Gardening (lazily) for the birds and bees

A forest of foxgloves in a Dunbar side garden made me think about today's changing attitudes toward weeds, flowers, and bird and bee habitat. How important is tidiness in a garden anyway?

Red and yellow poppies front foxgloves and wild roses at the front of this West Vancouver garden. There seem to be more and more wild spots like this these days.  Photo by John Denniston.

Another tangled display of wild and planted flowers in West Vancouver provides an insect feast. Photo by John Denniston. 

 

The lawn of a little nearby bungalow is a solid sheet of tight-packed blooming clover. Along a sidewalk just down the street from us is a forest of pink, purple and white foxgloves. An area in front of another house is a blaze of red and yellow poppies, with foxgloves and wild roses poking up behind.

Is it just me, or are Vancouverites letting up a little on tidy gardens? I’m suspecting several years’ worth of publicity about pollinator-friendly gardens that cater to bees, birds and butterflies is beginning to have an effect. “Butterfly Ways,” pock the boulevards now – little plots of two or three often-struggling plants meant to attract butterflies. And there are “pollinating gardens” with brilliant swaths of insect-friendly plantings in some Vancouver parks.

Even I, not the tidiest of gardeners at the best of times, am changing my ways. In the fall, I rake dead leaves onto the flower beds to give insects something to burrow under. I leave seed-heads for the birds and let dry plant stalks stand as potential egg-laying sites for insects. I even quell my automatic dandelion-murdering instincts to give the earliest bees a food source in the spring. My garden is not as neat as it used to be, but it's a lot less work.

My messier winter garden is spilling over into the summer now, as I rethink the annuals I once used to buy automatically to “colour up” the summer greenery. The pansies I planted last fall are still blooming, but they’re being taken over by the poppies, foxgloves, daisies and hollyhocks that arrive on their own and seem to want to thrive without any help from me.

At first I was a little horrified at the idea of letting things go. But as I see the beauty of other people’s tangled gardens, I realize they’re much more appealing to me than the order I once aspired to. Beauty, less work, and happy birds and bees. What could be wrong with that?

On the downside, here's what happens if you abandon your lawn completely. Buttercups take over in a solid mass, as has happened in the lawn of this soon-to-be-demolished house. I've never seen bees hovering over buttercups, but maybe they provide food for something. Photo by John Denniston.

My buttercups. I work away at them in patches to keep them under control. The white spots are rose petals. Photo by John Denniston. 

My front garden is a tangle of leftover winter pansies that I'll let bloom until they don't. Then poppies, daisies and hollyhocks  can take over for the summer.

The two Portuguese laurels in my back yard produce "cherries" in the fall that the robins flock to and fight over. In the spring, the climbing roses provide some high-up decoration.

The delphinium patch keeps the bees happy when the plants bloom in the summer.

There's something to be said about mixing order and disorder: The wildly blooming pink wiegelia is a nice contrast to the rest of this well-groomed West Vancouver garden.  Photo by John Denniston.

Order in the extreme. Perhaps because I'd been looking at wild gardens, I was amazed by this very large, perfectly round ball of orange and yellow begonias hanging in a back porch. At first I thought it had to be artificial, but when I got closer, it was real enough.  The other planter looks, well, more natural. I suspect neither provides much food for insects.