We study gardens: the plants, insects, animals, people, decisions and management practices that either improve or degrade a garden’s ability to promote environmental and human health. An underlying premise of our work is that gardens are important and understudied systems, that are key to building more sustainable, healthy and just communities. Our work is supported by Generous donations from theGarden Ecology league.
Robert Michael Pyle first used the term “extinction of experience” over 30 years ago in his memoir, which centers on the power of human-nature interactions. Extinction of experience refers to humankind’s increasing alienation from the natural world and the consequent impacts that include increasing disaffection towards the natural world. As Pyle so eloquently phrased it, “What is the extinction of a condor to a child who has never seen a wren?” 1
I grew up in the suburbs of Baltimore City, Maryland, where I relished opportunities to catch lightning bugs, pick mulberries, and crawl through the culverts of channelized streams. These experiences constitute some of my favorite childhood memories. Yet I remember being confused when I learned about deforestation in school, because I could see trees on every street. I had no frame of reference for how vast and diverse nature could be. It wasn’t until I took an undergraduate student position in an ecology lab that I started to understand how important the natural world was to humanity—and to my own existence. I worked in a peri-urban wildlife refuge, where I saw my first deer, hunted for spiders at night, and learned the names of an array of plants, birds, and invertebrates. I describe this time of my life, at the age of 21, as one where I felt like a scrim had been lifted from my eyes, and I saw the world in a whole new light.
More recent research has found that gardens can counteract extinction of experience. This is somewhat surprising, since gardens themselves are not natural areas; garden floras are diverse mixtures of both planted and volunteer plants and tend to be dominated by non-native and cultivated species.7 Nonetheless, gardens were ranked in the top five most frequented natural areas in a survey of 4,600 French adults.8 Gardens provide opportunities to notice and experience elements of the natural world in an accessible and relatively safe setting. And multiple studies (including those from the Oregon State University Garden Ecology Lab) have shown that, as people become more familiar with the plants, insects,9 and birds10 in a garden, they grow more positive feelings towards the natural world. This cycle of familiarity and increased emotional attachment to nature thus creates a positive feedback loop that disrupts and counteracts extinction of experience.10
There are two things you can do to create a positive feedback loop of familiarity and increased attachment to the natural world in a garden. First, you need to create a space that promotes biodiversity. If you have an affinity for neat and tidy gardens, challenge yourself to create at least one section of the garden that has a more natural look. If your garden is dominated by non-native and cultivated plants, look for opportunities to add a few native plant species. Don’t release beneficial insects into your garden. Instead, try to attract them with proper plant selection and by reducing or eliminating pesticide use. Second, practice noticing and identifying the volunteer plants, resident insects, and visiting birds in your garden.
If you are online, you may want to try using iNaturalist, which is a social media platform that uses artificial intelligence to help identify organisms. However, the artificial intelligence built into iNaturalist depends upon the community of naturalists that use the platform. The community aspect of iNaturalist allows nature lovers to connect with and learn from others. It is not unusual for a nationally or internationally renowned taxon expert to provide species-level determinations for bees, or beetles, or other syrphid flies on this platform. I use iNaturalist often and have expanded my own understanding of local biodiversity as a direct result of my engagement with the site.
Noticing and identifying nature in your garden are the very first steps to growing an appreciation for local biodiversity. Once you are able to identify a new garden organism, further challenge yourself to learn more about its basic biology and ecology. There are so many surprising ways that organisms make their way in this world, including cooperation and altruism to social parasitism and deception. Nature never ceases to amaze me.
This column is most likely to be read by gardeners, who already have a level of appreciation and affinity for plants and greenspaces. What about others, including those most fascinated with the digital and virtual worlds? With my students and my own kids, I try to connect elements from popular movies and video games with analogs in the natural world. The creature from the Predator movies has a face with insectoid-like mandibles that extend like a dragonfly naiad. The fictional Sarlacc pits from Return of the Jedi remind me of how antlion larvae hunt. And when you’re really struggling to catch the attention of someone seemingly bored with the natural world, you can always draw from British biologist Olivia Judson’s excellent and hilarious book,11 Dr. Tatiana’s Sex Advice to All Creation, which was first recommended to me by a Lane County gardener. For readers of this book, there will be no denying that the natural world is often stranger than fiction.
A few of the 213 garden species observed during a 2021 one-day BioBlitz of Oregon Gardens. There is a diversity of nature in every garden, particularly if you can pull back on pesticides and other design and management practices that exclude diverse species.
References
1Pyle, Robert M., The Thunder Tree: Houghton Mifflin, 1993.
2Clements, Rhonda, Contemporary Issues in Early Childhood, 5(1): 68-80, 2004.
3Soga, Masashi and Gaston, Kevin J., Frontiers in Ecology and the Environment, 14(2): 94-101, 2016.
4Nabhan, Gary P. and St Antoine, Sarah, Chapter 7. (pp 229-250) in, The biophilia hypothesis Island Press, 1993.
