Good Roots: Pollinator Gardens

I've always been interested since I was a child growing up in Chicago, where there's very little nature.

As I knew at retirement, I started thinking about transitioning over and what I wanted to do once I was retired.

And neighbor of mine and also a fellow employee at the law school, we're very interested in becoming Master Naturalists.

And so we joined the Master Naturalists together and we went through the training together and it was wonderful.

My name is Lynn Foster and I am very active in the Central Arkansas Master Naturalists.

What got me interested in native plants was Doug Ptolemy and his work in this area.

We like to think some of us as human beings, that we're kind of separate from nature and we're not a part of it, But we are, and we're starting to see environmental disasters.

In some places.

We're in the middle of what has been called the 6th grade extinction, also known as the Anthropocene extinction, which means caused by people because we are rapidly driving species to extinction, and most of that is because.

Because we are destroying their habitat with native plants in our yards, we bring their habitat back and provide places for them to live once again.

And this is kind of the heart of why natives are so important.

If we want the upper levels of the ecosystem in our yards, we have to have native plants.

It all starts with native plants.

2/3 of our vegetables come from pollinated plants, and so it's very important for the general public.

Produce food, and the only way to do that is for the bees and the other insects to pollinate all the flowers.

My name is Bob Callens and the organization I have found was keeping it right beautiful.

This is our latest project and it's the Pollinator Garden.

The Pollinator garden are native plants that attract insects, butterflies, birds, that kind of thing.

We've got a supplier that has collected the native seed in this region.

And has grown them for about a year.

So they were a year old when we planted these.

They all are interconnected with all the other trees and oaks and the ecosystem that is in this park here.

It's a more display type garden.

I did the layout of this.

I'm a retired landscape architect and we broke it into quadrants and each quadrant has the same layout in each section, so it'll be more showy when they all start blooming and everything.

I've always been involved civically, but in Little Rock, and we've always been concerned about the beautication of Little Rock and its parks and that type of thing.

The first step here was to eradicate the weeds that are in this site, and we had to follow the instructions of the city.

The great thing about this particular park, because it is public, it's educating more people.

We have so many people stop by and ask what's going on, and I point him to the QR code we have there, and we've gotten donations that way from it, too.

I think people could do any of these pollinator plants in their own yard.

Well, my name is Janet Lanza and I'm the coordinator of Arkansas Wild Spaces.

I'm a retired ecology professor.

Once I retired, Lynn Foster had this idea to have Arkansas Wild Spaces, and I joined her in the effort to develop the program.

I tell people that I'm working as hard right now as when I was getting paid.

But I feel like I'm doing a tremend, hopefully anyway, doing a tremendous service for the central part of Arkansas.

Basically what we do is try to persuade people that native plants are really important to put in our yards.

If we want to preserve natural ecosystems, we have to find a way that their food is available.

When we first go to a house, we.

Explain to the homeowners, who we call land stewards, that we're not going to add more preserves.

So we have an opportunity to make natural areas in our yards.

What people need to do is remove invasive species and then add natives, reduce the lawn.

Then we walk around and see what they already have.

We identify invasives if they don't know what they are.

We also ask them what kind of the yard do they want and that informs us about how they want to use the yard.

Lynn and I developed huge store of materials.

We have spreadsheets.

These spreadsheets help us figure out what would be good in a particular place.

We can think of plants basically in three categories.

First, there are native and some of them which we call keystones are especially good because they provide the most benefit in terms of the life that can live off of them.

And then we have non-native non invasive plants.

Those don't do much in terms of supporting the ecosystem because they're not going to host insects.

They may help pollinators though and they won't take over your yard and force out native species.

And then there are the problem plants and those would be the non-native invasives.

Those will not support the ecosystem.

So insects can't live off them.

And they also are very aggressive plants.

They typically have very aggressive reproductive systems and they will force out the native plants in your yard.

This is an example of one of the millions of special relationships that we see within ecosystems.

This is a pipeline swallowtail Caterpillar and if it's lucky it will grow up to be a pipeline swallowtail butterfly.

You don't have a viable ecosystem if you don't have caterpillars in it.

Birds need an incredible incredible amount of caterpillars to reproduce.

This is one such Caterpillar.

There's a quote that says you only protect what you love if kids are inside all the time watching TV, playing video games.

They're not going to be outside getting excited about seeing monarch butterflies that are traveling from northern US and Canada all the way down to Mexico to spend time over the winter.

If they don't see that, they won't care about it.

This is something very concrete that people can do on an individual basis, and if we get enough people together to do this sort of thing, I do think we can have an impact.

This segment of good roots is made possible by support from Acre Trader.