My garden has a hummingbird! I’m fairly sure she’s just passing through. I’m fairly sure she is a she, being a rather nondescript tiny greenish thing with feathers. Truthfully, she is very small, even for a hummingbird, so she may be a juvenile ruby-throat. I hope she’s scouting out my yard for nesting possibilities next year. She is certainly hanging around here longer than most migrants do. I’ve seen her around the garden for about two weeks now. When I am outside, she usually comes to see what I’m doing and will perch nearby. She is not nearly as aggressive or loud as the hummingbirds back in New Mexico. One gets the feeling that hummingbird is rich in swear words.
She loves the agastaches and nasturtiums. She also will stick her beak into the apples that I haven’t picked yet, and I’m pretty sure she is eating some insects. I wish she were a flock so they could do more about the mosquito population which has exploded this summer. I’ve never seen this many mosquitos in New England. Black flies, yes. Midges, yes. Ticks, of course. But mosquitos are usually in the minority. This is probably evidence of New England warming, but it seems like an abrupt shift north for these insect populations. I can’t walk outside without being surrounded by a cloud of mini-vampires on the wing. I have swallowed more than one in the past few weeks.
On the other hand, we still have very few of the insects that might do the world some good. It is rare to see any butterflies, and then it’s mainly cabbage whites. The garden is home to some bumblebees, but my beekeeping neighbor up the street has all of her hives broken down for cleaning because there are no bees left. I have seen some native bees and hoverflies this summer, but not in the last few weeks. I’ve also seen no mantises or ladybugs, not even the annoying Asian ones. There were some squash bugs early in the year, but they’re gone. Never thought I would be upset by a lack of squash bugs. There are pill bugs all over my basement and the occasional earwig, but there aren’t even many of those outside. Of all the disasters that have happened this summer, I think this sudden crash in insect numbers is the scariest. I don’t know that we can recover from this one.
I only have two bits of advice. Don’t buy anything that is made or grown using neonicotinoids. Certainly, don’t spray that poison or allow it to be sprayed on your own property. Buy organic everything, even cotton. That insecticide is killing more than bugs; it is stealing away our future.
My other bit of advice is to fill your garden with native plants. I realize this isn’t easy. Many North American natives are only now being adapted for garden cultivation. Until very recently, it was hard to find many of our native New England plants. But it seems we’re going to the opposite extreme. There are many, many new cultivars in garden centers now — only they are so overbred that they are not very like the plants that local insects and animals need.
Most of this breeding work is focused on making the flowers larger and more colorful, somewhat dubious improvements even from an aesthetic perspective. But it makes it very hard on the insects. They literally can’t see the bright blooms as well as the native pale shades. Butterflies and bees don’t see colors the way we do. Cool shades, that may appear washed out in a garden, are intensely attractive to these insects. However, reds appear black to bee eyes, so the vibrant shades that draw our interest are opaque to bees.
Though the hummingbirds love the warm colors.
In any case, most of the breeding that has happened has made plants that are more attractive to humans, particularly the sort of humans that want a pretty perennial bed to surround the house. But these adaptations are not especially beneficial to the native fauna. Native insects evolved with specific plants. They know those plants. They know that those plants mean food or shelter. Some of those plant and insect pairings can not survive singly; they need each other to survive. But the insects do not know the new plants, and for many of the new cultivars there’s no reason for insects to learn the new plants. Most cultivars have been bred in ways that makes them less messy, more showy, and therefore much less inclined to put efforts toward making sugary incentives to draw pollinators — so insects get nothing from these new plants. Indeed, some cultivars — like no-mess hybrid sunflowers — do not make pollen at all.
Further, while doubled blooms look fantastic to us, especially in the plant catalogs, all those showy petals get in the way of plant and insect reproductive work. Even if the plant retains reproductive organs, insects can’t reach the pollen or nectar buried in a thick forest of petals. Most butterflies and moths prefer flat, open disks with rays of petals held away from the flower. These are easy access and also provide a comfortable resting surface. But even coneflowers are being bred with extra petals that give no place to land and hide the plant’s reproductive parts. (If they have no large central cone seedhead, are they still coneflowers?)
