Curious Iowa: How can a backyard garden help butterflies and bees?

Master Gardener Wanda Ohrt has noticed a disturbing trend in garden centers and greenhouses in the area.

“I saw a huge display that said, ‘come shop our native plants’ and not a plant on there was native,” Ohrt said. “I have not been to a garden center anywhere that I can’t find one that says it’s a native and it’s not. And I bought them and I’ve been very disappointed and other people I’m sure are too.”

Instead of true native plants, they are nativars, native plants specially bred for more desirable characteristics, like exciting colors and more petals.

Native plants are valued by gardeners because native wildlife have relied on those plants for centuries. The native label matters because some nativars lose some of their natural benefits through the process of cultivation.

Luckily, there’s a trick to properly identifying native plants in greenhouses. In this installment of Curious Iowa — a Gazette series that answers questions about our state, its people and culture — we look at how to identify native plants and why people are passionate about planting them in home gardens.

How are native plants different from cultivars?

Native plants naturally occur in a region. Some Iowa examples are wild bergamot, milkweed and golden alexander. Some people may considers these plants weeds but native plants and native insects have evolved together for generations. The existence of lightning bugs, dragonflies and butterflies is dependent on the availability of native plants.

If a plant is not a true native, it’s either a cultivar, nativar or sport.

A sport, also known as a break, is a naturally occurring genetic mutation that produces a sudden change in the plant’s appearance. Meanwhile, a cultivar is a variety of plants that has been developed by selective breeding, which favors specific traits. This could make a plant taller, shorter or more pest resistant.

“But it changes how the insects get the pollen out of the plants.” Ohrt said. “If they bloom longer, it seems like that would be a good thing, but it also confuses the insects and the moths and the butterflies as for what they’re expecting.”

A nativar is a cultivar of a native plant.

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Cedar River Garden Center tree and nursery stock manager Justin Myers told The Gazette, “Some of the cultivars of the natives are just fine, produce plenty of nectar and things like that. Some [cultivars] that have been hybridized or chosen for having more petals don’t have the available pollen and nectar that some of the other cultivars do.”

Take the purple coneflower, echinacea purpurea, for example. Purple coneflower is a staple in the Iowa prairie. It features long, skinny, purple petals spaced out around a large cone-shaped center. The center, the pistil, provides surface area for a bumblebee to wiggle around on while pollinating. The CONE-FECTIONS™ “Hot Papaya” Echinacea is a cultivar. Its vibrant red-orange petals still fan out, but the pistil is very different. A compact poof of petals surrounds the center, making it harder for pollinators to access pollen.

How do you know if a plant is a cultivar or native? Ohrt said the only way to do it is by looking at the plant tag. If the plant tag doesn’t have a name in quotations like “Hot Papaya”, it is a native. If there’s anything written in quotation marks, it’s a cultivar or nativar.

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Why are gardeners prioritizing native plants?

According to the Government Land Office’s original public land survey of Iowa in the 1850s, the state had 23.3 million acres of prairies. In a healthy prairie, there can be as many as 30 different plant species in a square meter, according to previous reporting by The Gazette. Prairies are home to countless insects and birds, as well as snakes, turtles and more. After urban sprawl and monoculture farming forever changed Iowa’s landscape, just 0.1 percent of Iowa’s prairies remain.

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Prairies are endangered in Iowa. Researchers are using remnants to map the future.

In Marion, Monarch Research Project is responding by cultivating natural habitat and rearing monarch butterflies.

Monarch Research Station manager August “Augie” Bergstrom said, “The state of the monarch population here in the U.S. is scary … over the last few decades, there has been a fairly steady average decline in the population.”

Bergstrom said the population saw a 59 percent decline this past winter.

In May, the project held an Orange Alert rally where attendees were given milkweed seeds and urged to plant them.

Milkweed is the sole host plant for monarch caterpillars and they eat the plant exclusively. Plus, bees, moths and other insects feed on the plant. But there’s not enough growing naturally.

“When the habitat is fragmented, it’s difficult for the female monarch to find milkweed to lay eggs and even when they do, in the wild there’s less than a 5 percent change that egg will turn to monarch,” Bergstrom said.

The Monarch Research Project aims to spread its efforts to the backyards of Iowans by arming them with the information, milkweed and caterpillars they need to do so.

By establishing a healthy patch of milkweed, a backyard can become a Monarch Zone. By installing a 6x6 or 9x9 mesh BioTent stocked with monarch butterflies, anyone can rear and release butterflies from home.

Monarch Research Project also distributes smaller scale life cycle kits that easily fit onto porches, patios, balconies and decks. It’s a tool for showing children how caterpillars transform into butterflies.

Bergstrom said butterflies are released at least once a week from June through August, although the station keeps a portion of each generation for breeding purposes. Monarch Zones release within a day of butterflies emerging.

Two organized releases are coming up:

“This lack of native habitat is not going to be solved from a higher level. It’s going to be community-driven,” Bergstrom said.

“It may not feel like much, but if we can get an incredible number of people to transition a portion of their yard into micro-prairie or create a pollinator flower bed or even put in a couple milkweeds, we can start to … fill in the gaps of that habitat fragmentation and make it a lot easier on not only monarchs but other insects that are looking for a place to do their life cycle.”

“I think a lot of people are just coming to the realization that if we don’t start planting natives and things of that nature, we’re going to lose our native insects and birds and it all starts out with a plant,” Myers said. “All the bugs that the birds eat, or seeds that the birds eat, start with plant material.”

Beyond milkweed, oak trees are a host plant for hundreds of moths and butterfly species. Similarly, parsley and fennel support swallowtail butterflies. A diverse garden can support hundreds of species.

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“My big dilemma is, like, do I rip out all my gardens and put in native plants? And then I started to figure out, it’s like I have a lot of native plants, I just didn’t know that they were native. I think a lot of people will be in that same position.” Ohrt said.

Native plants are perennials, meaning they come back every year. This makes them cost effective and easy to maintain. Groups like the Iowa DNR and ReLeaf Cedar Rapids have online resources to guide gardeners looking to grow native flowers and trees.

Why do garden centers stock so many non-native plants?

Despite native plants having an excellent track record of being beneficial to native wildlife and surviving in Iowa’s climate, it’s hard to find native plants in the majority of a garden center’s stock. Myers said that Cedar River Garden Center keeps native and pollinator plants together so it’s easy to shop for them.

“And there will be cultivars in with the native plants just because that is what is commercially grown and that is available for us,” Myers said. “But there are other places like Ion Exchange and Prairie Moon that do just strictly natives … and they have a wonderful program.”

When it comes to stocking Cedar River Garden Center, Myers said what is available to sell is dictated by the nurseries.

“If they don’t have it, we can’t order it.” Myers said. “Otherwise, I’d love to have as many natives as we can pack the ceiling with. But there’s only so much grower space that they have and if a plant is not doing well, if it doesn’t grow in the pot very well — which some plant material doesn’t — unfortunately we can’t get ahold of that because it’s not going to look good on a retail standpoint.”

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Fortunately, there are many non-native plants that are beneficial to pollinators. Salvia, Myers said, is a great example. Ohrt said she has a white cat mint that she’ll never dig out of her garden because bees love it.

“There’s pollinating plants — the native plants are better — but I will never take out all of my pretty pollinating plants.” Ohrt said. “I think that’s what people are so hesitant about. It’s like, ‘Do I have to kill everything I have?’ and I don’t think you need to.”

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Comments: bailey.cichon@thegazette.com