Planting for Pollinators | Volunteer Gardener

We visit the home gardens of a couple who both work in horticulture. Plant lovers for sure, and practitioners of sustainable and earth-friendly gardening practices. The very long border beds contain host plants for various insects and birds. Agastache varieties are becoming a mainstay here.
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– You’d think that if you worked in the plant industry all day long that when you come home at night, you would wanna do something really different. But not So for Megan and Peter Grimaldi, there’s still time and energy left for their beautiful home gardens. This Grimaldi pollinator strip is the longest I have ever seen. And this is Megan Grimaldi, who is going to tell us about it. Megan, what was the inspiration? – When we moved into the house, these beds were already established with the landscape timbers here, but they were full of cannas and weeds that were two feet taller than I am. So we went through and we cleaned out everything. We removed every plant that was in these beds and just started over from scratch. We moved here from North Carolina, so we had brought a lot of plants with us in the back of our U-Haul. (Rita laughs) And those were the first things to go in, and then we just started filling in around them. At first, I bought one of everything that I liked. – I work at a garden center, so it was very easy access for me to do that. And just started bringing home a lot of different things and placing them in the garden, but it got quite messy very quickly. So then we’ve started editing out some things, especially things that don’t work, don’t survive, don’t thrive, and started planting more of what did live and what really enjoyed being here and what the pollinators have liked the most. – Okay. And what kind of pollinators do you attract here in your pollinator garden? – We get a lot of swallow tails. I’m trying to plant more of the butterfly weed so that we get more Monarchs, but that population hasn’t thrived yet. We get a lot of skippers, sulfurs, the little white and yellow clouded sulfurs, and those little guys. And we have a huge variety of native bees, wasps. – [Rita] Great. – And just other little flying guys. I get some really cool green metallic bees and I love them. – Oh, I do too. – They’re some of my favorites to take pictures of. – And they’re so colorful. – Yeah. – Yeah, I love those. So you’ve got Agastache, which is becoming one of the staples of the gardens, the pollinator garden. – Yes. – I love that. – And I’ve planted multiple varieties of the Agastache because it is one of the biggest detractors in our garden. Once it starts blooming, everybody seems to ignore the other flowers and just swarm to that so. – Its in the mint family. – It is. – [Rita] And it has a very long bloom season too, yeah. – It does. Yeah. It started really early. And if I cut mine back even halfway, you know, mid-season, not even cutting all the flowers off, just cutting some of them off, then I get a great rebloom later in the season. – Oh, okay. – And it just really extends all of that for us. – Okay. Good advice. – [Megan] So this area of the garden, we’ve added a lot of like lantana and blooming annual things that will attract the pollinators, mostly because I’ve also got a lot of butterfly weed. This one’s already gone to seed for the year, but things like parsley that act as host plants to some of our butterflies that- – The black Swallowtail. – And then even across the way we’ve got a tulip poplar, which is a eastern tiger swallowtail post plant. – Right, perfect, perfect. Tell us about that lovely cleome. – [Megan] So that is just a beautiful baby pink variety, a dwarf form that I saw at the garden center and just couldn’t do without. I loved it for the color, but now it’s attracting bees, butterflies and hummingbirds. So it’s been really important to the garden. – [Rita] If you ever move or get tired of that, I mean, I just happened to live not too far from here. – If I find any seedlings. Yeah, I will definitely bring you some. – I love that. I love that. And the fact that the bees are on it makes it even better. Megan, I love this pot full of those gorgeous cascading petunias. What kind are they? – [Megan] So that is a Supertunia called Vista Bubblegum. It is one of the only petunias I’ll ever plant. Supertunia is a great series of petunias and this one particularly performs exceptionally well for me here and other places that I’ve planted ’em. And so it’s always a crowd favorite. Hummingbirds like it. The butterflies like it. And I’ve planted it with butterfly bush to even enhance that