By Emily Royal

We could all use a little help in the garden, but good help is hard to find. Thankfully, nature provides the best helpers money can’t buy: bees! The trick is attracting these handy pollinators to your garden.

1: Native Plants, Please

One of the best ways to lure bees to your garden is by filling it with native plants. The scarlet bee balm (Monarda didyma) is a great option. It erupts in firework shaped red blooms in June and requires full sunlight. The native lonicera will also attract bees, unlike the invasive lonicera or busy honeysuckle, which is pollinated by moths. Native plants are crucial for creating a healthy ecosystem, and they practically take care of themselves. Since they’re acclimated to Kentucky’s climate and soil, they’ll need little water or maintenance. Certain natives can even decrease water runoff and erosion. In addition to bees, they’ll attract other native wildlife to your garden.

2: Make it Colorful

Bees have an acute sense of smell and a keen eye for color. Bees use color to help find the best flowers for pollination: certain colors (yellow and blue) will draw their attention more than others. By diversifying your garden’s color palette, you’ll entice even more bees. Try adding purple milkweed (Asclepias purpurea) to brighten up your garden. These flowers produce star-shaped blooms in June and July, and also attract monarch butterflies. You can also add sweet coneflower (Rudbeckia subtomentosa) for a splash of yellow. Sweet coneflower blooms from July to September.

3: Shady Spaces

Creating a hospitable environment for your garden helpers is easy. Choose plants that create enough shade and shelter from the wind and direct sunlight to give your guests a place to rest. The longer bees stay in your garden, the longer they can pollinate your plants! To keep bees in your garden longer, create a small bee bath. Fill a shallow dish with water and rocks or decorative pebbles. Be sure to change the water frequently. This lets your visitors take a quick, refreshing sip without leaving your garden. 

4: No Pesticides

Keep pesticides out of your garden. Even organic pesticides can harm and deter bees from visiting. Native plants will naturally deter harmful pests.  Pesticides won’t kill only visiting bees. Workers crawling over your blooms carry the pesticides back to their hives. The introduction of pesticide to a hive can contribute to Colony Collapse Disorder. This causes the other bees to abandon their hive, resulting in the death of the colony.

5: Bee Our Guest

Create a safe place for your bee visitors to rest by building your own bee hotel. Group bamboo tubes or cardboard tubes together. You can also drill holes into wooden blocks. Bee hotels do need to be maintained, so it’s something to consider when you start working on your new DIY project. The hotels provide bees with safe nesting options to ensure they stick around your garden. In addition, experts suggest that you keep them small and specific; attracting too many species to the same hotel can increase disease and predation.

Bees are a crucial part of our ecosystem, and harmful practices have endangered them. Choosing native plants makes your garden a hospitable place for our pollinating friends.

Emily is an environmental journalist whose home is filled with native plants and flowers. When she’s not tending to her indoor plants, you’ll find her in her vegetable garden, which she doesn’t mind sharing with the local wildlife. She loves pugs and pizza, oh, and her husband, too.

By Katrina Kelly

Hummingbirds are fun birds to watch flying through the garden. There is something very intriguing about them that draws our attention. Maybe it’s that they are small yet strong, fast flyers, and hover in midair to drink nectar from flowers. It’s no wonder so many gardeners desire to draw them nearer by planting a hummingbird garden.

In my own garden, I like to plant both native and non-native flowers to attract them. I have been quite surprised to see what flowers the hummingbirds like. It is true hummingbirds are very attracted to the color red, but they are attracted to other colors as well. They are also typically attracted to plants that have tubular shaped flowers, but not always. There are some native plant choices that I’d consider necessary in any hummingbird garden.

One of the best plants for a hummingbird garden are the bee balms (Monarda). The most common bee balm you find in home gardens is red bee balm (Monarda didyma) and its cultivars. This species of bee balm likes average to moist soils. Its cousin, wild bee balm (Monarda fistulosa) also attracts hummingbirds and likes average to dry soils. For the hummers that are traveling through in spring, try attracting them with Bradbury bee balm (Monarda bradburiana). It flowers earlier in the season than the other bee balms. It is a shorter plant, so it is excellent for more compact garden spaces.

The native red honeysuckle vine (Lonicera sempervirens) is also an easy hummingbird attractor. Its long red tubular flowers bloom nearly all summer. This vine needs some room to grow, so plan to grow it on a good-sized trellis or arbor.

One other native plant not seen as commonly in home gardens is hoary skullcap (Scutellaria incana). I have this planted near my hummingbird feeder, and the hummingbirds cannot get enough of this plant. It has purple flowers that flower nearly all summer, which is another great reason to plant it. It does like to spread by seed, so if you want to reduce its spread, just remove the ripe seed heads in late summer and fall.

