A Pollinator-Friendly Garden

Article by Pat Zander

Pollinator Attraction

My husband and I have always tried to attract birds to our garden. That meant planting shrubs
and perennials that would be sources of food and shelter, and minimizing the use of pesticides
that might harm.

Then we got a hive of honey bees and found that many of the same principles apply. In
particular, bees need a good and consistent source of pollen and nectar-rich flowers during the
warm season. And being very careful with pesticides is even more critical. As they feed, they
are moving pollen around and fertilizing the flowers. The majority of our food crops need these
busy little critters to accomplish this for them before they can produce seeds or fruit.

At one time, I thought there was nothing more entertaining in the garden than watching a
couple of robins bathe in the fountain. However, watching a bee wiggle her way into a tubular
flower and then wiggle back out, covered with pollen, is right up there too. It is a huge bonus
that I am now more aware of all the other pollinators that come our way. With awareness
comes appreciation. I’ve seen three different species of bumblebees “working” the same
patch of flowers, a tiny bee the size of an ant navigating a Hydrangea bloom, and the delicate
scalloping leafcutter bees make on a rose leaf.

Some Familiar Easy to Grow Favourites

Early Spring:
Crocus | Glory of the Snow | Pasque Flowers |  Snowdrops |  Tulips | Hazelnut | Pussywillows

Late Spring:
Allium |  Lilac | Saskatoons | Elderberry | Blossoming Berries |  Blossoming Fruit Trees and Shrubs | Oregon grape

Summer:
Beebalm |  Catmint |  Coneflower |  Dill | Fennel | Globe Thistle | Hyssop |  Jupiter’s Beard | 
Lavender |  Lambs Ears | Mint | Russian Sage | Salvia; | Snapdragons |  Veronica |  Yarrow | Butterfly Bush | Ninebark | Rose of Sharon

Late Summer into Fall:
Autumn Joy Sedum | Sunflowers |  Bluebeard (Caryopteris) | Russian Sage

I have mentioned only the plants in our garden which I know to be pollinator favourites. There
are hundreds more. A quick search on the internet will provide lists of appropriate choices;
borderfreebees.com is a good one. Also, do check out the plant list and images on OXA’s Pollinator Garden in the UnH2O Demonstration Garden on this site. 

It is also worth noting that native plants are the most appropriate for feeding native insect
species. Bonus that they are really easy on the water.

Living in the Okanagan where fruit growing is an important industry, gives us even more reason
to encourage healthy populations of pollinators.

Oh, and if you happen to have a few dandelions in your lawn, you are serving bee candy. Now
there’s an excuse to avoid hours on your knees digging them out.

GARDENING WITH NATURE

Article by Sigrie Kendrick

Think outside the box when prepping for winter

As gardeners, let’s remember to switch up the traditional garden tasks and think in a different direction: perhaps a more environmentally friendly one, that also provides us with more winter garden interest.

For instance, fall is the time of year when ornamental grasses shine. Many are in bloom and at the peak of their beauty.

What poet within us wouldn’t be charmed by the gentle way their graceful seed heads sway in the breeze and dance on the long stalks they’ve been growing all season? Grasses really add movement to your garden—unless you chop them down prematurely.

I recently had the opportunity to consider the importance ornamental grasses hold in our gardens as I cut down literally hundreds of Calamagrostis x acutiflora ‘Karl Foerster’, commonly known as Feather Reed grass, at a client’s property.

So often clients want their grasses razed to the ground before the onset of winter as they
perceive the standing grasses to be “messy” rather than graceful.

Often, land care providers such as landscapers are all too happy to oblige as that means one less task facing them in the spring.

Instead of this perverse desire to tidy in the fall why not take into consideration all the benefits of leaving ornamental grasses over the winter?

What about ecology?

From an ecological standpoint there also are many reasons to leave your ornamental grasses and your perennials standing over the winter. They provide needed habitat for birds and a myriad of other wildlife, as well as for beneficial insects to overwinter.

The seed heads of ornamental grasses and also annuals and perennials which have gone to seed, provide food for birds, who have to forage widely during the colder months, just to survive. They also provide great erosion prevention and slope stability, especially where wildfire has run through the previous season.

The time to shear your ornamental grasses is when you begin to see new growth at the base sometime in spring. Then, don’t toss out the cut grass. Instead, find a spot in your yard where it will be out of your way, but will provide valuable habitat for beneficial insects.

Perennials can also be pruned in early spring, when new growth begins to be visible, while annuals can be pulled out as soon as the ground softens in late winter or early spring.

Remember too that the fallen leaves from deciduous trees should also be left where they fall, rather than being neatly raked up and composted elsewhere in the fall. Those rotting leaves are like gold to a gardener and they provide habitat for insects and wildlife while they decompose over winter.

