Windsor
Sure, the skeptical 65-year-old Windsor resident said, planting a large smorgasbord of nectar-laden wildflowers sounded good in theory. But as he told his wife, Fiona Blunden, early last year, broadcasting packets of seed over the ground seemed unlikely to grow much of anything.
“We’ve all tried to throw seed out into the fields. It doesn’t take,” said MacGovern, a real estate agent who grew up on a dairy farm in Harvard, Mass., and ran against U.S. Sen. Bernie Sanders, I-Vt., in a longshot Republican bid in 2012.
In more recent years, he’d even tried scattering lupine seeds onto the scrubby field that slopes from their Windsor home on Marton Road, down to a small orchard at the rear of the property, which abuts the 826-acre Windsor Grasslands Wildlife Management Area.
Nothing happened.
The 60-year-old Blunden, who is a gilder, inspected the land with her husband. True, the haying was not very good. And the expanse was tangled with invasives like notorious knotweed, poison parsnip, and thorny thistles.
But still.
“We’re beekeepers,” Blunden said, the verbal coloring of her native Ireland apparent. For the last four or five years, Blunden and MacGovern had been making Christmas presents of the honey produced by the 100,000 or so honeybees that inhabited their two hives. She wanted badly to do something good for them, and she struck a more optimistic tone than her husband. “We’d love to have a wildflower meadow.”
They talked about the pollinator garden planting techniques that had been outlined during a presentation from the University of New Hampshire Cooperative Extension at the Montshire Museum early last year.
The key, according to presenter Cathy Neal — who, after 10 years of experiments, released a list of bee-supporting seed mixes earlier this month — was to first completely kill the existing grass and other vegetation.
MacGovern agreed that there was not much to lose in the effort, and by early summer, they were laying down sheets of heavy black plastic on a roughly 50 by 50 foot patch, to cut off light from plants and bake the life out of any seeds lying in the ground.
“I thought, certainly, let’s try to follow the directions of this Cathy Neal,” MacGovern said. “We wanted to see if it would work.”
Bees Stung
Blunden and MacGovern aren’t the only ones who have recently waded into the battle to protect the area’s native bee populations, said Barbara McIlroy, of Hanover, who is part of the Upper Valley Pollinator Partners. For the past year and a half, the nonprofit has used forums and newsletters to urge individuals like MacGovern and Blunden, municipal conservation commissions, garden clubs, schools and other groups to start their own pollinator gardens.
They also provided hands on support to certain projects.
“We grew thousands of pollinator plants from seed,” McIlroy said. “We got help in germinating them at the Dartmouth greenhouse, and then transplanted to donated 4-packs.”
It’s been, and continues to be, a lot of work, but McIlroy said the cause is so critical that they can’t afford to sit back.
The primary purpose of the wildflower gardens is to provide a robust, season-long buffet for the pollinators, primarily native bees, that have seen their numbers decline against a backdrop of human activities — habitat-fragmenting development, pesticide use, the importation of competing European bee species and climate change.
One apparent victim of human incursions is the macropis cuckoo bee, which once ranged alongside its favored loosestrife flowers through much of eastern and central North America and southern Canada, according to an early 2017 report from the Center for Biological Diversity. The bee disappeared for more than 60 years, and was only rediscovered in the country in 2006, when a small, solitary population was found to be hanging on in New London, Conn.
And in Vermont, the once-common rusty-patched bumblebee hasn’t been seen since 1999, with the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service listing the species as threatened last year.
Also last year, the Center for Biological Diversity released a report that estimated more than half of native North American bee species are declining, with 347 distinct species, like the macropis cuckoo and rusty-patched bumblebee facing outright extinction.
Seeds Planted
Faced with increasingly alarming reports about bees’ long-term prospects, McIlroy said, area conservationists responded in late 2016 by creating the Upper Valley Pollinator Partners, which quickly established a goal of encouraging the creation of 100 new pollinator gardens in the Upper Valley.
But the heightened interest in bees has been building for a long time, according to Neal, a landscape horticultural specialist who, in addition to public outreach, has a half-appointment running pollinator plant experiments at the NH Agricultural Experiment Station in Durham, N.H.
Neal spoke by phone on Wednesday while working in blueberry plots to help track the distances certain bees will travel to access certain flowers.
“Even as far back as the mid-to-late ‘90s,” she said, “people were starting to think they wanted to reduce the mowed turf grass” in their landscapes.
Around 2012, she said, specific concerns about things like Colony Collapse Disorder (a mite-caused threat to honeybees) and decimated monarch butterfly migrations began focusing that energy into a specific mission: Pollinator gardens.
In June 2016, the White House under the Obama administration released a national pollinator plan, and federal, state and municipal planning documents have begun to actively incorporate pollinator gardens into their lists of desirable landscape features. As a result, interest among professional landscapers spiked to new heights, said Neal.