Anna Perry joined our lab group, to work on the Building-Integrated Agriculture project that is a collaborative effort between the University of Oregon School of Architecture, OSU College of Agriculture, and WSU Western Center for Metro Extension and Research. Specifically, Anna will be studying the agriculture array that is located outside of the windows on the 5th floor of the PAE Living Building. The arrays currently struggle to produce crops, in part because they go through cycles of drought and over-irrigation.
Urban agriculture arrays sit outside of the 5th floor of the PAE living building. The arrays were originally planted with nursery pots that had water trays beneath them. The nursery pots have been replaced by larger ‘containers within a container’. The building managers have stated that water should not drain out of the rectangular containers. Water draining outside of the containers results in building stains and issues with a first floor ATM.
The arrays were replanted in 2024, to provide more space for soil/growing media. We will be following how plants perform, and will be tracking the soil temperature and moisture throughout the growing season.
Hey everyone! My name is Anna Perry and I use she/her or they/them pronouns. I’m an undergraduate in my final year here at OSU, where I am pursuing double degrees in Soil Science and Sustainability, a minor in Horticulture, and a certificate in Urban Agriculture.
Anna, in her Corvallis garden.
Aside from my academic pursuits I also have been involved with Ten Rivers Food Web for the past 3 years, a local organization focused on the development of a resilient and sustainable local food system. I’m passionate about food as an unalienable human right, and believe that everyone deserves access to fresh food, regardless of their socio-economic standing.
I grew up in Davis, CA, where I was fortunate to be raised by a mom who is a fervent gardener. I didn’t realize how lucky I was to have this background until I started volunteering at the OSU Organic Growers Club, where I found that most of my fellow students had never gardened before. As the “Berry Manager” for the club in 2022 I found a lot of joy in being part of my peers first exposures to caring for plants, and in eating the literal fruits of our labor.
Last summer I had the privilege of getting to visit Aotearoa/New Zealand for a short faculty-led study abroad. My experiences there prompted me to reevaluate my career and graduate school plans, and as a result I realized that my true interests were more interdisciplinary than I had previously realized. In my time in Aotearoa/New Zealand I became more aware of the effect culture has on land management and design decisions, and by proxy the effect culture can have on the ecological function of landscapes. This prompted a reinvigoration of a long dormant interest in landscape architecture, an area of study which I hope to one day pursue at the PhD level.
My research interests include sustainable urban horticulture/agriculture, building-integrated agriculture, urban soils, and gardens and landscapes as socio-ecological systems. Ultimately, I’m interested in how the land management and design decisions people make impact ecosystem function, especially when food production is involved.
In my (ever-shrinking!) free time I love making and sharing food with my friends and family, knitting, crocheting, gardening, and drinking my weight in tea.
I’m so excited to be the newest member of the Garden Ecology Lab, and for the opportunity to work with such a wonderful and supportive group!
It has been a while since we last posted a lab update. Although we’ve been quiet on the blog, we have been busy! This post provides a brief update on some of our efforts, over the past several months.
An example of a Garden Ecology Lab brief. These briefs were created to translate science to action in the garden.
Nicole Bell successfully defended her M.S. thesis, entitled ‘Urban garden bees: Global context and local perspectives’ in November of 2023. Her thesis consisted of a systematic review of the garden bee literature (which she published in the journal Frontiers in Sustainable Cities). The second part of her thesis consisted of an online iNaturalist guide and companion booklet (the Portland Bee Guide). Nicole recently started a pollinator outreach position with the University of Massachusetts, Amherst. Congratulations, Nicole!
The Portland Bee Guide represented one aspect of Nicole Bee’s M.S. thesis work.
Svea in front of her photographic array. She captured a garden over the course of a day, using filters that give viewers a glimpse of the colors a bee can see in a garden.
Nina Miller joined our lab group as an M.S. student with a passion for syrphid flies! Nina will be studying the syrphid fly communities of Portland- and Corvallis-area gardens. Specifically, she will document their biodiversity within garden spaces, and will be measuring their capacity for aphid management on kale, collards, mustard greens, and other brassicas. You can learn more about Nina’s study, from this recent blog post.
Anna Perry has joined the lab, to work on a Building-Integrated Agriculture project. Anna will be studying soil moisture and temperature fluctuations, in a 5-th floor urban agriculture array of 13 planter boxes that are part of the PAE Living Building, in Portland Oregon. The data will inform future plantings on this and other urban buildings.
There are 13 containers planted along the east and south windows of this building. Plants are challenged by hot temperatures in the summer, shade, and lack of consistent moisture.
Gail Langellotto worked with Nina Miller and an international group of designers and ecologists to produce a book chapter entitled ‘Supporting Galapagos Native Species via Ecological Landscape Design in Urban Greenspaces’. The chapter came out of the 2023 Association of Pacific Rim University Sustainable Cities and Landscape Conference, which was held in San Cristobal, Galapagos. This interdisciplinary conference coupled architects, designers, and ecologists, to work on urban issues. In the Galapagos, biodiversity drives tourism, but is also under threat from invasive plant species. We compiled a list of 130 native and endemic plant species, and created example landscape designs, to promote the use of native plantings in the urbanized areas of the islands.
