Creating a New "Paradigm" for Yards as Havens of Bees, Birds and Wildlife

A Brevard resident's wildflower garden is part of a growing movement to convert portions of sterile lawns into the thriving home of pollinating insects and birds.

Bob McDonough standing next to the pollinator garden that covers much of the front yard of his Brevard home

BREVARD — Bob McDonough has left just enough lawn in his front yard to allow a side-by-side comparison.

Looking closely at the clover blooms scattered like lint on the blanket of fescue grass, I saw one, maybe two, bees.

Next to it, in his pollinator garden’s profusion of pink, gold and purple flowers, I could see, well, pollinators. Scores of them. Bees, of course, but also wasps, beetles and butterflies — working every blossom, hovering in wait for a turn to tap nectar.

Hummingbirds are also regular visitors, McDonough said, before pointing to their predatory kin, the next link in the food chain.

“The birds are perched out there, looking for bugs right now,” said McDonough, 67, a retired kayak designer.

He invited me to his 2,600-square-foot garden in Brevard two weeks ago partly just to show that a low-maintenance wildflower garden can be beautiful. It is. Very.

But he also shared a message that seems to be gathering nationwide momentum: Yards don’t have to be sterile planks of mown grass, and homeowners don’t have to be slaves to this traditional order. They can be, should be, stewards of parcels that, no matter how tiny, fit in with and support the surrounding environment.

I previously encountered this general principle writing about the Reduce Rain Runoff campaign, which encourages the replacement of swaths of grass with rain gardens — miniature wetlands that contain and purify the uncontrolled flow of runoff that represents the greatest threat to the health of mountain rivers and streams.

The movement that applies to McDonough’s yard — converting sections of lawn to flowering plants, preferably natives —  has been propelled by the heightened awareness of a dramatic decline of the global insect population.

It’s been documented in the closest thing to charismatic megafauna the class can offer — monarch butterflies, honeybees and fireflies — but also in the vast array of species in the foundation of the food web that feeds actual megafauna.

The country’s most visible proponent is entomologist Doug Tallamy, whose Homegrown National Park program is based on his calculation that converting a portion of America's 40 million acres of lawnscape to natives would effectively create a widely dispersed national park. A very large one, considering that Great Smoky Mountains National Park covers a little more than a half-million acres.

On the state level, the North Carolina Wildlife Federation’s Butterfly Highway project is “creating a network of native flowering plants to support butterflies, bees, birds and other pollen- and nectar-dependent wildlife.”

Nearby, Mills River Park is home to a model pollinator garden and a new, 15-acre pollinator meadow. The city of Brevard, with the help of community groups, has created several native gardens, and homeowners interested in doing the same can contact the Transylvania County Cooperative Extension service or visit with its Master Gardeners during their twice-monthly appearances at the Transylvania Farmers’ Market.

Steve Pettis, the horticultural agent for Henderson County Cooperative Extension, estimates that about 10,000 acres in his county are devoted to lawn.

“Think of the number of hours of environmentally unfriendly mowing going on just to maintain that acreage,” he said. And think of the increased nutrients and habitat that would be available to wildlife, he said, “if just a quarter of that was converted to native plants.” 

Transylvania, with its smaller population and large number of homes tucked into wooded lots, no doubt holds less acreage of carefully tended fescue. Still, as is clear from a drive through residential neighborhoods in Brevard, this is the dominant “paradigm,” Pettis said.

Older homeowners, especially, “were raised to think of landscape as basically like an extension of your living room,” he said. “It’s supposed to be free of bugs and snakes and other creatures so you can walk right out of your front door barefoot.”

It’s not that lawns don’t have their place, said Pettis’ counterpart in Transylvania, Bart Renner; they control erosion and “provide spaces to run and play and do backflips, and that’s important too.”

They just don’t need such a prominent place considering that mowing eliminates flowers and seed production, and that lawns “are monocultures,” he said. “They do not provide habitat or nutrition for pollinators.”

How It’s Done

An array of wildflowers in McDonough’s garden

Also, McDonough said, less lawn means less work. His garden will require only annual mowing, he said, and even installing it wasn’t a major project.

