Gardening
Supporting pollinators like butterflies starts with keeping the lid on pesticides.
A Monarch butterfly feeds on Joe Pye weed. Ulrich Lorimer
August 27, 2025 | 9:51 AM
3 minutes to read
Although June was National Pollinator Month, every month is vital for the creatures that pollinate our crops, perennials, and wildflowers.
For those new to gardening, fostering connections between pollinators and flowers is an entry point, and their relationship is easy to understand. Despite the apparent simplicity between a pollinator and a flower, there remains a great deal of nuance and uncertainty regarding how to best support pollinators in general and what plants will provide the most benefit.
Do all flowers provide equally for pollinators? Do pollinator-friendly gardens need to be exclusively planted with regional native plants? What influence does the quality of the habitat surrounding my garden have on what pollinators will visit? These are but a few of the many questions I have been asked by my fellow gardeners who are seeking to support biodiversity and pollinators, but are worried that they will do something wrong or harmful.
I often find folks are unaware of the different concerns and are unsure how much to weigh one over another. This week’s column provides clear answers and perspectives on pollinator support to build confidence among gardeners that their efforts are indeed helpful, needed, and welcome.
One reader submitted the question below, looking for clarity on the topic of pollinator habitat and native plants.
Q. There is a lot of discussion in gardening worlds lately, first about pollinator habitats and more recently, about planting almost exclusively with native plants in one’s home garden. Is there a relationship and if so, what is the relationship between a pollinator habitat and native plants?
Or, put in a different way, can a pollinator garden have any non-native plants in it, or must a pollinator habitat contain exclusively native plants?
Karen, Groton
A. I will start this discussion with my number one rule for pollinator support: stop or avoid using pesticides. These chemicals have a cascade of adverse effects on insect, amphibian, and mammal health.
For example, more than habitat loss, climate change, and invasive species, pesticide use remains the biggest reason for the decline in the monarch butterfly. We may not be able to influence their use in the agriculture sector, but we have the agency to make better decisions in our gardens.
To further set the stage for the discussion, let us consider what a pollination system is and how that knowledge helps us to make better decisions for pollinators. Each type of pollinator, whether bee, wasp, beetle, fly, butterfly, moth, or spider (and that’s not even all of them), evolved within a system of plants on which they rely. When pieces of that system disappear, the relationship between pollinator and environment is strained to the point of collapse.
For more information and ways to get involved with fixing pollination systems, check out Robert Gegear ‘s excellent work at the Beecology Project.
So what can we, as gardeners, do to help repair these degraded systems? While the idea of returning to an earlier time when the New England landscape did not contain ecologically harmful plants or even plants from other continents may seem idealistic, it is far from realistic.
Research from Doug Tallamy and others points to gardens with a minimum of 70 percent native plants as a threshold that supports insect diversity and, therefore, bird and mammal diversity. About 96 percent of songbirds rely on insects to rear young in the spring, and no other group of plants supports more different kinds of insects than regional natives, especially trees.
Gardens that offer a variety of bloom shapes and bloom times are more likely to support a wider array of pollinators, but they need not exclusively be planted with native plants. The 70 percent mark is a great goal to work toward. It allows for other wonderful flowering plants to coexist with your natives and complement them.
The overarching idea here is not to get stuck on whether your garden is all native or not, but rather to build a diverse landscape that has something to offer for pollinators throughout the growing season. This is how we begin to mend pollination systems, how our backyards become connected and tied to nearby wild spaces.
Gardens have a particular power to connect humans with the natural world, to be a source of wonder and joy, and to be places where we want to spend time. This approach to pollinator support, beginning with not using pesticides and culminating in creating a space that is two-thirds native, one-third plants to bring you happiness, is a roadmap toward a future where we can coexist with nature.
I’d like to conclude that the ability to make these choices is compelling and one that each of us has the capacity to decide. Gardening is an act of hope and a firm belief in the potential of tomorrow.
Ulrich Lorimer is the director of horticulture at the Native Plant Trust in Framingham. Send your gardening questions, along with your name/initials and hometown, to [email protected] for possible publication. Some questions are edited for clarity.
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