This is just a sampling of the our work over the last few months. Make sure to bookmark our new lab website, and to share the resources for gardeners with your gardening friends.
My mother introduced me to gardening at a young age, growing parsley, tomatoes, marigolds, and basil. With spending much time in the garden, so came spending time with the insects. We would catch bumble bees in little jars to look at before letting them continue with their day. We would ooh and ahh over the butterflies that would visit our lilac bush in the late spring. With learning to garden came an interest in insects that I could not shake. With optimism that I would find a field that I would connect with, I started my voyage within academia in general Biology. Through a series of university transfers and focusing my passions, I graduated with a bachelor’s degree in Botany and Entomology from Oregon State University in September of 2023. During my time as an undergraduate student, I came across a paper discussing pollinators in the Arctic. I knew little about the process of pollination in an environment of such varying climates, and soon came to learn that flies were one of the most predominant pollinators in this curious ecosystem.
I took this image in 2021 of the garden space I was lucky to spend my time in. Featured is my beautiful dog, Francis, who is also a fan of insects!
Thus began my exploration into the world of fly pollinators. Underexamined and typically unassuming, I became enamored by these curious insects. As I was living between temperate and continental climates, moving from British Columbia, Quebec, New York, and Oregon, I looked to the ecosystems that I interacted with. Though “flashier” than the arctic muscid fly, as seen in the compelling report by Tiusanen et al. (2016), flower flies became both my academic and personal ardor. Also known as hover flies and syrphid flies, flower flies are integral pollinators in urban environments. Stopping at the flowering bushes and herbs during the blooming seasons to hunt for the flower flies and watching videos about them during the colder months, I ceased to subdue my fascination.
During the final term of my undergraduate degree at Oregon State University, I met Dr. Langellotto who shared my adoration for flower flies. Dr. Langellotto introduced me to the predatory nature of flower fly larvae, expanding my once-exclusively lens of flower flies as pollinators to flower flies as essential managers of insect pests, such as aphids and mealybugs. Under the expert advisement of Dr. Langellotto, I began my master’s degree at the beginning of April 2024 and have dedicated my thesis project to my flower fly friends. As an ode to all invertebrate and vertebrate pollinators, entomologists, gardeners, citizen scientists, and nature-enjoyers, I hope that my research project calls to you.
Thus comes my announcement for folks who garden. For this Summer 2024, the researchers of the Garden Ecology Lab are looking for people who garden in Corvallis or Portland, Oregon, to participate in a study of flower flies. In this study, student researchers of the lab will be examining how garden size, tree cover, and floral abundance changes the composition of flower flies. Excellent at mimicry, voracious predators of plant pests as larvae, and valuable pollinators as adults, flower flies are important insects in urban garden systems. Also known as hover flies or syrphid flies, they are often seen on warm and sunny days collecting nectar. We are looking for gardens of many kinds; whether it is entirely covered by trees, without trees, a garden with a great variety of flowering plants, an edible garden, a highly maintained garden, or a minimally maintained garden. A wide range of garden types will allow us to see patterns in what attracts flower flies to urban gardens.
In a second, more informal experiment, student researchers of the lab will be looking at food preference of flower fly larvae. We will look at flower flies that predate on aphids and if there are aphid species of greater interest to the larvae. To narrow down this study, we will look at Brassicas in edible gardens. Brassicas are a family of plants that include broccoli, cabbage, brussels sprouts, arugula, radishes, collards, mustard greens, and turnips.
If you are interested in sharing your garden in either of these studies, please submit your interest by May 20th, 2024, following the surveys above. After this date, we will close the surveys and contact participants if they were selected by June 1, 2024. If selected, your garden will be surveyed once a month between mid-June and mid-October 2024.
References:
Tiusanen, M., Hebert, P.D.N., Martin Schmidt, N., & Roslin, T. (2016). One fly to rule them all- muscid flies are the key pollinators in the Arctic. Proceedings B, 283: 1839. https://doi.org/10.1098%2Frspb.2016.1271
We live in a world where we’re recognizing and discovering an ever-more complex and interwoven web of life—this vast ecology of our planet. We can see that life has taken many different routes to find success, and we call these paths ‘kingdoms’: animal, plant, fungui, protist, archaea, and bacteria. While we belong to and often focus on the first kingdom—that of animals—we are at what is only the beginning of discovery of the benefits we can reap from those in the last kingdom; we can harness the potential of bacteria to our good.
