Sunny landscapes that attract pollinators

With fall in the air and the leaves changing colour, perhaps our minds are on the snowy winter months.
So let’s imagine a glorious, sunny day and a full-sun pollinator garden instead!

I’m working on a couple of projects that fit this brief: lots of sun and clients who want colour and the buzz of bees.

Good news: It’s a lot easier to design a native plant pollinator garden when the conditions are right; not so easy to have lots of blooms when the landscape is shrouded in shade.

Indeed, there’s a danger on a sunny site that there’s too much going on and we end up with a cacophony (of sights as well as buzzing insects). That’s why it’s important to have a matrix layer – a repeating element that ties the whole thing together.

The foundation

I will choose some groundcovers as part of the matrix for a sunny site. These will help suppress weeds, which is key for a landscape that is towards the low end of the maintenance scale.

Pussytoes and Wild Strawberry are perfect for sunny sites. While slow to establish, Pussytoes creates a silvery green mat, with subtle spring flowers. In contrast, Wild Strawberry is a more airy groundcover, spreading by stealth and rewarding with little white flowers and tasty red fruit. Also joining the matrix is Prairie Smoke. This plant has it all: its leaves green up early, and in spring pale purple flowers become wispy seedheads that give the plant its name.

Also part of the matrix are taller repeating elements. For this, two grasses come to mind: Little Bluestem, which turns a glorious bronze in fall and has seeds that shine in the low light; and Side-oats Grama, which has seeds on just one side of the stem, like red and brown drops of rain. If I repeat these grasses throughout the design, the eye has something to grab onto, turning what could be a mess into something intentional.

With the matrix done, we can move onto the fun bit: the flowers! Now’s the time to think of the seasons, making sure we and our insect friends have something from spring through to fall.

The furniture

Foxglove Beardtongue, with its spikes of white flowers, is a reliable start to the season. A nice side dish is Ohio Spiderwort, with its thick leaves and blue flowers. On a dry, sandy site, which we have a lot of here, Harebell makes a delicate foil, with its pale blue bell-shaped flowers.

Moving on to the heat of summer, Lanceleaf Coreopsis puts on a real yellow show. Pale Purple Coneflower is the near-native equivalent of the well-known Purple Coneflower – and who doesn’t like a coneflower? As the days start to get shorter, Anise Hyssop begins blooming.

As we move into fall, we have the classic aster and goldenrod pairing. Gray Goldenrod is well-behaved and looks great amid the grasses, while Azure Aster and Heath Aster provide blue and white accents.

The structure

Finally, it’s time to think of the structural layer. Some chunky perennials could work here. Butterfly Milkweed brings a splash of orange (and the orange of Monarch butterflies) and Rough Blazingstar some architectural spikes.

If the site has room for them, we mustn’t forget shrubs, too. I’m a huge fan of Serviceberry – I planted two in tree form at Lucas House in Haliburton this year. Ninebark, with its larger leaves, would make a nice contrast. I recently specified a compact cultivar of this native for a site where height had to be kept on the low side.

So there we have it. A feast for the eyes and for the bees. And that’s what it’s all about.