a little bit. – [Rita] Do you have to water it much or? – [Megan] I don’t. I have not. I might have watered that pot once this year. – [Rita] Okay. – Yeah, I’m not big on watering. I’m a plan it and forget it kind of girl. And that has gotten me in trouble, but also it shows me what thrives without the necessity of water. I also believe in like if you’re going to water, you should water deeply and really thoroughly so that the roots seek out that water and go deeper in the soil so that they can sustain themselves on their own without a lot of extra. – Okay. All right. Look at your autumn sage in the Salvia families just now starting to really do the fall bloom thing that it does. – [Megan] Yes, it does seem to perform a little bit better in cooler temps and this is another huge pollinator attractor. We chose to put it kind of outside of our bay windows, so we get a good view of it all the time, and we get butterflies, hummingbirds, bees. Sometimes it just looks like it’s moving on its own ’cause there’s so many things visiting it at the same time. – That’s great. And very drought tolerant too, which is a great thing. And I love the way you put the gaura in the background that just peeps over the top of that. That’s so cute. – [Megan] Thank you. – [Rita] I assume you have left the seed heads here for the birds. – [Megan] Yes, the goldfinch love these echinacea seed heads. We’ll have four or five grouped here, all eating together and it’s just so fun to watch them pick through the seed heads and really kind of tear ’em up, but it’s just so interesting. – [Rita] And speaking of heads, this little lady here has lost hers. And I assume it’s because she’s so crazy about your garlic chives, which attracts all kinds of pollinators, especially small, right? – Yes. Yeah, mainly we see the little tiny bees and little wasp on the garlic chives there. And I don’t use them for cooking ’cause they are inside these landscape timbers. I’m a little worried about chemicals. But I just have them there for the flowers ’cause they’re so pretty this time of year. – They are. And they fit in perfectly. This is a different area of your property. It’s a long sloped shady hillside. So in it is my new favorite Agastache, which is called Blue Boa. I love the miniature size and it attracts so many pollinators. But, Megan, that is spectacular out there. The little violet colored looks like a crocus to me, but what is it really? – [Megan] So those are colchicum. It is the bold and it’s called autumn crocus because it does have the same shape of flower as a crocus. They send up leaves in the early spring and they die back very quickly when the heat of summer comes on, the leaves do, and then they bloom like this without leaves in the fall. – [Rita] Gorgeous, gorgeous. They like it moist then and shady, right? – [Megan] They do, yeah. They can take some sun, but they would prefer kind of part shade conditions and just kind of even moisture throughout, but like a bulb, you know, they have all the food stored in there so that they don’t require a lot from me, which I like. (both laughing) – [Rita] This is also a sloped area on the Grimaldi property, but it’s a sunny space full of wing stem right now and goldenrod and beautiful things. This is Peter Grimaldi, who is the engineer of all this. So tell us Peter about what you had in mind. – Thank you. It’s really a utilities right of way as it carries the overhead power lines. And so we’re managing it as, you know, kind of a low input meadow and introducing points of interest, a bit of native species diversity and experimenting with creating as much positive competition as we can. So for example, on the hill we inherited the canna, which does have its benefits, including the functional benefits of shielding us from the driveway and the neighbor’s property. But introduced a couple different native species of sumac in attempts to experiment with creating competition for that canna, which we overall wanna diminish, including this little guy in the foreground. – [Rita] There’s a hummingbird on the canna right now. – Right. Again, it has its benefits. – Very good. – It has its benefits. – It’s really cool. – You know? – Tell us about this sumac. It’s a new cultivar. – [Peter] This is Lanham’s Purple, which is a cultivar Rhuscoppalina. I expect it to grow, we just planted it this year, I expect it to grow at least six to eight, 10 feet tall and it maintains this deep purple foliage year round. It’s not a seasonal thing. – [Rita] It’s gorgeous and it’s really effective with the yellow of the goldenrod too. And so tell us about your Rudbeckia over there. – [Peter] This is Rudbeckia