I want to tell you all about the bacterial genus Streptomyces. The genus is noted for the scent of their spores. You know that smell after a rain? That’s ‘petrichor’, ancient Greek for ‘rock’ and ‘ethereal blood of the gods.’ This smell is from a mix of compounds, but a significant contributor is geosmin, itself a by-product of the hydrophobic spores atop the aerial growth of this filamentous bacteria are launched from the earth with the force of raindrops striking the ground. The average human nose is incredibly sensitive to this chemical; we’re able to notice it as faintly as three parts-per-trillion—like a single drop in 40 Olympic swimming pools! Geosmin is also the reason we like the smell of freshly-dug earth, and it’s responsible if there’s a ‘muddy’ taste in your fish.
But there’s plenty more to love than just a pleasant smell. Most of its many, varied species are found living in soils the world over. They are commonly aerobic and produce exudates which resemble mycelium-like networks throughout the substrate in which they live. These exudates and the volatile organic compounds they off-gas are created in a category called secondary metabolites.
By Anne van der Meij, Joost Willemse, Martinus A. Schneijderberg, René Geurts, Jos M. Raaijmakers & Gilles P. van Wezel - [1]doi:10.1007/s10482-018-1014-z, CC BY-SA 4.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=94443322
Living organisms create secondary metabolites as interactions with their environment. These compounds are not strictly required for survival. Sometimes called ‘relational’ or ‘ecological’ interactions, because it’s facilitating the meeting of the lifeform with the greater world. Contrast this to primary metabolites, which are required for growth, development, and reproduction.
How Streptomyces offers such tremendous potential
The great genetic variety it holds as the most populous genus in its phylum, with more than 700 species cataloged thus far. There are even species which rank among the longest genomic strands in all the bacterial kingdom: S. violaceoruber with 8.7 million base-pairs (Mbp) and S. scabiei at a whopping 10.1 Mbp.
Add to this the knowledge that Bacteria have more protein-coding genes from Eukaryotes, and that that gulf widens as genomes lengthen, and we find a very complex and active set of organisms.
A final point to the activity of the Streptomyces genome: it averages 12% of its protein-encoding genes dedicated to secondary metabolite production, a “high proportion” when compared to the rest of the kingdom (Nikolaidis et al., 2023). This all paints a picture of Streptomyces having a strong ability to affect the world around it.
Global focus on the genus
The discovery which launched Streptomyces into global focus was the creation of streptomycin, an antibiotic which helped treat tuberculosis. This compound was isolated from S. griseus in 1943 and won the Nobel Prize for Medicine in 1952. Various extracts and synthetizations from this genus have focused on the antimicrobial properties and their application both for human health as well as pesticidal controls for use in agricultural production.
However, the global zeitgeist of our time is beginning to focus our attention inwards, to examine what we might do to change our bodies from within to better fit their environment without. Of notable interest is what’s been termed our ‘microbiome,’ all the various microscopic life inhabiting our very bodies. We’ve already scoured the genetic potential of Streptomyces for over 100,000 applications of reducing harmful microbial activity in humans and for agricultural chemicals (Alam et al., 2022). What if there is still more to be gained from this genus, and what if the methods might be different than laboratories and synthesized extracts?
Environmental interactions between microbes & humans
Exposure to different environments and inputs can change the various microbiomes in our bodies. We know the gut microbiome is tremendously affected by both temporary and long-term dietary options (Leeming et al., 2019).
Scientific experiments continue to investigate what effects various environmental exposures have on human health. In particular, investigations into affecting the microbiome on human skin are still ongoing. Our skin interacts with the world before and one behalf of all our other organs, and so might hold great potential for affecting reactions or purposeful changes to each of our skin’s microbiomes.
One recent study (Mhuireach et al., 2022) hypothesized that the hands of gardeners would be a likely place for soil-to-skin transfer of microbial populations. Complications, including hand-washing, confound the issue. But they did find Streptomyces among the top ten most abundant genera found in urban garden sample soils! The authors go on to emphasize the importance of soil/skin contact, citing Roslund et al. (2020) who found that biodiverse playgrounds improved children’s health and immune-function. Such findings reinforce efforts— at to get children outside and interacting with curated, natural play environments.
Further reading
Read more about this research on human health and garden soil contact, fresh from Oregon State University’s Garden Ecology Lab.
And now, you can carry on with your day knowing you’ve got about as much breadth of knowledge of Streptomyces as possible without beginning to delve into specific species. Thanks for reading!
This month has seen the release of the Portland Bee Guide! This guide was a collaborative project among many different members of the Garden Ecology Lab, along with numerous others inside and outside Oregon State University. Our goal for the project was relatively simple: create an accessible guide to Portland bees. If you haven’t already, click hereto download the Portland Bee Guide. It contains species descriptions of 67 bee species found in Portland, OR, gardens (including the ones seen below!), and the accompanying iNaturalist guide (click here) contains photos and interactive functional trait filters for each species. Read on for bonus content, not included in the bee guide or in the social media campaign we ran to promote the guide earlier in recent weeks.
This blog will also serve as an access point to the social media content, for those not on Instagram or Facebook. The social media campaign contained three sets of posts: one focused on floral resources for bees, another on nesting sites for bees, and the final was a feature of some of the Portland bee-friendly gardeners.
