RUSSO (Host Intro): They say that April showers bring May flowers, and when that happens, pollinators are often not too far behind. I'm Bryan Russo. Many environmental organizations praise the benefits of native "pollinator gardens", but how do these gardens benefit local communities like those on the Lower Shore? In this segment of conservation conversations, Lauren Imhof discovers how these spaces pack an ecological punch.
IMHOF: To learn about pollinator gardens, I started in my own backyard at the Lower Shore Land Trust. LSLT hosts a pollinator garden tour every year. So I sat down with Beth Sheppard and Brooke Orr to find out more. For Beth, this event perfectly builds off of their native plant sale.
SHEPPARD: We then recognized it was really fun to go come behind that and to try to recognize the work people do in their own backyards or front yard [and] side yards. So by doing a garden tour, we feel like it helps to bring attention and appreciation to other gardeners sharing what they've done.
IMHOF: Highlighting local work is just the beginning. Brooke noted that these gardens inspire others too.
ORR: Inspiring the broader community to think about how they can just do one action after this tour to be a little bit more sustainable or think about pollinators in a different way. It's really just a mind switch, and I think that's our overall goal when it comes to events like these.
IMHOF: I wondered what these single actions could look like on a national scale. So I reached out to entomologist and co-founder of Homegrown National Park, Doug Tallamy.
TALLAMY: So I'm not talking about one or two people making a garden in their yard. I'm talking about everybody. This becomes the norm.
IMHOF: Homegrown National Park works to do just this, encouraging everyone to create their own biodiverse nature areas in the places they live and work. To start this nationwide mission, we need to rethink our 44 million acres of grass lawn.
TALLAMY: There are four things every landscape needs... four ecological goals. Every landscape does need to support pollinators. It needs to manage the watershed in which it lies. It needs to support a food web. If you don't have the food web, you don't have any animals. And if you don't have animals, you don't have a functional ecosystem and it needs to sequester carbon. Lawn does none of those things, which is why we need to reduce all the acreage that's in lawn. So how do you go about doing that? In this part of the world, the easiest thing to do is plant a tree and put a bed underneath it. Then all of a sudden you have less lawn and you've also added a resource.
IMHOF: He's not alone in this thought. Beth mentioned a Salisbury garden created with this in mind.
SHEPPARD: One of the gardens this year is in an HOA where they actually adopted an unused building site and they got a design drawn, and they have spent a few years really trying to change it from just a patch of grass to be mowed. And they've made a lovely garden and they're really proud of it. And I think they did that, hoping that members within their HOA community will get inspired and say that they would like to carry some of those plants into their own landscape.
IMHOF: One thing that they all emphasize is that pollinator spaces can take any form. You'll see all types of gardens at LSLT's, upcoming Pollinator Garden Tour in Salisbury on June 6th. From small containers to large swaths of meadowscape, native gardens create unique ecosystems and healthy communities too. For Delmarva Public Media, I'm Lauren Imhof.
RUSSO: Conservation Conversations is a partnership between Delmarva Public Media and the Lower Shore Land Trust. To learn more, visit lowershorelandtrust.org or delmarvapublicmedia.org.
