To me, a healthy garden is one that buzzes, flits, scampers, and leaps with life. One way to encourage more hummingbirds, butterflies, songbirds, and beneficial insects to populate your garden is to plant what they like and think of the garden as habitat. A habitat provides four essentials: food, water, cover, and nesting places.
With the help of a landscape designer or nurseryperson, you can choose native plants that provide food for selected wildlife year-round. Native Revival Nursery in Aptos publishes a catalog that describes the wildlife value of many native plants, as well as lists of plants for hummingbirds, songbirds, and butterflies.
A water source can be as simple as a birdbath, though you need to change the water daily to deter mosquito larvae. Another way to avoid adding to the mosquito population is to install a fountain or other moving water source.
Careful garden design and maintenance ensure good cover and nesting places. Twiggy shrubs help small birds stay out of sight or out of reach of predators, so they can forage without the risk of becoming someone else's lunch. Undisturbed leaf duff protects overwintering butterfly eggs and chrysalids.
Finally, to let birds and beneficial insects raise their young without being disturbed, keep leaf blowers out of your garden, leave some dead leaves in place as mulch, and plan to prune trees and shrubs only after baby birds have fledged.
To invite hummingbirds, choose red and orange flowers with trumpet shapes. From late summer until late fall, California fuchsia is an ideal hummingbird plant. Flowering currants provide nectar in winter, and alum root, native sages, and island bush snapdragon round out the year.
Butterflies munch on specific host plants in the larval stage. To attract a specific butterfly, add its preferred host plant to your garden – and learn to recognize (and tolerate) the caterpillars eating the leaves of your plants! For instance, host plants for the pale swallowtail include coffeeberry and holly-leaf cherry; for the painted lady, cobweb thistle.
As colorful adults, butterflies switch to a varied liquid diet: nectar from tiny-flowered plants in sunny areas protected from the wind, and water from shallow mud puddles or moist sand. Native buckwheats, milkweeds, asters, ceanothus, yarrow, goldenrod, verbena, and coyote brush are some good nectar plants for butterflies.
Songbirds eat insects as well as berries, seeds and nectar, so the easiest way to nurture birds year-round is to create a good insect habitat. If you've seen a shrub vibrating with bushtits, chances are they were foraging for insects.
Common shrubs such as manzanita, ceanothus, elderberry, coyote brush, and coffeeberry, as well as native oak trees, provide excellent food, cover, and nesting places for birds as well as insects. Let some plants go to seed instead of deadheading, and plant a berry bush outside a window to ensure hours of delight for both you and the birds. Many birds love to forage for insects in leaf duff.
The tiny-flowered plants butterflies favor also attract the beneficial insects that both help pollinate your fruits and vegetables and eat other insects.
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alum root asters buckwheats California fuchsia ceanothus cobweb thistle coffeeberry coyote brush elderberry flowering currants goldenrod island bush snapdragon manzanita milkweeds oak sages verbena yarrow
© 2006 Tanya Kucak