Making the Guide
Most of my time spent on the guide happened in my home, which is my preferred work space (it helps that a cat is included). Specifically, a table on the same back patio where I grew up spending time with my family in the outdoors as I was growing up. When I entered graduate school, the sampling in Portland gardens was already finished—so many people had contributed to this project before I ever knew it existed. The main thing that inspired me to work in science communication was the opportunity to serve as a liaison between the academic sphere and the public sphere. I’ve always enjoyed interacting with people, and was parented by scientists who valued their work in Extension programs.
The back patio, where I spent much of my time this past summer working on the bee guide.
Because so much of my work took place on my computer, far removed from the soil, forage, and buzzing bees of Portland, I knew I wanted to make visiting some of the gardens a priority. This would allow me to have a deeper understanding of the guide itself prior to its release, as well as to take photographs and interview some of the gardeners who hosted diverse bee communities in their backyard. I completed my visits in June 2023, and got a chance to talk with gardeners about their successes, setbacks, motivations, and more. Let’s look at some of these gardens!
Our 3 Featured Gardeners
Pascal: “Small and mighty”
Pascal’s garden is in Northeast Portland. He lives just off a busy street, so his main goal when creating his garden was privacy. I was inspired by Pascal’s eye for design—his garden, to me, was the definition of maximizing space. He has created a layered effect, with winding pathways, designated sections for food crops and ornamental plantings, but everything blended seamlessly. Though I could tell from the road that Pascal’s garden was going to be quite something, while I was inside it felt like I was in on a secret: here I was, in a secluded refuge.
I asked Pascal!
What is the biggest challenge you deal with in your garden? “My biggest challenge is keeping the garden healthy and thriving during dry stretches of weather, which seem to be getting longer each year. I use soaker hoses throughout the garden and run them once a week, but during extreme heat and dry weather over the last few summers, the stress on the plants is obvious. I’m now running them more often, and this year, earlier than in previous years. More water means a bigger water bill, but it’s better than losing established plants to drought. When I do lose plants, I now plant replacements that are native and more drought tolerant.”
What has been your biggest gardening success? “My biggest gardening success has been transitioning this yard, that was basically lawn and a few trees, into a biodiversity hotspot with almost 80 species of plants stuffed into a small space. All those plants now provide a lush green wall that blocks out some of the noise and business of our urban location. They also provide shelter and forage year-round for a variety of birds, insects (including pollinators), a few small mammals and even a lost cat, who we were able to rehome.”
What is your favorite spot in the garden? “My favorite spot in the garden is under the canopy created by a series of overlapping trees that create a cool, shaded area over the lawn. It’s the perfect spot to sit on a hot day and face out towards the surrounding gardens and see all the activity that is going on with birds, bees, and other insects moving around. The yard is still noisy, but sitting under those trees feels peaceful.”
Pascal and my father, Neil (also a retired Community Horticulturist for Oregon State), talking about plants in Pascal’s urban refuge. I love this photo because you can get a feel for the layered effect that this garden has. The variety of foliage textures makes the space feel welcoming, cozy, and vibrant.
Bob: “A bee’s urban paradise”
I visited Bob, along with a fellow Master Gardener, Cathy, at the Multnomah County Master Gardeners Demonstration Garden. This garden is open to the public, and Bob made is clear that visitors are welcome. Visitors are free to come walk around the garden, which is not limited to pollinator-oriented spaces. Other gardeners focus on food crops, ornamental plantings—there’s even a willow tunnel to walk under. The garden is beautiful, and worth a stroll-through if you’re in the area. It was such a joy to talk with both of them—their passion for both pollinators and gardening was tangible, and his interest in learning more about the bees he was seeing in his plot was inspiring.
Bob and Cathy standing next to their sign at the Multnomah County Demonstration Garden. If you’re in the Portland area, take a visit! It’s open to the public, and they were both wonderful to talk to.
The number of active pollinators here was astounding! Many of my now-favorite bee photos came from my visit to Bob’s garden. Male long-horned and leaf-cutter bees snoozing inside California poppy, Agapostemon (“green bees”) on Gaillardia, and bumble bees abounded during my midday visit. Many of those bees are pictured in our social media campaign, which will be included below.
I asked Bob!
What is the biggest challenge you deal with in your garden? “Unwanted plants. However, we have developed management strategies to deal with them. We plant very densely and layer plants vertically; we also tolerate some ‘weeds’.”
What has been your biggest gardening success? “Over time, Master Gardener colleagues—some of whom initially looked askance at what we were doing—have come to appreciate the aesthetic of our plantings. While some still wouldn’t garden the way we do, they now recognize that there’s a method to our madness.”
Where is your favorite spot in the garden? “I enjoy standing at the intersection of the steppingstone pathways, where I feel engulfed by vegetation.”