They also suppress weed growth and protect the roots of perennials over winter and what’s left can be gently dug into the soil come spring.

So, leave the leaves, don’t mow down the grasses and allow perennials and annuals to go to seed (unless they tend to be invasive!)

Article by Mark Godlewski

While it is a complex topic, the main tool used by the horticulture industry to judge which healthy plants likely to survive winter conditions is Plant Hardiness Zones. Most nursery plants are assigned a Plant Hardiness Zone based on their ability to survive winters in a given climate. Those zones range from 1-13 and are based on the harshest historical winter conditions averaged over a period of 20 or 30 years. Zone 1 represents the worst winter conditions.

You can see the Government of Canada plant hardiness zones displayed in map form (see Figure 1). These small-scale maps, however, cannot capture local variation. That is why looking up your municipality is a better option using the following Government of Canada website (it can be a bit slow to load but there should be a newer version published later in 2024).

Canadian Government Plant Hardiness for BC

Figure 1 – Canadian Plant Hardiness for BC

On inspiration and irrigation

Article by Judie Steeves, Past-President OXA

Take inspiration and caution from Mother Nature

Consider taking inspiration for your own landscape from Mother Nature, as well as learning about cautions to be aware of.

For instance, I recently spent a few days hiking in Manning Park, where we visited wildflower meadows in the alpine and hiked all along the string of lakes about the same elevation as Highway 3, where the campgrounds are. That’s about 1,200 metres or 4,000 feet in elevation.

I’ve hiked there in the past, and never have I seen such dry conditions in the alpine and subalpine meadows (except where there are creeks or seeps). If it’s that dry at such a high elevation, far less water than normal is coming down into the Okanagan Valley or being stored in the hills around it.

With that in mind, it would be irresponsible for us to water our home landscapes this year as much as we might in a normal summer. And, that means the plants which prefer a coastal climate or higher natural precipitation, are not going to be happy and may even die back. The plants that will thrive are the ones that naturally do well in a more-arid climate such as the Okanagan’s near-desert conditions. Check our plant database for drought-tolerant plants.

Despite drought conditions in the park, the wildflowers were diverse and beautiful and inspired me to consider replicating some of the colour combinations in my own garden.

In the alpine, at 5-6,000 feet, red paintbrush were bright against the background of silvery pussytoes and white star-flowered sandworts. A great combination! Add in the occasional deep blue of lupines or self-heal and bright yellow buttercups it was different again. Western anemone had finished flowering but their mop top seedheads were graceful and fun and reminded me of the Pulsatilla vulgaris or Prairie Crocus from my own garden, which also have seedheads that look like bedheads.

The wildflowers were entirely different on our hike along the chain of lakes at about 4,000 feet: Lightning, Flash, Strike and Thunder. It’s a more-shaded hike, with lots of creeks and seeps, wetlands and streams, so it features plants which require more moisture than we typically find naturally in the Okanagan.

However, we can substitute drought-tolerant, xeriscape plants for some of those dramatic combinations I found on the lakes trail.

For instance, there was one meadow of deep blue Upland Larkspur, nearly as tall as me, along with creamy Cowparsnip, Fireweed and thistles and I thought of alternatives such as the tall hollyhocks, Beebalm, asters and yarrow, with Fallugia paradoxa or Apache Plume. It’s a shrub of about four feet that has fluffy, pinkish seed heads in summer. All of those are tolerant of both heat and dry conditions and make a glorious show of colour and height and texture.

Paintbrush was a feature everywhere you looked, whether short or tall, and in all shades of red, orange and pink or white. However, it’s one wildflower that’s best left in the wild as it is semi-parasitic on the roots of particular grasses and won’t survive on its own.

Never dig up wildflowers in the wild. Instead, look for cousins in nurseries or explore the native plant section.

Hiking around the Okanagan is a wonderful opportunity to bring home inspiration for your own landscapes, as well as a reminder that it is very dry out there.

If we try to garden as if that natural condition did not exist, we’ll use far more water than we can afford to waste on our landscapes. If we want to live in the Okanagan, we must reform our bad habit of growing plants which require lots of water to thrive.

Gardening with Nature

Article by Sigrie Kendrick

Use native plants to help stabilize slopes

It’s just common sense to look to Mother Nature for advice about solving natural concerns on your landscape, like water, steep slopes and sun exposure or shade.

If recent rain sent a torrent of water sluicing down a steep slope on your property, leaving behind a small creek bed full of rocks and gravel and a pile of soil at the bottom, consider planting native and xeric trees, shrubs, grasses and ground covers which will naturally help to stabilize the slope.

Many residential properties throughout the Okanagan have to deal with steep slopes. Our silty soils are notorious for losing stability when exposed to higher-than-normal volumes of water such as intense rainfalls or a sudden rush of water from water line breaks or leaks.

