Promoting pollinator plants
We’ve been talking a lot about green industry trends lately as we do our best to understand what our customers want in order to adapt and modify our production and strategic plans to meet current and future demand. Consumer trends can be tricky; they’re often cyclical or temporary and swing from one extreme to the next. For example, we’ve seen demand rise over the past decade for smaller and more compact plants, and, consequently, breeders and hybridizers have clamored to develop more and more dwarf varieties of everything from hydrangeas and roses to coneflowers and lilies. As the market becomes more and more saturated with compact plants, it seems inevitable that we’ll be looking to fill a void for new introductions of larger shrubs and perennials at some point in the near future.
One enduring trend that shows no sign of fading anytime soon, though, is the consumer- driven demand for natives and pollinator plants. Year after year, when green industry trend reports and marketing studies are released, themes like sustainable gardening and planting for pollinators continue to top the list. We can’t produce enough Asclepias, and anything deemed a “pollinator plant” flies off the shelves of our local garden centers.
It could be that this current trend is, to some extent, a response to a different green industry trend that has dominated our national landscape for most of the 20 th and 21 st centuries: the American lawn. For much of American history, the lawn has been more than simply an element of garden design. Post WWII, a house in the suburbs with a nicely manicured lawn became a symbol of wealth, status, and, quite frankly, the “American Dream”. But as we’ve all learned over the past few decades, a well-maintained lawn isn’t the most sustainable choice for the landscape. Besides requiring significant inputs like regular pesticide applications and supplemental irrigation, turf grass provides very little in the way of habitat for pollinators and other animals.
In recent years, social media has played a huge role in increasing awareness around issues like habitat loss and educating consumers about the importance of pollinators, especially bees. Campaigns like the No-Mow Movement have been extremely influential when it comes to promoting the use of natives and pollinator plants and discouraging lawn space in favor of other types of plantings. With so much information constantly at our disposal, it’s important that we, as growers, retailers, and landscape professionals, do our best to contribute to these conversations and help shape the messaging that is so influential to our customers. There has been a big push to promote natives over the past several years, for instance, and we are wholeheartedly on board with this movement. But we do believe that all this focus on natives sometimes comes at the exclusion of other beneficial pollinator plants, nativars, and cultivated varieties that aren’t true natives by definition, but nonetheless can play an important role in diversifying our landscapes and ecosystems. We should be diligent in doing our part to educate our customers when it comes to issues like these.
Cultivars can be misunderstood at times, and some native purists will claim that cultivated varieties selected and bred by humans will never be as beneficial to pollinators as open pollinated native species. But this isn’t necessarily true; plant trial comparisons out of Mt. Cuba Center, for example, have shown that cultivars that are close to the species in terms of morphology, flower color, and bloom time, often perform similarly to their native counterparts. Overall, we can’t make broad generalizations regarding the efficacy of straight species versus cultivated varieties with regard to benefiting and attracting pollinators; cultivars need to be evaluated on a case-by-case basis. And, in the grand scheme of things, aren’t we better off planting a mix of natives, nativars, and even non-native plants if it means that we can attract a wider audience of new gardeners to the green industry?
We continue to be encouraged and energized by this sustained demand for pollinator plants. Much of it is being driven by younger generations of consumers who are increasingly motivated by concerns for environmental sustainability or who use gardening as a way to relieve stress and improve mental health. These young gardeners may be passionate about pollinator plants, edible gardening, or natives. They may be obsessed with collecting houseplants so they can post about them on Instagram (#plantsofinstagram, #urbanjungle) or they may want to plant a pollinator garden in their backyard to create habitat for bees and butterflies. But any one of these reasons is cause for us to be excited for the future because they are all possible gateways for introducing the next generation to what could be a lifetime of gardening.
