A Feast for the Pollinators
Let native plants nourish your garden’s ecosystem
By Claire Elizabeth Bradley | Illustrations by Charmaine Koehler-Lodge
In the East Bay’s mild climate, a kitchen garden can provide year-round delight, but as gardeners, we can also pay it forward by incorporating native plants that nourish the ecosystem we depend on.
It’s common knowledge that adding flowers to a vegetable garden attracts pollinators and beneficial insects, boosting productivity and controlling pests. Popular non-native standbys like marigolds, nasturtiums, and lavender serve this purpose adequately. However, there are many beautiful native options that provide the food and habitat required by local species of bees, birds, and butterflies.
Looking for guidance on native plants that do well in a home garden, I head to Oaktown Native Plant Nursery at 702 Channing Way in Berkeley to talk with owner and horticulturalist Suzanne Howard-Carter.
“Manzanitas and ceanothus are really important because they provide early forage for our bumblebee friends when they’re just coming out of hibernation and need food right away,” says Howard-Carter. “Later in the season—in the hottest part of the year when everything else looks kind of dry—there’s California buckwheat, which will go straight through the fall. Those three are really the cornerstones.”
Standing at a nursery table, we peruse small starts of native wildflowers: meadowfoam, baby blue-eyes, and ladies’ tobacco. Howard-Carter gestures to a California poppy called maritima, which she says is excellent for planting around fruit trees and grows all over the East Bay hills. “The idea is you start with a couple of plants, and then the next year they’ll reseed and populate your area.” I’m thinking that they’ll also grow happily in the cracks around raised beds.
“Some of these wildflowers are from meadow-type areas where they have ample sun and water,” says Howard-Carter. It makes me realize how a vegetable garden could be made to resemble a wild meadow with herbs like yerba buena, coyote mint, and monardella spilling out around the veggie beds. Howard-Carter suggests other drought-tolerant species like California phacelia, gumweed, and woolly bluecurls, which prefer drier conditions and serve as butterfly-friendly alternatives to Mediterranean herbs like rosemary and sage.
When I ask about edible native plants, Howard-Carter mentions species prized by local Indigenous populations, various aromatics for cooking and teas, and several types of local huckleberries, salmonberries, elderberries, and raspberries.
“Nettles are a really cool little crop,” Howard-Carter adds with some pride, since her nursery grows and sells local nettles while most nurseries won’t. “You pick them with gloves on, dunk them in boiling water, and they’re incredibly nutritious.”
Howard-Carter says that finding native plant varieties suited to specific regions and growing conditions can be challenging, so she reaches out to local regional parks and privately-owned properties for seeds, cuttings, and starts to use in the propagation process.
On the question of when to plant, Bay Area horticulturalists agree that the late-fall through early-spring rainy season is best for planting native perennials and shrubs, but planting in spring and summer is possible if you pre-water the area.
Where to start? Howard-Carter suggests planting buckwheat, since it’s so tough. “The red [buckwheat] is especially pretty; it’s from the Channel Islands. The white one is our local one, and then you get the beneficial wasps coming to feed on the blooms; they’ll parasitize the aphids and help keep your aphid population under control.”
I head home with some new plants and a deeper appreciation for the critical role that natives play in a healthy ecosystem. The benefit of planting them is mutual. ♦
Claire Bradley gardens on her Oakland balcony and shares her experience with fellow small-space container gardeners in a blog called “Botany on the Balcony.”