One of my favorite plants that attracts hummingbirds is the native blue sage (Salvia azurea). It flowers later in the summer and will continue into fall, so it is a great nectar source for hummingbirds as they prepare for their fall migration. It’s a tall and slender plant, and one of the few flowers that has a true blue flower. Other notable native plants that attract hummingbirds are royal catchfly (Silene regia), fire pink (Silene virginica), Indian pink (Spigelia marilandica), tall phlox (Phlox paniculata), beardtongue (Penstemon), wild columbine (Aquilegia canadensis), and cardinal flower (Lobelia cardinalis).

There are also many non-native annual flowers that attract hummingbirds. I enjoy planting many of these around my patio spaces to encourage hummingbird visitors to the garden and the feeder near my patio. Some of my favorites are verbena, pineapple sage, lantana, tomatillo, annual salvias, Mexican sunflower, and Spanish flag vine. Many of these plants are native to Central and South America, so hummingbirds are familiar with them from their southern migration.

Hummingbirds love to take a rest and perch, so they will appreciate something to rest on near your feeder or hummingbird garden. It’s also a great opportunity to watch the hummingbirds or take photos. I once watched a hummingbird sit on the perch I have near my feeder take a bath in the summer rain.

To attract hummingbirds throughout the year, plant your hummingbird garden with a diversity of plants that will flower throughout the season. Planting them in a grouping together will encourage the birds to visit your garden routinely and provide more opportunities to watch them all summer. 

Katrina Kelly is a native to Lexington, Kentucky. She is a graduate of the University of Kentucky and has a degree in Landscape Architecture and Music. She is the owner and solopreneur of EARTHeim Landscape Design in Lexington, which focuses on creating unique garden designs with native plants and backyard homesteads. Her interest in native plants began when she volunteered at Salato with Mary Carol Cooper in 2005. She is a board member of the Wild Ones organization in Lexington. In the small amount of time she is not thinking about gardens or gardening, she enjoys photography, writing, science, fitness and nutrition, and building or crafting things around the home.

Calvin Andries

KNPS has many research grant opportunities; you can read about them and recent winners by viewing the Grants page. Recently, editor Nick Koenig caught up with 2018 winner, Calvin Andries to see how his research was going, and here’s what Calvin had to say.

During the 2018 growing season, I conducted vascular floras of two wetlands within the Red River Gorge Geological Area and Clifty Wilderness. The floras were created using vouchers I collected, and some herbarium records for a total of 106 vouchers from 2016–2018; they documented 35 families, 49 genera, and 61 species. The most taxon-rich families were Cyperaceae (10 spp.), Fagaceae (four spp.), and Rubiaceae (four spp.). This study investigated two NatureServe ecological systems – an Appalachian sinkhole and depression pond with the upland sweetgum-red maple pond association, and a Cumberland seepage forest with a forested swamp bog association.

The full results of this study are currently in review for publication, but this project wouldn’t have happened without the guidance of my advisor, Dr. Brad Ruhfel, and the support from the Society of Herbarium Curators, the Kentucky Society of Natural History, Battelle, and of course the Kentucky Native Plant Society. Without the support of these great groups I wouldn’t have been able to make the 20+ collecting trips and purchased the collecting supplies needed to conduct this flora.

Since finishing my flora, I have graduated from Eastern Kentucky University and have moved down south to the University of Georgia where I am pursuing a Masters of Science in Forestry and Natural Resources with a wildlife emphasis.

My masters thesis work will look a little different from my undergraduate research, but will be staying in the realm of botany. I am working with a power company to develop a way to remotely identify natural prairies along powerline right-of-ways in the eastern half of the Piedmont region of Georgia. This project will help preserve these uncommon early-successional habitats and document the impact they have on pollinators such as the monarch butterfly (Danaus plexippus). In addition, this project will rely on a combination of field work, herbarium records, and citizen science data.

If anyone finds themselves in Georgia over the next year, make sure to post what flowers you see! Thank you to everyone at Kentucky Native Plant Society and within the botanical community in Kentucky for the support you gave me through undergrad, and for the well wishes as I continue my academic journey.

Rachel Cook

One of the biggest questions for native plant enthusiasts is where to buy plants. Tara Littlefield, Jeff Nelson, and I wanted to improve the existing Native Plant Nursery list to help KNPS members find the right nursery to buy from. The existing Native Plant Nursery list was primarily contact information, and we want to share more about the plants and services offered. We used the Indiana Native Plant Society website as inspiration for updating our nursery list.

