Every year it’s the same thing, and every year I’m amazed.
As soon as my first crocus flowers open, usually during the third week in March, there come the bees, hovering and dipping into the blossoms to snatch some pollen.
How does this happen, I wonder? How do the bees “know” to show up just when there are flowers available to accommodate them? Talk about the wonders of nature.
Now that high summer has arrived, I have far more than those early springtime bees in my garden—dragon flies, damsel flies, bumblebees, moths, butterflies, the occasional grasshopper, and countless others I can’t name. That’s fine with me. In fact, the more the merrier. Ever since the plant count in my garden started going up, the pest problem has gone down.
I have no proof, of course, but it seems that once I introduced a few Illinois native plants into the garden, it began attracting insects I’d never seen before, and the aphid problems I had had in my early gardening days simply vanished. Good guys fought off the bad, so who needs pesticides? Biodiversity rules.
But here’s the snag. This happy balance depends on the plants and the insects appearing at the same time. However, if our plants start flowering and fruiting earlier because of global warming, the insects, birds and other wildlife whose life cycle is governed by day length will be out of luck. The plants will lack pollinators while wildlife will lack food, thereby leading to the species extinction that’s the real doomsday scenario of global warming. In comparison, the prospect of more100-degree days looks like small change.
All of us need to do our bit to keep this from happening, and there are many ways to help. Biodiversity comes in many forms, so we don’t all need to go out and plant a prairie or restore a wetland. Yes, in this issue we do profile a one-man dynamo who has almost single-handedly introduced a huge variety of Illinois native plants onto the grounds of his condominium complex in Schaumburg (The Gardener, page 30). But we also showcase a beautiful professionally designed, formal garden that is congenial to wildlife through its plant choices and maintenance practices (page 52).
Then there’s our story about Elewa Farm, an early 20th-century “gentleman’s farm” that is being restored to vegetable-growing productivity in Lake Forest (page 56). And if you want to grow the prairie plant that we used to think was Chicago’s namesake, you can learn all about it here (Chicagoland Natives, page 24).
The important thing is to keep gardening and keep growing a wide variety of plants. Include Midwestern natives, to be sure, but I, for one, am not going to relinquish growing non-native plants that I adore such as David Austin’s New English Roses. Just remember and repeat it like a mantra: biodiversity rules..