Josh Smith, a director of the Okanagan Xeriscape Association and manager of XEN Xeriscape Endemic Nursery in West Kelowna explains that a cost-effective, low-maintenance and eco-friendly solution is to take advantage of Mother Nature’s suggestions: plant strong-rooted native and xeriscape plants that are adapted to survive and thrive on our slopes—and in our dry environment—to retain the soil and beautify the space.

Plants just after planting to help stabilize a slope on a residential property in Kelowna last year

Developing a naturalized slope-retention system on your property can take several seasons of monitoring but once it is established, it should require zero maintenance, irrigation, or upkeep.

Some key points for getting started include:

• Control the weeds until the trees, shrubs, grasses or ground covers get established. Some invasive species in the Okanagan are virulent enough to take over a slope and hinder the growth of shrubs and trees you have planted or which seed themselves.
• Grass blends or ground-cover are necessary to occlude weeds and provide surface erosion protection. These species help retain the top 10 to 20 cm of the soil.
• Tree and shrub species are what will provide deep, long-lasting, structural support to help stabilize the slope over the long term.

Smith recommends that if you are choosing plant species for slope retention or naturalized areas, go for a walk in your neighbourhood and look carefully at what is growing on natural slopes in your area. This is a surefire way to ensure you select species suited to your soil and moisture conditions.

A year later, the native plants used to stabilize the slope including a yellow-flowered sedum, grey rabbitbrush, nodding onion, a showy fleabane, kinnikinnick and native grass mix are filling in nicely

Resources

There are many wonderful resources available to help you identify native species and learn more about their growth characteristics. Phone apps like iNaturalist and Seek can help you identify plants. There are also several Okanagan-specific plant identification books, including Trees, Shrubs and Flowers to Know in B.C. by C.P. Lyons, and Plants of Southern Interior B.C. by Parish, Coupe and Lloyd, or you can take photos. They can help you look up the plant characteristics in books or on the Internet. You can also take your photos to a native plant nursery for an expert to help you identify the plant.

OXA has an extensive plant database of ornamental and native species. 

There are also specialized native plant nurseries like XEN in West Kelowna and Sagebrush Nursery in Oliver, and many other nurseries carry a selection of native and xeric species.

Sigrie Kendrick is a Master Gardener and Executive-Director of the Okanagan Xeriscape Association. She can be reached at 778-363-8360 or by email at exec_dir@okanaganxeriscape.org.

Gardening with Nature

Article by Sigrie Kendrick

Can we make better choices?

Next to our vital agricultural industry, outdoor landscapes in the Okanagan suck up the most
water.

And there’s no comparison when you consider which use is the most important: we can no
more do without food than we can do without water.

Unfortunately, the Okanagan is a near-desert and water is in short supply, a situation made
much worse by climate change and the resulting extremes in weather such as drought.

While attitudes are changing, wholesale buy-in from civic authorities, the development
community, landscape professionals and nurseries, as well as those of us who plant and water
our gardens and outdoor living spaces is absolutely essential.

No longer can we afford to be so irresponsible as to use plants that require large quantities of
water to stay alive.

With that in mind, the Okanagan Xeriscape Association has joined forces with the Okanagan
Basin Water Board, an entity on which every taxpayer in the region has representation, and its
Okanagan WaterWise program to help educate the whole community about the importance of
replacing water-thirsty landscapes with beautiful ones that require far less water.

When we obliterate natural landscapes to create buildings, and pave our grasslands and forests
over with concrete and asphalt, we simply must re-plant at least some of that with native-type
plants which don’t require large quantities of water to stay alive.

Rewilding

When we obliterate natural landscapes to create buildings and pave our grasslands and forests
over with concrete and asphalt, we simply must re-plant at least some of that with native-type
plants which don’t require large quantities of water to stay alive.

Re-wilding is the term for restoring healthy ecosystems in the landscape that have been
disturbed by humans. Think of the millions of acres of mono-culture that is turf grass currently
planted across this country.

Re-wilding aims to reverse biodiversity loss by using native plants and animal life to rebuild
ecosystems and mitigate climate change.

It is in the hope that we as humans can undo some of the destruction we have wreaked on our
home—earth.

Please consider allocating a portion of your garden to native plants.

Plants native to the Okanagan thrive in our semi-arid valley and support countless pollinators,
birds, and animals. Think of the ripple effect, much as that from a single stone thrown into a
pond.

It’s simplistic to believe that because the bottom of our Okanagan Valley features a sparkling
blue lake, water is not scarce. As soon as we begin to ‘mine’ the lake— use more water than is
replaced by natural precipitation each year— we are in big trouble.

