To the Editor:
My gardening is about helping nature. It used to be that nature didn’t need help, but it does now. Chemicals, lawns, and sprawl are displacing and killing wildlife at an alarming rate.

I feel the best thing I can do is create a sanctuary for birds, insects, and other little creatures. When I moved in, I approached my barren patchy grass yard as a three-alarm disaster needing help stat.

After last year’s drought, I hoped for rain, and I got it this summer: watering last year’s plantings and this year’s. This year’s garden is great. I want to tell you about it.

The redbud, serviceberry, plum, black cherry, and crabapple trees are the very welcome first bloomers. Other first sources of nectar for the early bee pollinators and a few overwintering butterflies are flowering shrubs and mine should be coming into their own next spring.

I’ve provided “pollinator partners” for those that need them and many should be old enough to make berries. The viburnums, dogwoods, chokecherries, blueberries, button bush, winterberry, and hops tree will provide a lot of pollen and nectar in early summer before they make their berries. Holes in the leaves of these trees and shrubs means that caterpillars are here for the birds to eat.

When it warms up and flowers bloom, the hummingbirds and butterflies will join the hardworking bees, hawkmoths, and the amazing shiny blue wasps. I have had six or seven different species of butterflies this summer, maybe more next year.

The pink bee balm, which is over six feet tall, is a favorite for all these creatures, as is the delicious smelling agastache planted next to it. When the bee balm gets white mildew on it, I mix baking soda and water and pour that on it on a cloudy day when rain is not expected.

The dark pink phlox is also a fragrant favorite. The pink coneflowers are loved by bees and butterflies, but the hummingbird prefers the very tall yellow prairie coneflower and the honeysuckle vine on my metal arch.

The hummingbirds like red so I planted cardinal flowers in my one moist spot. If you plant the right flowers, the hummingbird will fly close to your face as if to get a closer look at this wonderful and mysterious provider. 

The very yellow lance leaf coreopsis is always covered in bees and the early seed is eaten daily by goldfinches. Bees and a variety of wasps are drawn to the mountain mints and the unusual looking dotted bee balm.

Volunteer black-eyed Susan flowers are a vigorous plant and a must-stop on the pollinator route. Look at them closely and you will see tiny little pollinators, just slightly larger than ants.

When the fall comes, goldenrod, asters, Joe Pye weed, boneset, prairie blazing star, blue mist flower, milkweed, and helenium are on the menu. Birds benefit from this abundance in caterpillars on leaves, under-leaf crawlers, seeds, berries, and flying insects looking for low lush vegetation. 

When plants aren’t growing and leaves are too full of holes, I give the plant a little fertilizer made from all organic ingredients.

All of the above plants are native species except the viburnum cultivar I needed to pollinate my nannyberry bushes. I planted a few non-native plants that I know to be popular sources of nectar and pollen: “Lady in Red” and “Rockin’ the Blues” salvias, zinnias, tall verbena, borage, senna, and comfrey.

I sowed a lot of wild blue flax seed last year, thinking it was native to New York. It grew and gave me beautiful blue flowers all summer.

I put up a lot of wide-gauge hog fencing and individual cages, and that is the only way I can have some of these plants. Fence is not all bad: the hummers and birds use it to access hard-to-reach flowers, to rest and look around. It protects the plants when it stands straight up in snow while cheaper chicken wire goes down in the snow.

The groundhog could dig under or go around my fence but she usually stays outside it. I don’t think she sets out to eat the golden Alexander but eats whatever she finds as she goes.

Because I have left a lot of native growth standing, I see the rabbit and the groundhog making a meal of that instead of my plants. When pinecones fall I put them where the squirrels can find them later. I have two birdbaths in an overgrown corner of the yard that I rinse daily and scrub sometimes.

I let all dried vegetation stand until warm May weather because it is seed and shelter and, when I have to “clean up” in the spring, I put all the vegetation into a pile in my yard, eventually to go back into the soil. 

With the house came a jungle in the far backyard that I try to contain; the animals love the shelter but it’s full of invasives. I do what I can do.  

I mowed the lawn twice this summer for 10 minutes each time.

Joan Mckeon

Guilderland

Editor’s note: During the spring and summer planting season this year, Joan Mckeon wrote and illustrated a series of “Plant this Plant” columns for The Altamont Enterprise, highlighting local native plants.