competition. And the clumping, thick, fibrous-rooted nature of the sedge should help slow down the self sowers (coneflower) and the root runner (aster).

So that's a little insight into how I think about garden plants when I have the base plan drawn up and go into the nitty gritty. Of course, besides all this practical and aesthetic stuff, I'm also thinking about wildlife. What is the plant a host to, what will it attract and support from egg to wing, and in what amounts and in what diversity? But that's another post.