Herbstsonne, which is, you know, kind of a continued evolution of some of the classic Rudbeckia cultivars, herbs, fruit. Never knew how to pronounce that. Anyway, herbs sounds a lot easier, but it’s huge, right? Six, seven feet tall, courser in texture, larger leaves so it sticks out in an application like this. And the big, you know, in the big yellow flowers, it’s a nice successor to the Rudbeckia maxima, which you also have sprinkled in here, but as you know, comes on earlier in the season. So we’re just overall just experimenting with a mowing interval to manage the woodies and some of the aggressive grassy species. And then just- – Do you bush hog or? – Yeah. Yes. – Okay. – [Peter] Once or twice a year. – [Rita] What time of year do you bush hog? – So typically we wait until the last frost. – Okay. Okay. – So I’m bush hogging around mid to late April. And then we’re experimenting with the exact timing of the second mow, which we think is important, around Mother’s day, mid to late May. So about a month apart, early in the spring, and that’s all we’re doing. There’s almost zero chemical intervention in here. It’s just simple, stubborn attrition. It’s just a guy with a shovel, right? A guy and a gal with a shovel. And when you’re trying to manage a meadow in the middle of a walnut forest, you’ve got uphill bottle, which is, the squirrels are very good – Plus the erosion control. – Yeah, the squirrels are very good at planting those walnuts. – Yeah, I bet they are. – Yeah. – [Rita] So, and the goldenrod was already here pretty much. – The golden rod was already here. – You didn’t have to plant that. The big blue stem, you planted that or was it here? – [Peter] No, that was already here so. – [Rita] Wow. – [Peter] You know, again, it’s that mowing interval to try and find the exact timing to give the native species the most, the best competitive advantage. – [Rita] Do you do any hand weeding out here? Do you have to go through and take out something particularly invasive like ailanthanus or something that might be? – So, yes. And good tip is ailanthus took me about a year to figure it out, right, ailanthus seedlings look super duper similar to black walnut seedlings, right? And so it’s all in the smell. I think everybody can, you can stand here and imagine what a black walnut smells like, kind of rotting in your hand. Well, if you strip the leaves off a black walnut seedling smells the same, immediately identify it. If you strip the leaves off of ailanthus, the tree of heaven and crush ’em up, they’re supposed to smell like peanut butter. So a good way to distinguish between a native species and an invasive species, the steep seedling sage. – Great tip. And if it smells like peanut butter, don’t keep it. It’s not gif. Rip it out of the ground. It is terribly invasive. – So less hand weeding, just managing woodies with the shovel and kind of plopping down, again, little points of interest and architectural moments in the meadow. – I love mountain mint because of all the beneficial insects that it attracts. That is the most suppressed mountain mint and tamed and staying in his place that I have ever seen. But Peter, tell us about this whole little area right here still in the meadow. – Yeah, it is a nice little vignette. A good example of just throwing more stuff out there. Obviously focusing on the edge where we get better visibility, looking out from the house, but the mountain mint, as you mentioned, and then a clear purple theme going in this area between the Jeana Phlox and the echinacea kind of all then echoed by a cultivated variety of hibiscus in the background. Got some purple and then contrasting yellow with the Little Henry Rudbeckia here. Even some of the Eryngium yuccifolium, Rattlesnake Master, as well as, you know, gotta volunteer, elm tree, some of the, you know, the brambles that we’re trying to manage and any number of invasive grass species. But nonetheless, you know, some native and well-behaved selected plants kind of doing their thing and creating this little moment for us. I’m mowing a single strip, you know, one strip in. I might mow a third or fourth time mid to late spring just to keep it lower and, again, keep the competition down for some of these things that we have introduced. But then, other than that, you know, it’s just taking a sharp shovel and lopping the brambles off at the base. – [Rita] Okay. – The Japanese stiltgrass, the microstegium is, you know, public enemy number one around here maybe, but it pulls real easy It’s almost kind of therapeutic. So just kind of creating little, almost little rings or halos for some of our pockets of interest or