He took this on after attending a presentation from Tallamy in Tryon a little over a year ago. The first step was blanketing his future plot with plastic sheets to smother the grass and superheat the soil to kill weeds and their spores. After removing this covering, he added worm castings to fertilize the ground and replenish its supply of microbes.

The wildflower seeds he planted in mid-April germinated within days, he said. “It was insane how fast it happened.”

He is impressed with — or, actually, thrilled by — its mid-summer peak. So was his sister, a Master Gardener from New Jersey,

“She was down for a family reunion and she said, ‘Oh my gosh, I’ve never seen anyone do it like this.’ ”

The whole project cost about $300, he said, about half of which was spent on three one-pound bags of a North Carolina wildflower mix.

He might have been better off spending a little more on and being a little more selective about the seed, I learned after talking to Alden Picard, conservation coordinator at the Wildlife Federation.

The flowers in McDonough’s yards include natives such as black-eyed Susans, tickseed and purple coneflowers, but also species that are naturalized, not native, to the region. Comos, for example, and cornflower.

Such exotics aren’t necessarily bad, especially if they aren’t invasive, said Michael Plauche, a leading member of the Transylvania County Bird Club. After all, the honeybee is a European import. So are most earthworms.

“It’s not like we’re going to turn back the hands of time,” Plauche said.

And judging from the frenzied swarm of pollinators supported by McDonough’s cosmos and cornflowers, they’ve found a place in the food chain.

But native plants are generally more beneficial because they evolved in conjunction with the many endemic species of bees and moths, meaning they can be more fully utilized by these insects, Picard said.

“Some of the nutritional value of the pollen and nectar produced by these nonnatives is not the same as our natives,” he said.

To help homeowners choose the most beneficial species, the National Wildlife Federation has produced a list of Keystone Native Plants for each region.

Property owners in it for the long haul can’t do better than the white oak, whose renown for dropping mammal-sustaining acorns, Picard said, “pales in comparison to its ability to produce the insect food needed by our birds and other wildlife.”

To be precise, according to the Keystone plants page, white oaks support a whopping 498 species of butterfly and moth larvae, the meal of choice for birds raising chicks.

“Caterpillars are high in fat and protein,” Picard said. “They pack a really big nutritional punch.”

The mountain mint not only produces “this beautiful white waxy bloom on the leaves,” Pettis said, it’s a top producers of nectar and pollen.

Homeowners, in other words, should not limit their plant choices to annual and perennial flowers, but can also incorporate trees and shrubs. And the opportunity to support wildlife is not limited to homeowners. It’s open to any public or private entity that controls the fate of landscapes.

Plauche gently suggested, after the Brevard City Council rejected a plan for a trailhead/adult fitness park on 11.5 acres owned by the Pisgah Health Foundation, that this thriving bird habitat could be even more thriving with the addition of flowering natives.

The pollinator meadow established at Mills River Park, in particular, could serve as “a good template and a great place to draw inspiration from,” he said this week.

It was established under the guidance of the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service and with labor and equipment provided by the North Carolina Wildlife Commission, said Nicole Sweat, the Mills River Parks and Recreation Director.

The total cost of the project, including the model pollinator garden installed by Pettis, came to $26,000, about half of which was covered by grant funding, she said.

I don’t know if Pisgah Health is considering this option; the chair of its board didn’t return my voice message. It’s their call, of course, as the property’s owner, but it seems like a worthwhile project for an organization devoted to public wellness.

Its meadow, accessible by the city’s heavily used Estatoe Trail, is just a few yards away from McDonough’s yard on Hawthorne Drive. With its surrounding woods and streams, this open space is already one of the top birding destinations in the county.

But when I stopped by after seeing all the blooms in McDonough’s yard, I was struck by the lack of the same in the tall brush that covers the meadow.

It made it easy to imagine the thrumming insect and bird life that could be drawn by asters, tickseed and coneflowers — and their beauty as an added attraction for walkers and cyclists.

Even a few swaths of flowers would be an improvement, said McDonough, who offered to help with any project the Foundation considers.

“You could do it in tracts,” he said. “It would be pretty cool. As big as it is, it would be amazing.”

Meadow owned by Pisgah Health Foundation next to the city of Brevard’s Estatoe Trail, pictured in late June

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