Imagine every yard with at least some habitat designed in: food plants for bees and butterflies, berries for birds, a variety of plants for foraging.
Looking at the typical suburb in a satellite photo, you might notice the dominant plant type: lawn. It might be a great place to play from time to time, but it consumes a lot of water and energy – yet provides nothing for bees. Some birds will visit to pull worms or chase insects, but none will stay to nest, find shelter or forage for berries. Neither will the lawn feed caterpillars that become our larger butterflies like monarchs.
Just removing even a patch of your lawn and doing three simple things can help bring back vanishing butterflies, encourage native bees and give your local birds a better home. In the process, you’ll get movement, color and seasonal variation.
Provide water. The biggest attraction for birds in our garden is the fountain. It’s designed as part of a system: running water that makes noise so passing birds know it’s there. Bare perching branches over the fountain so they can pause to look for predators before drinking or bathing – or wait for their turn as other birds bathe. Sheltering shrubs nearby so wet birds can fly somewhere safe to preen and dry off. Sloping sides with a rough surface let hummingbirds cling to the edges for a bath, and placing pebbles at the top lets birds judge the depth of the water. Our fountain has filtration made from inexpensive aquarium supplies, drain line and perforated piping – so the water stays clear as long as nobody adds goldfish (although egrets love eating them!).
Plant food plants. There’s a double benefit here: by helping the bees, you’re also increasing the number of pollinators and therefore encouraging seed production for the birds. Although it’s a bit tricky to establish, milkweed is the only thing monarch butterflies eat. When I was young, these butterflies floated across the landscape in huge numbers; now they’re few and far between, to the point where people are considering putting them on the endangered species list. California asters will attract bees and butterflies, then produce seed. Toyon berries will give birds something to eat in autumn – while various species of mahonia and ribes can provide berries at other times of the year.
Plant native plants. You can plant certain Mediterranean climate plants, too – as long as they’re not invasive species. All the plants I mentioned above are native, and you can add Ceanothus and manzanita to the list. Both come in a variety of forms and are much loved by bees when in bloom. Most prefer dry conditions, often minimal or no water in summer. Other good natives include California fuchsia (hummingbirds love this), coffeeberry, sages (hummingbird sage even grows in partial shade) and penstemon, another hummingbird favorite. A lot of great ornamental grasses are native: deer grass, sporobolus airoides, nassella pulchra… There are grasslike rushes and sedges, some with spiky upright gray foliage. There’s blue-eyed grass, actually a type of iris – and we have native iris, too. There are annual wildflowers loved by native bees: California poppy, Clarkia, lupine, five spot… although you’ll probably have to reseed the annual area every year and give it no supplemental water. For shade, there’s red-twig dogwood, creeping mahonia, snowberry and bush anemone for light shade. You can add western columbine and alum root in irrigated areas.
These are just basic points on bringing small wildlife to your garden, possibly restore butterfly populations and gain something more interesting to stroll through than lawn. There is a lot of information on the web, and you can also join a local environmental organization like the California Native Plant Society (CNPS) to learn what people are doing in your area.
You can also contact us, of course! We’ve given talks on attracting wildlife to your garden, and many of our designs have a wildlife component.