Most hovering pollinators want tube-shaped flowers, tiny goblets that hold nectar and pollen. Many native plants in the legume family have figured out how to make shapes that will not only attract pollinators, but fit to their bodies so that the insect or bird will be coated in pollen as it feeds. Selecting larger blooms for the garden market makes for a prettier garden but much less efficiency in pollinating. Some of the lupine blooms are so large, not even the bumblebees will brush up against pollen while feeding. There is no way to pass pollen from one plant to another. This translates into no lupines in a couple years since they are biennial or very short-lived perennials. The lupines planted by the former folks in my perennial bed are all but gone. I suppose if I want lupines, I’m going to have to hand-pollinate them, or spend a lot of money on plant starts every two to three years.
So you may not want the more cultivated versions of native plants. However, you also need to avoid buying the wild plants. It is illegal to collect wild plants in many places — for good reason. Humans, being not very good at self-limiting, will annihilate wild plant populations if they think they can make money just by digging up a stand of cohosh or something. It takes years for many plants to recover from irresponsible wild-crafting. But removing even one plant from a wild population breaks root connections and takes away genetic information from the community, reducing its viability. In truth, it’s hard to see how some wild species can survive even a light reaping. So we have rules to keep humans from decimating wild flowers in the pursuit of profit.
But these are the plants that most benefit local insects and birds.
The solution is to buy garden cultivars that have not been modified much. These are often sold as heirlooms, meaning they’ve been around for a long time. They are not wild and they have been bred somewhat for human pleasures, but not much. Moreover, if they have been in gardens in a region for a long time, there are probably insects that are adapted to them. Old versions of garden monarda have showier blooms than natives, in colors that bees do not see well — even though these are called “bee balm” — but hawk moths find the bright red flowers irresistible. So the wild versions with their lilac and lavender blooms feed native bees, and old cultivars have hawk moth partners. But the newest monarda cultivars are too dense for hovering pollinators, with florets packed tightly on shorter stalks. So the recent modifications have not found new insect partners.
In time, insects would normally evolve alongside the flowers in our gardens. New partnerships are made, though some of our showiest flowers can just flummox insects. But even then, plants and insects will find a way to team up eventually. For example, peony blooms are essentially inaccessible once they open. But ants have figured out how to tap into the sugary buds without harming the plant, and peonies seem to encourage this by making the bud ever more sugary when there are ants present. The plant benefits because the ants will kill pests to defend their sugar source. Now, peonies are not native though the ants are. This partnership only developed after humans started planting peonies in their gardens. So with even the most overbred plants, new partnerships would grow in time. Usually. However, in the middle of an unprecedented insect die-off, it’s hard to see that happening.
What is maddening is that this bug apocalypse has not affected the pest bugs in my garden, aside from reducing the number of squash bugs. I still have aphids, box elder bugs, potato beetles, flea beetles, midges, blackflies, mosquitos and, I assume, a healthy tick population in the jungle. So what are we gaining from insecticides? Perhaps fewer corn borers and other agricultural pests. Maybe. But only for as many generations as it takes for some mutation to come along that makes the insects impervious to this particular poison. Obviously, mosquitos have already overcome the neonicts, just like they did with DDT and chlordane. Perhaps, other insects would develop resistance also in time. But we don’t seem to have time. In any case, it takes a large breeding population to grow new traits, and in my garden, there doesn’t seem to be a healthy population with a large and diverse gene pool for anything but the pests.
So I have been rethinking my garden. I usually plant herbs and native flowers anyway, but I may take some of the veg space and turn it into beneficial bug food. I’m not going to get much annual veg out of the hugelkultur mound as long as there are large ravenous rodents, so perhaps that could be an herb and flower bed with a few fruit-bearing bushes and small trees. I am looking at building another perennial bed next to the garage, one that can tolerate shade and road salt (which sets a good challenge for my gardening skills). I’m also trying to find more native early summer blooms for my climate. We have garden cultivars of flowering bushes and trees and spring ephemerals, and then there are dozens of blooms in the late summer all the way until frost. But from late May almost through July, when the bees and butterflies are coming out of their pupal stages and feeding and breeding, there aren’t many native plants with blooms. Lucky for me and the bugs that live nearby, many of the herbs flower in June, but I’d like more of the plants that already have partners.
So as I go through a rather intense garden rehabilitation after this summer of hell, I am changing things around. Maybe that will make a difference. But it would be better if everybody put some effort into not killing the small creatures that keep us all alive and fed. I don’t tell other people what to do very often, but I am telling you all to do this: don’t buy anything with pesticides in its history and do everything you can to make your part of the world a habitat for more than humanity. Because anything less will not support even humans for very long.
