Plan Your Project
Design Your Project Selecting An Area Choose Your Plants
Selecting an Area for Pollinator Planting
The first step in planting for pollinators is selecting an area to convert to native meadow, garden, or hedgerow. Whether your site is large or small, getting to know its existing plant communities is a critical first step. Then you can select the best restoration actions for the site’s plants, sun and soil conditions, and your own management capacity.
The restoration practices described here are best for sites that are already heavily disturbed by human activity. The most common disturbed landscapes in the Hudson Valley include lawns and residential landscapes, urban spaces, hayfields, pastures, and agricultural areas such as cornfields. These landscapes typically host few, if any, native plants. In such places, wiping the slate clean and starting fresh by adding a bounty of new native plants is a great gift to our native pollinators.
Lawns (left) and unused hayfields (right) offer prime opportunities for converting a landscape from non-native grasses devoid of pollinator benefit into thriving communities of native plants. Photo: PCA
Some sites - those that are less heavily maintained, like fields that have been left fallow for several years - may be starting to repopulate with locally native, pollinator-supporting plants such as goldenrods and asters. Rather than starting from scratch, the best restoration action for these landscapes may be more hands-off monitoring, perhaps adding a few targeted interventions such as shifting the timing of mowing, installing deer protection, or selectively removing invasive plant species.
Do no harm: avoid making drastic changes to areas that already have healthy communities of native plants.
It’s up to you as the land manager to choose what’s right for your unique place. If you’re new to native plants or are just getting to know your land, this might extend your project’s timeline by a season or more, and that’s fine. It’s well worth it to be certain you’re taking the most appropriate action as a responsible steward of your landscape.
Photo (left).This wild wet meadow at the edge of a pond may appear weedy, but is in fact teeming with native pollinator-supporting plants that have established on their own, such as goldenrods (Solidago spp.) and jewelweed (Impatiens capensis). This type of site should not be disturbed or re-planted - it provides a great opportunity to steward existing biodiversity. Photo: PCA