I don’t need to inform the reader that not every door is meant for every person. Beyond simple locks and deadbolts, doors that we aren’t supposed to enter can be very effective in their restrictive powers. The most secure modern doors include heavy steel construction, sensors to identify the approaching suspect based on retinal and fingerprint scans, impenetrable grids of laser tripwires, and other futuristic additions.
It doesn’t take Inspector Gadget to make a door that can keep me out, however. There are some unopened doors in my house that appear to have been made to the specs of Wonka’s factory, far too small for any human to cram inside. I also freely admit to having been stuck in a revolving door for a spin or two while I gathered my senses, perhaps on more than one occasion.
While many doors are quite obvious in their ability to allow or halt the progress of unwanted individuals, some rather restrictive entrances in our gardens can be pretty subtle.
In fact, many of the flowers we see on a regular basis have been engineered through time to keep unsavory animals at bay, while also making it easier for their preferred pollinators to enter. When planting or maintaining a garden, it’s important to keep this in mind, as fostering a space with a healthy variety of bloom types and shapes will help local beneficial wildlife thrive.
Flowering plants have lived alongside insects and other animals for around 120 million years. Slowly but surely, they began to develop close relationships with many of those animals. One of the most important of these relationships is the one between flowering plants and pollinators.
Relying on their mobile friends to spread their pollen between plants and achieve proper pollination, flowering plants slowly developed ways to better attract the pollinators best at the job. Attractive floral blooms (many of which have markings seen only in the ultraviolet spectrum, a sense we humans lack), potent smells, and nectar rewards are all believed to have been developed in order to bring potential pollinators closer to where the plant wanted them.
The most generally accessible of these flowers are types with large groups of tiny blooms, like goldenrod, sunflowers, and members of the carrot family. These can be used by animals of all shapes and sizes, even those with tiny tongues like flies and wasps. Make sure to include at least a few plants with prolific shallow flowers in your garden to help give these picky eaters something to feed on.
Many other flowers, especially those with unique or accentuated shapes, are engineered in a way to make the bloom less of a wild buffet and more of an intimate setting. The blooms of turtle heads, for example, never truly open, relying on large and strong bumble and carpenter bees to pry open the entrance, sometimes letting other smaller insects in and/or out at the same time.
Flowers with deep bell shapes, like trumpet flower, also keep most shorter-tongued insects away because they simply cannot reach to the bottom of the flower, where the nectar reward is usually provisioned. Rhododendrons and azaleas take their restrictions to another level, lacing their nectar with poisonous chemicals designed to keep all but the most local bees at bay.
While most restrictive flowers won’t outright kill unwanted visitors, having too many in a landscape can mean some insects and other beneficial wildlife can have a hard time finding food when nothing else is in bloom.
Keeping a healthy diversity of plants with different floral sizes, shapes and bloom times will make sure your space is able to be enjoyed by a wide variety of beneficial animals.
Brannen Basham and his wife, Jill Jacobs, operate Spriggly’s Beescaping, a business dedicated to the preservation of pollinators. He can be reached at brannen.basham@gmail.com.
Comments are closed.