The alternative is for all of us to wake up and give our heads a shake; to enact legislation
requiring that new developments install landscapes that use the principles of xeriscape; to insist
as creators of subdivisions, as home builders and homeowners that our landscapes use
drought-tolerant plants instead of lawn grasses, trees, shrubs and flowers that belong in a
coastal rainforest.

We have to move away from inappropriate landscape choices such as turf grass, cedar hedges
and inappropriate plant selections and instead move toward choices that better mimic our
stunning natural Okanagan environment and support our pollinators, birds, and small mammals.

We humans have to relinquish our control issues and let nature do what she does best— heal.

Sigrie Kendrick is a Master Gardener and Executive-Director of the Okanagan Xeriscape Association. She can be reached at 778-363-8360 or by email at exec_dir@okanaganxeriscape.org.

Gardening with Nature 

Article by Sigrie Kendrick

Try a drought-tolerant alternative to lawn grasses

One of the easiest ways to reduce your water use on the landscape is to reduce your turf area and to consider alternatives to the traditional lawn.

Traditional turf is a monoculture, a single species developed to out-compete other species and is far from a natural, biodiverse ecosystem. Turf as such offers little benefit to pollinators and can only be maintained using resource-intensive practices: think water, water, and more water.

Traditional lawns also require herbicides, fertilizer, and pesticides to maintain that perfect, even shade of green. These chemicals often end up in our waterways with harmful consequences for all manner of aquatic life. No less dangerous on land, the toxic effects of many lawn chemicals on wildlife, especially birds, have been well-documented.

With record drought and water restrictions throughout the Okanagan Valley, you may be faced with limited irrigation to use on your lawn and so allow it to go dormant over summer.

Rather than over-seeding with a traditional lawn mixture this fall, consider transitioning away from turf and instead plant Trifolium repens, known commonly as Dutch white clover.

There are many compelling reasons for transitioning to a lawn of clover:

• Dutch white clover needs very little supplemental water and maintains its green throughout the driest of summers.
• White clover requires no fertilizer and is in fact a member of the pea family known for ‘fixing nitrogen’ in the soil, thereby allowing plants to better access available nitrogen.
• Clover is immune to the burnt patches dog urine creates on a traditional turf lawn.
• Trifolium repens is a favourite with bees that will visit your clover lawn and pollinate your garden while doing so.
• Dutch white clover is not particular about soil and will thrive in even nutrient-poor soil common to the Okanagan Valley.
• A lawn of clover is comfortable to walk on with bare feet.
• Dutch white clover seldom needs mowing, so planting it reduces pollution from mowers and the corresponding fuel costs.
• The seed itself is also extremely inexpensive and can be found at West Coast Seeds listed at $9.99 for 125 grams, enough to cover one thousand square feet.

Gardening with Nature | March 2021

Article by Sigrie Kendrick

Now is the Time to Design Your Garden

Although spring is not yet here at the beginning of March, there is hope warmer weather will soon allow us to get out into the garden. That means now is the time to plan and design the coming season’s garden. In my last post, I discussed the first of seven Principles of Xeriscape, Planning and Design, but divided it into two sections, beginning with planning. This post will focus on design.

The first design decision to be made is whether you want a formal or informal landscape.

Formal design tends to be more symmetrical, achieved by identical plantings on either side of a central axis, often a walkway or path.

The variety of plants used tends to be limited and the colour palette neutral.

Formal design features straight lines with sharp angles, often laid out in squares and rectangles, making use of tightly-clipped, low hedges of evergreens or boxwood.
These designs tend to be fairly labour-intensive with lots of pruning required to keep everything looking perfectly symmetrical.

Many traditional, historical British gardens are formal in their design, a popular aesthetic when you employ a full-time gardener.

A modern take on formal design can be achieved by the use of drought-tolerant ornamental grasses planted in rows.

In contrast, informal garden design tends to feature curved planting beds for a more natural look with a greater selection of plants used.

As informal gardens often feature a wider selection of plants than those used in formal design, they tend to be the choice for those of us who can never have too many plants.

That being said, a common design mistake is the use of too many plants in a space— and I am guilty as charged.

A well-designed landscape is a balance: of size, shape, colour and texture.

Repeating groups of the same or similar plants throughout your garden creates a sense of continuity and unity and will be more pleasing to your eye than a multitude of individual plants.

Cottage gardens, rock gardens, native gardens, and meadow plantings are all examples of informal garden designs which are well-suited to drought-tolerant plant choices.

The maintenance of an informal garden will be significantly less as the selected plants will be allowed to achieve their natural size which reduces the time spent pruning.

The plant database on our website offers hundreds of xeric trees, shrubs, perennials, annuals, bulbs, and vines which can be referenced for either a formal or informal landscape design.

Many of the plants featured encourage birds and pollinators to visit your garden making it ecologically valuable and not simply aesthetically pleasing.