Pollinator Programs

Jennifer Polanz

The week of June 20-26 is National Pollinator Week across the U.S. If you’re reading this before, you still have time to promote it in the garden center. If you’re reading this after, don’t worry—our hard-working pollinators and their favorite plants deserve more than just a week to tell their story. In fact, if we say “Fall is for Planting” (remember that slogan?), then fall would be a great time to promote planting perennial natives to attract pollinators the following spring.

There’s a national movement swelling to protect our pollinators (bees, butterflies, birds, beetles and even bats in the Southwest U.S.), and those pollinators need habitats. Two years ago President Obama created the Pollinator Health Task Force, an inter-agency group designed to create a strategy to combat pollinator losses. They came up with a three-pronged approach:

1.    Reduce honey bee colony losses to an economically sustainable level.
2.    Increase Monarch butterfly numbers to protect the annual migration.
3.    Restore or enhance millions of acres for pollinators through combined public and private action.

My daughter’s third-grade teacher recently asked me to come speak to her class (it turned out to be the entire third-grade class!) about the importance of pollinators and what we can plant to help. She’s big into science and created curriculum around planting a pollinator garden at the school. The kids were tasked with researching the plants (I gave them a list of appropriate plants to start with) and getting measurements on how tall the plants would grow (Math) for their best placement in the garden bed. They went outside to measure out the bed itself (Math again). They talked about the different types of soil we see here on the east side of Cleveland (Earth Science) and how the plants grow.

What I found during this talk is kids love sharing stories of their interactions with nature. They’re also afraid of bees (a hurdle to overcome) and some of them really enjoy plants. After the talk we went outside to start planning the pollinator bed and one girl in particular was very excited to draw out her ideas for the garden. A future landscape architect in the making? Perhaps!

There are opportunities in schools all across North America to conduct similar or more in-depth pollinator programs. In our industry, we’re always talking about how we get the younger generation involved, and partnerships with elementary schools and daycares are a great way to get started.

I found getting kids involved in gardening is a little bit like the pollination process—you put the plants in front of them and let nature do the rest.

Perhaps it was an early experience with plants that helped define our Young Retailer Award nominees, whose essays about addressing the online threat to their retail businesses. This issue also centers on the outdoor room and we’ve got the whole of it covered from front porch to the backyard grill and fire pit.

Be sure to check out our guest column from Jessica DeGraaf of Proven Winners, too, about how independent retailers are primed to offer customers what they value most: an experience. GP