Our mission: Replace lawns with gardens that nurture birds, pollinators and people too. Save water for our region’s rivers and re-discover the joy of connecting with nature. Heal the earth, one landscape at a time. Join Audubon Rockies, Plant Select® and High Country Gardens in promoting wildscaping. Be a habitat hero.
Roots Make it Hard to "Date"
Plants are rooted beings, anchored by the networks of appendages that finger through the soil to supply them with water and nutrients. Being rooted has advantages, especially in semi-arid environments like our Rocky Mountain region: the soil is a much more clement place than the environment above ground, sheltered from desiccating sun and wind, providing a thermal buffer against temperature extremes, and supplying an abundance of relationships with micro- and macro- dwellers in that subterranean community of life.
Being rooted also brings plants one large disadvantage: they cannot just pick up and move around. This is an especially big issue with reproduction. In general, to maximize your offspring's chances of success, and thus of promoting your genetic line, you want to endow those offspring with an infusion of genes from some other healthy member of your own species.
In other words, you need to reproduce sexually. So you go on the prowl for a date/mate. Unless you're a plant and can't prowl.
Pollination Partners
In which case, you put a lot of effort into attracting a partner who can go on the prowl for you, carrying your pollen (male sex cells) to the female parts of other plants of the same species and bringing you pollen from those other plants. That partner might be a beetle, butterfly, bird, bat, an ant, a honeybee, or one of North America's 4,000 species of native bees.
(Plants like grasses and conifers, cone-bearing plants, use the streams of air as "pollination couriers," which requires them to produce tons--literally in some cases--of pollen to maximize the chances it will actually land on the receptive flower of another plant of their species. Wind-blown pollen is so abundant that it provides the mainstay of the diet of many small critters--and it irritates the lungs of allergy sufferers far and wide.)
How Do Plants Attract Pollinators?
Plants dress up in bright colors, smell good (most perfumes are based on plant-produced scents), offer rewards in terms of food (or in the case of certain orchids, in the form of scent or pigment packages insects use to court their own mates), and produce flowers in intriguing shapes complete with flashy markers showing the way to the goodies inside.
Why Do Pollinators Matter for Gardeners?
Providing food, shelter, and a safe haven from pesticides for pollinators is part of making a healthy garden community. Pollinators are crucial to successful reproduction of many flowering plants, and plants know it.
Research on plants from tomatoes to penstemons shows that plants visited by pollinators are more vigorous, produce more flowers, and produce more seeds and fruits.
There's another level too: Pollinators are key to our food and the health of earth's ecosystems as a whole. According to the Xerces Society, pollinators are critical to the reproduction of some 70 percent of the world's flowering plants, including two-thirds of our crop species.
These hard-working plant partners not only ensure the crops of seeds and fruits that are the basic food of wildlife as small as voles and as large as grizzly bears and elephants, they provide our food too. About one in three mouthfuls of food and drink you ingest require pollinators at some point in their lives, as illustrated by the "pollinator lunch" in this charming and informative film from The Nature Conservancy.
Join us and give a hand to the plants you love by gardening for pollinators too. Be a Habitat Hero!
By Habitat Hero
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