This Town's Blooming

Monarch caterpillar on a leaf. Photo credit: Nancy Fede

Last year, Southbury Land Trust volunteers planted a native plant, pollinator garden at Phillips-Lovdal Farm Preserve. The year before, we collaborated with the Southbury Garden Club and Sustainable Southbury to plant a pollinator garden at town hall.

Why? As a conservation non-profit with an eye on education, SLT wants to create awareness about dramatic declines in pollinators. This decline has a chain effect. The loss of pollinators runs up the food web to negatively affect bird populations. No butterflies? No moths? Then there's no caterpillars. Without caterpillars, bird parents cannot feed their nestlings. Baby birds don't eat birdseed or hard-shelled beetles. They need protein-rich, soft bodied caterpillars. Entomologist and best-selling author Douglas Tallamy says baby chickadees need upwards to 500 caterpillars a day. It takes a little over two weeks for those babies to fledge, so add it up: they need about 6,000 soft caterpillars.

Recent findings by The American Bird Conservancy, along with other researchers, published in the journal "Science," cites a loss of 175 million individuals from the Dark-eyed Junco population, and 93 million White-throated Sparrow. "To put it another way, we've lost more than a quarter of our birdlife since 1970."

Native plants are the host plants for lepidoptera (moths and caterpillars). We need them if we want a successful food web. Native plants refer to those plants that originated in a localized area, have not been altered by humans in any way (adding a change in leaf, or color, etc.), and are plants to which insects / pollinators co-evolved. Most native insects use specific native plant as a host plant to reproduce. For example, Milkweed is the host plant for Monarch butterflies. They need milkweed to successfully reproduce. As adults they can nectar on anything, but they lay their eggs on milkweed and their cats eat only milkweed through all of its instars.

The Town Hall garden is just now coming into bloom. Among the plantings in that garden, you'll find echinacea, butterfly weed, and New Jersey Tea (Ceanothus americanus). New Jersey Tea is a compact shrub, generally blooming July to August (must be early!). It attracts all sorts of pollinators, including hummingbirds and is the host plant to 37 lepidoptera species, including the Spring azure butterfly.

Content assist on New Jersey Tea comes from the Native Plant Trust.

Phillips-Loval Farm Preserve: the garden runs along the stone wall at the entrance to Phillips Farm on Sanford Road. Native plants include bearberry (groundcover), echinacea, running serviceberry, ninebark, columbine, monarda, goldenrod, New England aster, tall tickseed, and more.

Why not stop by our gardens and take a look. And please let us know if you would like to volunteer in the garden (watering, planting or weeding). Finally, the best thing you can do right now is to plant a few native plants: in your yard, in a pot on your balcony or front door, etc.