If you have ever seen the movie ‘Field of Dreams’ you know the famous line, “If you build it, he will come.” This line is what Ray Kinsella, played by Kevin Costner, hears in his head when he is building a baseball field in the middle of a corn field in Iowa. The ‘he’ referred to a dead baseball player named ‘Shoeless’ Joe Jackson, who was disgraced in the cheating scandal of 1919 when the Chicago White Sox were found guilty of throwing the World Series. ‘Shoeless’ Joe played exceptionally well during the series and this lead many people to believe he did not participate in the scandal.
The voice Ray kept hearing in his head is what convinced him to keep going when everything and everyone was trying to tell him it was not a good idea. When installing a native plant garden you might face similar struggles with your neighbors saying they will not like it or you wondering if it will look like a bunch of weeds. Fear not because the voice inside your head is saying, “Plant it, and they will come.” Plant your native garden and your insect population will grow exponentially in the next few years. You will have created an oasis for the insects in your ecosystem where they have all they need and native plants that they recognize.
Planting and watching a newly installed native flower garden is a joy that you have to experience to understand. Pride of accomplishment and hope for the future combine to create a very satisfied feeling that can go on indefinitely. A second wave of joy comes when you see that the surrounding ecosystem has noticed your contribution and starts to use it. The first time you see a butterfly flittering around your garden doing its job as a pollinator is quite a rush.
At our home in west Knoxville we have a small (1,000 square feet) native plant garden that contains roughly 40 different species and has increasingly become a home for insects that use these plants to survive. Over the last 2 years my son, Talon, has become interested in photography and more specifically – macro photography. Macro photography is extreme close-up photography of small subject matter like insects, flowers, and interesting textures. In the case of my son, our native plant garden provided the perfect opportunity to photograph these insects.
I knew before he started taking pictures of our garden that there were insects on the plants and that we had provided a sanctuary of sorts for our little part of the world. I did not, however, realize the diversity and outright beauty that these insects bring to the space. I was truly amazed at two things: the number and variety of insects using our plants in various ways, along with the curiosity of my son to find as many new insects as possible. We spent several hours in our front landscape bed discovering new creatures and taking note of which plants they liked the best.
In the landscape design world there are many hot button terms and ideals that fluctuate with time. Plant communities are a big deal in the realm of native plant design right now. Plants that grow together and compliment each other in appearance, size and root growth. With native plant communities come native insect communities. The insects in our native garden just seemed to appear there over night like they were summoned from afar. The ‘community’ in this instance are native plants providing food, cover and hunting grounds for a native insect population that has relied on this resource for thousands of years. By planting natives you are helping this community broaden and in a sense recover from the destruction of much its existing territory.
How do insects find the native plants?
They use a combination of specialized sensory mechanisms, including chemical signals (scents and tastes) and visual cues shaped by thousands of years of co-evolution. In other words, the insects found in east Tennessee do not recognize exotic plants. Exotics do not give off the right smells or have the appearance the insects are looking for. So you may have a beautiful landscape in your yard with stunning ornamental plants and blooms all year round but you will never have a thriving insect population because your plants are invisible to them. You can lump these ornamental landscapes in with turf grass and call them dead zones because compared to a native plant garden there is little to nothing going on in them.
You can see in the picture above that rudbeckia or ‘black-eyed’ susan attracts native insects. We have a mass of rudbeckia and that was the first place my son would go to find jumping spiders (his favorite) or whatever decided to use the native plant that day. One of the coolest looking bugs was the Ambush bug (above) that we found on the rudbeckia. These ambush predators hide in the leaves, petals and blooms of native plants waiting for other insects to come along. They use armored forelimbs to reach out and snag their prey while the appendages on each arm hold the insect in place so it can be eaten. My son wanted to do some research on the Ambush bug and found out that it uses bright colored plant blooms to lure its prey and the rudbeckia fits into this method perfectly.
Do not let the negative voices in your head or the picky neighbor that might not like it deter you from creating your native plant garden. It will take some work and sometimes it will feel overwhelming but in the end, it is worth it. Observing bees locate your perennials or a butterfly flittering from bloom to bloom is rewarding and relaxing at the same time. Making your contribution to help reform a critical piece of a healthy environment is what it will take to reconnect a declining insect population to their native companions. This reformation can start with a small space in YOUR yard if you listen to the voice in your head and “Plant it.”
Photos courtesy of Talon Adkins – Instagram @talon_macro