Sherry: “A suburban oasis”
Sherry is a long-time supporter of the lab, and follower of our research. One of my favorite parts of her garden is her planting of Douglas aster and goldenrod, which she was inspired to plant based on Dr. Aaron Anderson’s research, a past GEL lab member. The plating overlooks the Willamette River. I included this quote in the social media campaign, but I can’t help from including it here too: “Growing together, both receive more pollinator visits than they would if they were growing alone. It’s a testable hypothesis; it’s a question of science, a question of art, and a question of beauty.” – Robin Wall Kimmerer, from Braiding Sweetgrass.
Something I admire about Sherry’s garden is how she incorporates both native plants, and also plants that are important or special to her. It reminds me of my childhood garden growing up, planted and cared for by my parents, both horticulturists. I remember being surrounded by vegetation on our back patio, which was one of the first places I ever experienced the natural world up close.
I asked Sherry!
What is the biggest challenge you deal with in your garden? “Leaving unwanted and unmulched ground for nesting bees is hard for me. Bare ground goes against my nature!”
Sherry has done a wonderful job of incorporating more patches of bare soil into her garden: these spots are perfect for ground-nesting bees!
What has been your biggest gardening success? “A bee garden starring Douglas aster and goldenrod, two natives that tested well in the Garden Ecology Lab research. I added Allium, Emerus, rose, Persicaria, Phlox, Verbascum, and a Vitex for diversity and to extend bloom time.”
Where is your favorite spot in your garden? “I favor areas where there is a place to pause and reflect: an alcove off the driveway affords a scene of raised beds against a coral-colored wall, a bench surrounded by a circle of Phlomis offers expansive views of the pollinator garden, and a second-story deck gives a bird’s eye view of colorful shrubs and perennials below.”
Sherry standing next to the Phlomis in her June garden. This is one of her favorite spots to pause and admire the work she has put into this space. I can see why!
Social media content lives here, too!
Above: the set of slides included in our first post, which focused on floral resources for bees.
Above: the set of slides for our second post, which covered nesting sites for bees.
Above: the third and final post in our social media campaign, featuring Portland gardeners Pascal, Bob, and Sherry!
Thank you to everyone who has taken the time to tune in over the past month. Take some downtime during our rainy Oregon winter to familiarize yourself with the written guide PDF (downloadable here) and the online interactive iNaturalist guide (click here), so you’re ready for all our Portland bees next spring!
Do you have questions about the guide? I am more than happy to chat with you! Feel free to reach out to me at nicolecsbell@gmail.com.
In the recent blog post “The Controversy Surrounding ‘No Mow May”, Dr. Langellotto explores the lack of good science supporting the idea of giving your lawn a month-long break from being mowed. Despite the scientific controversy, “No-mow May” is an idea that has taken off. It is simple and makes people feel good about helping pollinators, while also doing less yard work. At its best, it may indeed work in some places, for some people, to help some pollinators for a month…but what about the rest of the year?
A month of neglecting your lawn might allow flowers to bloom, depending on what grows in your lawn besides grass. These may well attract pollinators – but the untended expanse may also fool various creatures into thinking they have a safe place to nest, pupate, and burrow. What happens to them when the mowing starts again? Bees and butterflies can fly away to other flowers, but less-mobile creatures may be killed or displaced.
It’s also questionable whether this method reduces yard work at all. A lawn grown long and lush in peak growing season – and which may be wet from spring rains as well – will be very difficult to mow after a month. So at best, “No-mow May” provides a very short-term benefit, and may cause more problems than it solves.
Are there other routes to a low-maintenance pollinator paradise? Definitely! As Gail concluded, a pollinator garden provides year-round support to pollinators, without the disruption of intermittent mowing. If you want detailed information on creating a pollinator garden in the PNW, and what to plant in it, here’s a good resource to get you started: “Enhancing Urban and Suburban Landscapes to Protect Pollinators”, https://extension.oregonstate.edu/catalog/pub/em-9289-enhancing-urban-suburban-landscapes-protect-pollinators.
But maybe you aren’t able to devote a whole garden to pollinators. Maybe you just have a little bit of space. How about planting just a few strategic plants?
Garlic chives (Allium) with Douglas aster (dwarfed by tight location) in fall
Certain types of plants are pollinator powerhouses. They tend to attract a wide variety of pollinators. Some are food plants for many different native butterfly and moth caterpillars. The best bloom for a long time, offering their bounty for up to several months. To extend the bloom season even more, plant several varieties of the same species, with varying bloom times, or multiple related species.
Include a few of these in any landscape and you will benefit many pollinators. Choose natives when you can, and choose at least one species from each family or general category.
It’s not just bees: Syrphid fly on Douglas aster
Pollinator Powerhouse starter list In western Oregon, you could do worse than start with the Garden Ecology Lab’s Top 10 Oregon Native Plants for Pollinators (https://blogs.oregonstate.edu/gardenecologylab/category/top-10-plants-for-pollinators/) and their relatives. (Top-10 are in bold below).
