There are no native flowers left in my yard that she can drink from so late in the season, but this salvia now shows how a few exotic flowers can still benefit wildlife in a backyard garden. After spending all summer here, she will leave on migration any day now. It has been a privilege to have her.
by LobeliaTheCardinalis
10 Comments
Thats a great clip
A job well done 👏 I just had a rufous hang out for a few weeks on their migration route probably refueling a bit
Whenever my lemon tree blooms the pollinators go absolutely insane for it. I’ll have literally dozens of bumblebees at once on it; and often hundreds of tiny native bees as well.
My hybrid roses will often bloom into the first frost too.
This is a really pretty plant.
So, I was advised to take my hummingbird feeder down at the end of August as leaving it up delays the birds from migrating.
Although they’re so fun to watch, and I’d love for them to stick around longer, I do wonder if the lack of native hummingbird-friendly flowers in late September is a feature rather than a bug.
This could be my yard. Salvias are great space fillers. Some years the bees cut the ends off to rob the hummers though.
The best exotic flowers are those that wildlife completely ignore. The real problem with exotics are not the relatively few plants that are intentionally introduced, but the indefinite number of offspring that follow.
People seem to forget what the word “pollinator” actually means. They’re called pollinators because they spread pollen, and pollen fertilizes flowers, and fertilized flowers become fruit that contain seed, and then seeds become new plants in other places. These escaped exotic plants displace natives and reduce diversity, limiting access to host plants and nectar sources throughout the rest of the season. We would all be much better off if they were never pollinated in the first place because the “pollinators” just ignored them altogether. That way they would stay just where they were planted and would be no more objectionable than garden gnomes–sure they’re taking up space, but they’re not replicating themselves and spreading everywhere.
Paradoxically, the best behaved exotics are those that do not serve pollinators well, do not attract pollinators, or for some reason pollinators fail to actually pollinate. The trouble with helping the pollinators is that it spreads pollen, and that’s exactly what we don’t want to happen with so many exotics.
The same goes for exotic plants with fruit that is eaten by wildlife, because we don’t want native wildlife spreading exotic seeds and destroying their own habitat. It’s better if they ignore exotic fruits. You can’t just see an individual insect or animal use a plant and conclude that it’s therefore good and useful after all, because the systemic effects of that interaction can be part of a larger pattern that is destroying whole ecosystems.
There is some nuance about some plants being better or worse than others, especially with near natives, but this is like videoing a native bee on a Bradford pear flower and saying that Bradford pears must not be so bad after all because that one bee is benefiting, but at the same time the only reason Bradford pears are such as damaging invasive is precisely because the pollinators pollinate them! If all the bees would just agree to stop pollinating Bradford pears, then we wouldn’t have to hate Bradford pears!
Check out Salvia azurea if you haven’t, it’s a great native, super late blooms, super easy to grow from seed and tolerates the worst soil. The light blue flowers are to die for.
❤️ Fun fact: Arizona (my home state) has the most hummingbird species in the US!!!
https://preview.redd.it/kxfh3csghurf1.jpeg?width=3840&format=pjpg&auto=webp&s=aa1a4d2a569e3ac5b9981b0076a5b1d8a40c7466
I’m a Salvia lover, I’ve grown a few and I think I recognize one of those as a Salvia guarantica ‘Black and Blue’. This year I grew ‘Roman Red’ (left in photo) for the first (and last) time, and also grew my longstanding Salvia coccinea (middle in photo) and occasionally I grow Salvia Hot Lips (right in photo) until it quits. The differences between the three are astounding.
The only one that performs well during the heat is the Salvia coccinea, which is a native of the Gulf Coast and can be grown as an annual the rest of the country. It will bloom from Spring through that scorching hot Summer and even take really cold temperatures until the Fall hard frost takes it.
So no offense to the Salvias you like, I like them too but only for looks until something better comes along, because when I tasted the nectar from the flowers of the Roman Red it was only semi-sweet, and the Salvia coccinea was very sweet, so the Gulf Coast native won hands down. Taste it, you’ll see. The bumbles and Carpenter bees don’t even visit the Roman Red, but regularly visit the S. coccinea and in this photo, and hard to see, there’s also a butterfly on it. So although S. coccinea is an annual at your location, it gently self-seeds and gives them something of good nectar quality to fight about. They love it so much that I have it at like 10 locations so they don’t have to fight so much.
But in absence of this there are other flowers they’d like, such as what is also blooming now, the Lobelia puberula and the Agalinis tenuifolia but none would be as sweet as this Salvia.