Pollinator Friendly Gardening - by Rhonda Fleming Hayes (Paperback)

About the Book

Pollinator Friendly Gardening shows you how to select plants and build habitat to make your garden a place for bees, butterflies, hummingbirds, and other pollinators to thrive.

Book Synopsis

This is the perfect book for anyone who wants to help support our pollinators. Are you interested in growing a naturally healthy garden? How about making sure your local environment helps bees, butterflies, and birds survive and thrive? If you are a beekeeper, are you looking for the ideal plants to keep your colony happy? Pollinators such as monarch butterflies and bees are under threat, and more and more gardeners want to do all they can to create a hospitable space for them. That's where Pollinator Friendly Gardening comes in. It identifies the most visible and beloved pollinators: bees, butterflies, and hummingbirds, as well as some more unlikely candidates such as ants, wasps, and beetles. It then explains the intriguing synergy between plants and pollinators. This vital information makes it a unique sourcebook to share the ways that anyone can make a yard a more friendly place for pollinators. Plant selection, hardscape choices, habitat building (both natural and manmade), and growing practices that give pollinators their best chance in the garden are all covered in detail. Plant lists organized by category, helpful tips, and expert spotlights make it a fun and easy book to read too.

Review Quotes

"...covers everything the average gardener needs to know to create a garden that attracts and sustains bees, butterflies and other pollinators - including plant selection, hardscape choices and growing practices."

"...it is excellent at reinforcing the importance of pollination, it offers numerous handy lists of all manner of plants (larval host plants for butterflies, landscape nectar plants for butterflies and bees, weeds that nevertheless provide nectar and pollen sources, etc.), and it provides practical advice on setting up a garden to make pollinators feel at home, among other topics. And for readers who might question whether their humble garden could help mitigate, even turn back, the loss of pollinators, the author and those she interviewed would certainly reply, "Believe it!"

"Hayes provides a plant list that reads like a greatest hits in support of bees, butterflies and hummingbirds."

"This is a valuable resource for developing a garden that supports healthy lives for bees and butterflies"

About the Author

Rhonda Fleming Hayes has gardened since she was a child and has cultivated her green thumb everywhere from her native California to the south, Midwest, and England. She is an award-winning garden writer who pens a column for the Minneapolis Star Tribune and inspires readers of Northern Gardener magazine with unique garden profiles and her ongoing "Kitchen Garden" feature. She has also won the Garden Writers Association silver award and been published in Minnesota Gardener, Savannah Magazine, and Mother Earth Living among others. She is a Master Gardener and public speaker, who always encourages her audience to plant for pollinators.