Aster family (Asteraceae) – Daisies or Composites. A huge family with many pollinator favorites. Here are just a few. Achillea millefolium (yarrow) Anaphalis margaritacea (pearly everlasting)NOT for a well-fed and watered area, or it can become invasive Eriophyllum lanatum (Common woolly sunflower) Solidago spp. (goldenrod) – Plant Native S. canadensis (Canada goldenrod), miniature S. ‘Little Lemon’, and late and showy S. ‘Fireworks’ for a really long season of bloom! Be aware that most tend to spread by seed, and the birds won’t eat all the seed. Seedlings are easy to pull, though, if you don’t want too many. Symphyotrichum/Aster – Tall native S. subspicatum(Douglas aster) or short native S. hallii (Hall’s aster), miniature S. ‘Woods Blue’, and many others. Also: Echinacea (coneflower), Erigeron (fleabane), Helenium (sneezeweed – for treating sneezes, not causing them), Helianthus (perennial sunflowers), Inula, and many more.
Anemone blanda, early spring daisy
Mint family (Lamiaceae) Another really big family almost universally attractive to pollinators. Includes Agastache spp. (anise hyssop, hummingbird mint), Calamintha nepeta (calamint), Caryopteris x incana (bluebeard – a small shrub), Monarda didyma (bee balm), Salvias, and herbs rosemary, mint, basil, oregano, and thyme, among others.
Calamintha and Alliums in midsummer (Wisconsin)
Sedum/Hylotelephium (stonecrops) Both the low groundcover Sedums and the tall, fall-blooming Hylotelephiums like ‘Autumn Joy’ are pollinator magnets , though often you will only see honeybees mobbing them.
Alliums – Any kind There are spring, summer and fall bloomers – plant some of each, mixed in with other pollinator plants. Late spring to summer is the main Allium season, with dozens of kinds available. For late summer and fall try Allium tuberosum (Garlic Chives), Allium cernuum (nodding onion), a NW native, and Allium thunbergii ‘Ozawa’ (Ozawa Japanese onion) for the very end of autumn.
Self-sowing annuals Many annuals will bloom straight through the season until frost. Alyssum, Clarkia amoena (Farewell-to-spring), Eschscholzia californica (California poppy) (mostly annual), Fagopyrum esculentum (Buckwheat) – a great cover crop, pollinators love it, and you can harvest the seeds to eat or let it self-sow; Gilia capitata (globe gilia), Limnanthes douglasii (NW native), Madia elegans (common madia), Phacelia heterophylla (Varileaf phacelia).
Late summer: Crocosmia, Agastache, Solidago (left to right)
To make sure your pollinator powerhouse plants thrive and bloom for a long time, make sure to give them good growing conditions. • Soil should be reasonably good (though not excessively fertilized, which can cause pest-attracting lush growth and fewer flowers). • They should have full to half-day sun in most areas. • Even native plants appreciate some water during dry summer months, otherwise they will go dormant. • Grouping these plants together can make care easier – voila, a pollinator garden! – but they can be tucked into any available spot as long as their needs are met. Even a vegetable garden!
Study: Native Plants & Native Cultivars: Understanding Pollinator Preference for Native Plants and their Cultivated Counterparts in the Pacific Northwest
Thank you for your interest our survey! We are done collecting survey responses at this time. If you previously took the survey and have any questions, please direct them to Gail.Langellotto@oregonstate.edu and/or Jen.Hayes@oregonstate.edu.
This article was written for the regular column that I submit to the Hardy Plant Society of Oregon (HPSO) Quarterly Magazine. I am grateful to the team at HPSO for their editorial skills and feedback, that always improve what I write.
No Mow May is an initiative that was started in 2019 by Plantlife, a non-profit that works to restore meadow habitats in the United Kingdom. Their annual campaign called on garden owners and greenspace managers to cease mowing in the month of May, in order to move lawn-dominated yards towards a more natural approach. The movement quickly spread to other regions of the globe, as an easy and feel-good measure that almost any land manager could take to promote biodiversity and protect pollinators. In the United States, Bee City USA adopted the No Mow May campaign, which they also refer to as Mow Less Spring, as a way to conserve native pollinators.
A No Mow groundcover, being managed for increased flowers and pollinators. Photo by: Kenneth Allen (CC BY-SA 2.0). Source: https://www.geograph.ie/photo/6860492
There is some science to support the notion that less-intensely managed lawns benefits biodiversity. Our lab group even wrote about it in a blog post on No Mow May, including sharing a meta-analysis of 14 studies from North America and Europe showed that plant diversity and invertebrate diversity increased in lawns, as mowing intensity decreased [1]. However, several studies included in this review had mowing treatments that are not generally practical for most residential yards. Some studies compared lawns mowed once per week to lawns that were mowed once per year, for example. One of the few studies that compared mowing frequencies that approximate real world conditions was conducted in Springfield, Massachusetts [2]. In this study, Dr. Susannah Lermann and colleagues compared bee abundance and diversity from yards mowed every week, every two weeks, and every three weeks. Lawns mowed every three weeks had 2.5X more lawn flowers than other lawns. Interestingly, lawns mowed every two weeks had the highest bee abundance, but lowest bee species richness. The authors speculate that the higher grass height of the three-week mowed lawns covered lawn flowers, and made them less accessible to many bees. The higher lawn height also made the three-week mowed lawns less acceptable to nearby neighbors, leading the authors to suggest that a ‘two-week regime might reconcile homeowner ideas with pollinator habitat’.
