Please don’t
I recently received a new education. That’s a good thing. I’m very lucky because now I know something, and that makes the world smarter. It’s getting harder to know who to believe, but, as a scientist, I will test this alleged new knowledge and see what happens because my mind is an open book– lotta blank pages in there.
And regarding education, we humans deserve our due. We’ve educated ourselves enough to make spray bottles and zippers, so we’ve demonstrated our initiative.
But this discussion will be about what pollinators eat in autumn.
We live among pollinators – birds, insects, lepidoptera, and the rest – many that feed on seeds and nectar of flowers. Birds also feed on insects and lepidoptera, but let’s move on. Flies and beetles and moths and pals are born to pollinate plants, and the plants know to mature, look handsome and spread themselves around. All the while, pollinators are living on or near the plants and feeding on them. That’s the cycle, so it must work.
Pollinators eat what is available during the seasons just like we do. In spring, everybody in the pollination business wakes up hungry, so nectar and pollen from the early flowers, including bulbs, are important, and pollinators know these things – they’ve been to school. If you’re a cabbage moth, for example, you look for an enclave of cabbage family plants like mustard and broccoli because that’s where all your high school classmates will be… the stories they will tell!
Daffodils, dog violets and fire pinks feed the throng in spring along with milkweed, famous for its value to butterflies in summer. Rudbeckias will have established themselves by then and flowered. Also called black-eyed susans, established patches of them have a knack for showing up year after year because they’re indigenous. The bright yellow flowers on tall stems attract the whole chorus of pollinators through the summer. The flowers eventually drop off leaving large brown seed pods at the end of the stem. Bee balm (monarda) and echinacea flowers do the same.
Bee balm flowers fade by mid-summer, but the flowers and ensuing seed pods attract a steady clientele during their season. Bee balm seed pods resemble small brown floral knobs of seeds.
Goldenrod plants flower in August and September which is when some summer flowers such as echinacea fade. Petals on echinacea flowers drop off late summer leaving a floral knob of seeds resembling a spiked sphere, and spikes are the seeds. I had goldfinches in my garden this summer because of the echinacea.
Beside them were healthy anise hyssop plants which bear blue cylindrical flowers eventually leaving cylindrical seed pods. All manner of pollinators love them, and the stems stand tall ‘til season’s end.
The point at hand is the time comes at the end of the season to clean up the garden by removing plants past their time, but if you’re tempted to cull echinacea seed pods and pull up rudbeckia plants by the roots, don’t do it! I might have done so except for my new education. Those seed pods are important end of season nourishments for birds and bugs when other food sources begin to disappear. Seed tassels on ornamental grasses also. Leave ‘em.
Goldenrod flowers don’t make spiky knobs or flower buttons; instead, they produce attractive clusters of yellow florets at the end of long stems. Insects, moths and birds in autumn need goldenrod flowers and all the dried seed pods because other sources are fading. That is why we should leave black-eyed susans alone ‘til later.
Garlic chives also send up flower stalks at the end of summer, and I saw various flies and beetles feeding on every clump this weekend. The clump will spend a few weeks flowering, feeding fauna, making seeds, so later is the best time to trim them back.
Sometimes, don’t is the best thing you can do.