There are so many nurseries in Kentucky, how do you know what type of native products they are selling: cultivars vs locally collected seed, plants or seeds only, pollinator-friendly, or edibles? These were some of the many questions we thought were important to members, but answers were difficult to find. Who best to answer these questions than the nurseries themselves! To find nurseries, we used the existing nursery list and suggestion from the members of our KNPS Facebook group. I focused on Kentucky nurseries, but included nurseries in other states that were within an hour. With Jeff’s technical expertise, we created an online survey that I emailed to nurseries. After receiving most of the responses, I created a new template and updated the KNPS website, https://www.knps.org/native-plant-nurseries/.

After the initial update, we opened the survey up to the public! Now any nursery can use this link, https://www.knps.org/native-plant-supplier-form/, to fill out the survey and be included on the website. We are also working to create a page for native plant swaps and sales events using the same link. Do you have a nursery you would like included? Send them the survey, we would love to highlight more native plant suppliers!

Ann Longsworth

Railroad tracks ran along the end of our small backyard, along the edge where brambles grew, the occasional hobo slept, and Mother and I examined leaves and gathered wildflowers. From this seed planted long ago, a lifelong love of wildflowers grew. Many years later, this city kid bought nine rugged acres in Madison County, Kentucky. I named the property “Jean’s Glade,” after my mother. The first year was spent bush whacking and building a small home. The second year, I started exploring the property and discovered what turned out to be Gentiana flavida, a Kentucky state endangered species and the largest documented population at that time. So began a twenty-year odyssey.

I had a lot of questions about this plant and set out to find answers. First, how to positively identify the plant. Dr. Ralph Thompson, to whom Jean’s Glade owes much, identified the plant and collected the voucher specimen, currently housed in the Ralph Thompson Herbarium at Eastern Kentucky University. Next, how should I manage the plant? Heather Housman, formerly of the State Nature Preserves, was an incredible asset in this process. I chainsawed eight 110-year-old cedars. Staff with the Landowner Incentive Program removed numerous saplings, as did Josie Miller and Nathan Skinner, one winter day. With more exposure to the sun, what was originally 129 gentians became 634 at last count (I continue to remove woody plants, an ongoing job).

Finally, should the plant be studied? Dr. Chris Adams of Berea College and Dr. Ralph Thompson, Berea College retiree, completed the floristic study of the gentians which was published in Phytoneurexon, 2017-83: 1-25. Other studies to come: germination requirements of Gentiana flavida and isolating the mycorrhiza associated with the plant.

At Jean’s Glade, gentians grow on a south-west facing slope. They occur in a small prairie inclusion and in the open mixed hardwood/cedar forest edging the meadow. Gentiana flavida is a sun loving perennial that is recruited by seed. They bloom August through September and are pollinated by bumblebees. According to Drs. Adam and Thompson, “Gentiana flavida populations are imperiled throughout much of their distribution range because of extreme habitat loss primarily from anthropogenic disturbances, forest expansion, absence of fire, and invasive grasses and forbs.”

The efforts I’ve made for the gentians may read as if it was a trouble-free path. Nothing could be further from the truth! Along my journey, I encountered years of what seemed to be insurmountable problems, read stacks of literature, cold-called various researchers, professors, and authors, visited a gentian site in Indiana, and mostly refused to take “No” or “Can’t” for an answer. I have met many wonderful people because of this plant and probably ruffled a few feathers, and let’s just say, the electric company could probably describe to perfection “old Betsy” my rather rusty hunting gun (not a recommended conservation tool, but effective).

Many things have changed in the past twenty year. “Miss Jean” passed away five years ago. Now in my senior years, I face the biggest challenge yet: how to preserve the Glade, knowing that I will need to sell it in order to move closer to town soon. This may be one problem I am unable to solve.

It is springtime at Jean’s Glade now. Titmice are calling, goldfinches are fussing, and the creek beside my house sounds like a sweetly flowing conversation. I can almost hear a voice saying, “Let’s take a nature walk!” And I would add, “While it’s still here, while it’s all still here.”

Ann Longsworth is a retired psychologist whose avocation is Kentucky native plants. Two events sort of encouraged my pursuit of native plants. First, we moved to Kentucky for my father’s work at Berea College. The college property we moved to had lots of native plants. Second, was my first short-term course at Berea College, which was at Pine Mountain Settlement School. I also grow native plants and have a native plant fundraiser sale (this year will be my eight) and give all of the proceeds to Monarch Watch and/or nature projects.