Example of a lawn-dominated yard participating in the Lermann et al. 2018 study. Note the minimal landscaping and bare patches in the lawns, which were common throughout the sites. Also note the yard sign in the lawn explaining the objectives of the study. Photo Credit: Susannah Lermann, from Lermann et al. 2018.
That brings us back to No Mow May, and whether or not there is science to support the idea that not mowing for an entire month might benefit pollinators. In 2020 (soon after the start and spread of No Mow May) Del Toro and Ribbons published a paper that suggested that households that observed No Mow May had three times more bee species and five times higher bee abundance than spaces that were regularly mowed [3]. The results were highlighted in a New York Times story[4], and resulted in a change in the City of Appleton code that suspended an 8” lawn height restriction for the month of May, via a 6-3 split vote for and against the resolution[5]. Israel Del Toro, lead author of the study, was elected to Appleton’s Common Council, soon after leading the effort to adopt the resolution. By 2022, an additional 25 U.S. cities had followed suit [6], with their own declarations in support of No Mow May.
As the No Mow May movement grew, so did controversy surrounding the Del Toro and Ribbons study. Bee taxonomist Zach Portman noted serious issues with the bees identified in the study. Horticulture Professor Bert Cregg noted that the study was confounded, by comparing home lawns that were not mowed to park spaces that were mowed. With this experimental design, it is impossible for the authors to disentangle the effects of mowing (e.g. mowed or not mowed) from the effects of habitat type (e.g. home lawn versus park). In November of 2022, the authors retracted their study ‘after finding several potential inconsistencies in data handling and reporting’. After the retraction, the City of Appleton considered a resolution to eliminate No Mow May, claiming that the program lacks scientific backing. However, this resolution did not pass [7].
What is a science-informed gardener to do, amidst confusing and sometimes conflicting messaging related to pollinator conservation in a yard? First, note that science self-corrects, when the system works well. Retractions are part of that corrective process. Second, remember that bees can be found in lawn areas, particularly if lawns are less managed. The Lermann study demonstrated that lawns can host a surprising richness of bee species: 72, 60, and 62 bee species, in lawns mowed every week, two weeks, or three weeks, respectively. Note that to be part of this study, homeowners had to agree to not use herbicides or irrigation, during the length of the study. As a result of reduced management, lawns in this study often had bare patches that might be good nesting habitat for soil-nesting bees. Relaxing your mowing regime to every 1-2 weeks is supported by good science. Stowing your mower for an entire month is not. Finally, if you want to manage your yard for pollinators, planning and planting a pollinator garden is likely to net more species than stowing your mower. Indeed, many critics of the No Mow May movement, including native plant advocate Doug Tallamy, suggest that providing a temporary safe haven, regardless of its length of time, is counterproductive for pollinators and other wildlife it was meant to benefit. We currently have a paper in review, addressing this very topic. I look forward to sharing the highlights with readers, once it is published.
A Willamette Valley lawn with grasses setting seed, after weeks of no mowing. Photo Credit: Gail Langellotto.
At the conclusion of the skin microbiome study, many gardeners asked for more information on how gardening affects the gut microbiome. Dr. Mhuireach received USDA funding to conduct a pilot study, to address this question. Gardeners in Linn and Lane Counties are specifically invited to apply.
The deadline to apply to participate in this NEW study is August 15th.
We are seeking healthy adult gardeners to engage in a research study exploring microbiota of fresh fruits and vegetables from gardens and supermarkets, and their potential to influence the gut microbiome. To be eligible, you must be between the ages of 18–45, be fluent in English, live in Lane or Linn County, and have access to a garden that can provide enough fruits and vegetables for the diet intervention. Participants will receive $50 at the beginning of the study, $50 upon completion, and a $75 allowance to purchase supermarket fruits and vegetables.
Study activities: If you participate, you will be asked to undergo two week-long diet intervention periods during which you will eat the USDA-recommended amount of fruits and vegetables. In one period all of the produce should be sourced from your garden and in the other the same produce should be sourced from a supermarket. You will be also asked to pre-plan your meals for the intervention periods, complete a Lifestyle, Health, & Diet Questionnaire, maintain a Daily Fruit & Vegetable Log, collect samples of all the fruits and vegetables you eat, collect stool (fecal) samples, and collect a tapwater sample. The total duration of participation is 24 days, with an expected average time commitment of 20–30 minutes per day.
Potential risks: Participants will be exposed to microorganisms from garden and supermarket produce, however, this exposure occurs during normal daily life. There is also a risk that privacy or confidentiality could be breached, though precautions will be taken to avoid such breaches.
Benefits: There are no direct benefits to participating in this study.