larger specimen out in the meadow to make sure that they get enough sunlight and you know, everything else they do. – And speaking of that, the wings stem here, the white crown beard, several common names, but it’s just now that the sun is popped out, it’s just coming alive with insects. And this stuff is great if you have a big area. And like they do, it’s just wonderful in the pre early fall to attract beneficial insects. So good job. This cool shady spot on the property is just a wonder. And there’s some new ideas we’re trying here inspired by Monte Don. And Megan, tell us about this. And Peter, feel free to tell us your part in this, of moving these logs around and putting ’em up on the end. – So I’ve started watching a lot of Monte Don "Gardener’s World" and they visited several gardens that had stumperies where people have actually taken stumps out of the ground, upended them, laid them on their side, whatever, and planted into them different types of ferns. We didn’t have any stumps, but we were having some trees cut down. So we went with a loggery and have just artfully arranged some different logs, actually like planted or buried some of the logs and then planted a variety of ferns and other flowering shade perennials down here and right. – [Rita] And Peter got all the logs perfectly straight, right, when he was putting them. (Rita laughs) – They’re very calculated angles. (laughs) – Yeah, it took me a minute, took Megan a minute to gain some buy-in, but I immediately found myself to be having a good time. Much to my chagrin, there was an argument about whether to mix species in the stem arrangements. – [Rita] Okay, interesting. – [Peter] And so we kinda started to think about them as deconstructed trees honoring the trees that they once were. – I love that idea. – Yeah. I mean it’s fun. – We’re complete with knots on the trees and every. And then I love the half sunk one here. And you’ve got ferns all over, which are just gorgeous. I love the pot on the stump beautiful there. And the outline of it and even the dogwood tree is so, is that Cornice Florida or? – It is. – Yeah. – [Rita] That’s the native dogwood then. And any significance in the three tree or just the dynamic of odd numbers? – The dynamic of odd numbers. – Okay. – And they just kind of went together. Once we started planting them, we considered even going to five or do we just leave it at two? But these arrangements kind of worked and just felt good in the space. – [Rita] Did you draw it all out or you went one to one? – Oh, no. – No. – No, it’s completely for that. – You never draw anything out here? Okay, of course not. – No, not really. It is very much a feeling, like it’s kind of an artistic thing. So you just get out here and play with it and work on different arrangements. And next year it might change. We may feel differently about some of the smaller stumps and move them around. – Okay. – [Peter] Well, and it happened over time. The dogwood’s been here for several years. This Japanese maple just came from a friend’s garden this spring. We got that azalea in the middle, you know, in the middle of it looks like a, you know, a focal point at Walmart for 4.99 four years ago. – Actually it was 50 cents. – 50 cents. – From Walmart four years ago so. It’s doing well. – That, I would say that’s a bargain. (Rita and Megan laughing) And the ferns are what type? – [Megan] That is the sensitive fern. – [Rita] Oh, wonderful, wonderful. And you’ve got another, that’s Christmas back there? – [Megan] Those are autumn ferns. – Autumn ferns, okay. – Haven’t added any Christmas fern. We have a lot native on the property. So we may gather some up this winter or buy some in and sometimes there’s some debate. Oh, no, there are Christmas ferns. – [Peter] Here’s the Christmas fern right here which was here naturally occurring Didn’t plant that. Probably stick ’em. – Wonderful. Peter and Megan, thank you so much for letting us come today. We just have so enjoyed seeing all the different areas in your property. And do you have any quick tips or advice since you’re in the plant industry for people wanting to manage beautiful spots on their land? – Buy what you love. Don’t worry about what the whole neighborhood’s doing and how their yard looks. Do what you love and buy the colors that you like. And it’s a space for you to enjoy, not everyone else. So do it for yourself. – Don’t think you have to keep up with the Joneses. – Exactly. – Yeah. Okay, Peter. – You just have to keep up with your wife in that case. (all laughing) That’s my advice. (all laughing) – Okay, that’s good advice too. I’ll tell my husband. (all laughing) I love that.