“It’s really taken off,” she said. “People find out about me and contact me. Now it seems like I spend half my day every day answering emails about this stuff.”
Neal compared the goodwill surrounding the pollinator garden movement to that of recycling — something simple that an individual can do as part of a larger collective effort to help the environment.
“It just seems to be a teachable moment,” she said, noting that MacGovern and Blunden were part of a crowd of 150 people who had shown up to hear her speak at the Montshire Museum. McIlroy said that 30 of those attendees expressed intent to go start pollinator gardens of their own.
Garden Recipe
Killing off the existing vegetation, as the Windsor couple did, was a critical step, said Neal, though it’s also the step that would-be pollinators tend to want to skip.
Not until several months later, in the late fall, can they undertake the more exciting task of taking the plastic up, spreading the seeds, and covering them with a layer of hay. Wildflowers can’t compete with a thick carpet of grass, said Neal, but they can hold their own once they’ve had a chance to establish themselves on bare soil.
Choosing the right mix, it turns out, is both a science and an art.
When she’s not staring at blooming flowers to advance a running count of bee visits, Neal said she has spent a lot of time over the past decade tweaking wildflower mixes, and the Cooperative Extension published a list based on her findings in early July.
Neal only uses flowers that are native to New Hampshire, because those are the plants that the state’s 200 bee species have evolved to mine for energy. The bees collect balls of pollen to take home — often a nest in the ground or a piece of hollowed wood — and lay their eggs on, and they sip high-energy flower nectar to sustain themselves while they work.
The perfect pollinator garden will have big blooms to serve species like the bumblebee (Neal calls them the large, fuzzy Teddy bears of the bee world), and small open blooms, like daisies, to serve the little bees that aren’t strong enough to push through the petals of large flowers.
The ideal blend will cover the entire season by blooming in succession, from the mid-May lupine and golden Alexanders, through the late-fall flowers of aster and goldenrods.
Moreover, the flower species have to be robust enough to hold their own against grass incursions, but not too aggressive. Neal recently bumped Canada goldenrod from her list because it was too good at crowding other wildflowers out of the mix. Instead, she’s trying other goldenrod species, like stiff goldenrod. The right set of flowers will also vary depending on soil condition.
“It’s important to find that balance,” said Neal, who plans to show off the UNH’s pollinator gardens during the 6th annual Durham Farm Day on Aug. 18.
Even for those who do everything right, the rewards are slow, said Neal, because many of the flowers are perennials and don’t bloom in the first year.
“Some people include California poppy and non-native plants,” said Neal. “The benefit to those is they flower right away. But those plants won’t come back next year.”
McIlroy said that, though they are currently significantly short of their goal of 100 pollinator gardens by the end of 2018, the Upper Valley Pollinator Partners have seen more than two dozen gardens that can be viewed by the public — including at high schools in Hartford, Lebanon Hanover, Bradford and Mascoma, and in businesses and organizations like Hypertherm, the Hanover Conservancy’s Balch Hill, and the Upper Valley Land Trust’s Brookemeade Farm in Norwich. The city of Claremont has put in two small pollinator patches in pocket parks on Main Street, while one at the Sharon library that was created with established plants rather than seeds “is looking good this year,” said McIlroy.
Though the widespread effort is not yet old enough to really bloom, John Bouton, of the Hartford Conservation Commission (a member of the UVPP), said earlier pioneering plantings show that, once they establish themselves, the gardens can continue to look vibrant for many years.
“Several years ago, the Vermont Institute of Natural Sciences turned a gravel pit into a meadow and planted seed with many pollinator plants,” Bouton said. “It still looks good.”
Neal said that the only maintenance needed is an annual, late-season mowing that allows the late bloomers to play their part, but cuts back any woody shrubs or trees that might be tempted to take up residence.
Full Bloom
Back in Windsor, Blunden and MacGovern hoped to get quicker results from their pollinator garden, so when they shopped for a customized seed mix from a Vermont-based wildflower company, they decided to tide themselves by including a healthy number of annuals that would, ideally, come into bloom this year.
“When they first came up” in early June, said MacGovern, the skeptic, “the first flowers were, like, daisy-like, but it wasn’t anything spectacular. It wasn’t anything that extraordinary. I still thought, ‘This is not interesting.’ ”
But that was just the beginning.
“It was changing,” he said. “More colors were coming out. Blues and pinks and purples. As soon as something is gone, it’s replaced by new colors. It’s the most extraordinary thing I’ve ever seen in my life.”
“I’m totally in love,” said Blunden, who typically visits the patch every evening to take pictures of the latest blooms. “It’s so exciting, because every day, it’s something new.”
Just last week, she took pictures of a fawn that she believes was born that very day, and which had hunkered down among the blooms.
“Anyone that would do what we did would be totally satisfied,” said Blunden.
Matt Hongoltz-Hetling can be reached at mhonghet@vnews.com or 603-727-3211.