Attracting Native Pollinators
Attracting
Native Pollinators
by the Xerces Society is the prettiest homesteading-related book I've
read this year. Stunning images dot nearly every page, zooming in
on the tiny bees pollinating an apple tree or diagramming the
underground nest site of a bumblebee queen.
Unfortunately, the
book's writing isn't quite as stellar as the illustrations. Attracting
Native Pollinators
was clearly written by a committee who couldn't quite decide if they
were working on a textbook or an inspirational DIY guide. Now and
then, I could sense the authors' passion to protect the bees, wasps,
and flies pollinating our wild and cultivated landscapes, but elsewhere
they got bogged down in excessive vocabulary. All the more reason
to sum up the most intriguing points in a lunchtime series and save you
some slogging.
Despite the annoying
features of certain parts of the text, I heartily recommend that you
pick up a copy of the book, if only to use as reference guide.
The main genera of pollinator bees plus the most important families of
other types of pollinators are covered in a field-guide-like fashion,
another section lists the host plants for many common butterflies, and
yet a third chapter discusses the best native plants to add to your
pollinator garden. And, of course, the book is the gardener
equivalent of porn --- perfect to set on your coffee table to
suck in new converts to ecological gardening.
| This post is part of our Attracting Native Pollinators lunchtime
series.
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About us: Anna Hess and Mark Hamilton spent over a decade living self-sufficiently in the mountains of Virginia before moving north to start over from scratch in the foothills of Ohio. They've experimented with permaculture, no-till gardening, trailersteading, home-based microbusinesses and much more, writing about their adventures in both blogs and books.
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