Native plants for your backyard

by Laura Reeves, for the Winnipeg Free Press

Black-eyed Susans (Rudbeckia hirta)

The platform flowers attract a wide diversity of insect life – butterflies, moths, stick caterpillars, spiders, ambush bugs, flies, beetles, and more. By nature, platform flowers make all of these insects easy to see and watch, so they’re a lot of fun.

Prairie dropseed (Sporobolus heterolepis)

This is my favourite native grass because it smells like peaches when it flowers. The thin-leaved bunches are beautiful any time, but especially when they turn a golden yellow in the fall. Most people select showy flowers for their pollinator gardens, not knowing that the larvae of many pollinators (including the endangered Poweshiek skipperling) feed on native grasses.

Wild bergamot (Monarda fistulosa)

A mint-family magnet for pollinators and an incredible medicinal plant with the same properties as oregano. These flowers are better suited to butterflies that have a longer proboscis. I no longer buy oregano — I use wild bergamot to flavour tomato sauces, soups, herb breads and salad dressings.

Giant hyssop (Agastache foeniculum)

Similarly to wild bergamot, giant hyssop is a) easy to grow b) attractive to all sorts of insects (I’ve found various butterfly pupae curled up in giant hyssop leaves) and c) a great medicinal plant to have around. The plants smell and taste like anise and the flowers make the most amazing fritters. They produce a lot of flowers, so it’s OK to take a few for fritters. Asters and goldenrods Most asters and goldenrods provide a late-season food source for a variety of insects. Take a close look at some goldenrod flowers (using a magnifying glass is even more fun) and you’ll be amazed by how many insects you find.

Milkweeds (Asclepias spp) and meadow blazingstar (Liatris ligulistylis)

Milkweeds are host plants for monarch caterpillars and the flowers are visited by a wide range of other insects. Showy and common milkweeds spread quickly by underground stems and can dominate a garden space, so it’s best to stick to other types, like swamp or whorled. Meadow blazingstar is a favourite flower for monarch butterflies, so if you have milkweed in your garden, you should also have meadow blazingstar.

Important note: Most nurseries sell cultivars of native plants. Culitvars are selected, bred or hybridized for traits that are attractive to humans — different colours, larger flowers, longer bloom times, different coloured foliage (leaves), double flowers, etc. — but these traits are often unattractive to insects. Research has shown these enhanced traits often come at the expense of nectar and/or pollen production, or make the plants less or not attractive to the insects they’ve evolved with for the last 9,000 years.

The clue to knowing if a plant is a cultivar or not is in the name. Plant species have two scientific names (see above). When the second scientific name is replaced with an English name, it’s a cultivar. For instance, if you find a black-eyed susan (Rudbeckia hirta) with a name like Rudbeckia Cherry Brandy or Rudbeckia Prairie Sun, it’s a cultivar.

For a list of native plant nurseries in Manitoba, go to mgmanitoba.com. One of the easiest ways for households to increase biodiversity is by not doing anything.

“The best thing do to is to do nothing at all, and it all starts in your yard,” Reeves says. “The key is to do less; not mowing the lawn as often as a lot of people do. Not raking up leaves and throwing them in the garbage, not cleaning up all the dead or rotten logs that we see in the bush. There’s a lot of things we could actually save our time and energy on by not doing which would also benefit biodiversity.”