Pollinator Garden Initiative

A pollinator garden is designed to provide habitat (food and shelter) for pollinators such as birds, bees, butterflies, and other animals and insects. The hardy native pollinator plants help maintain native biodiversity and support local agriculture.

What the City is doing:

• The City is including pollinator habitat in planting plans any time a park or public space is upgraded with new landscaping, such as the pollinator planters installed at JFK Plaza (City Hall) in 2022.

What YOU can do:

• Plant pollinator species in your own yard! This can be anything from a small planter or plant bed to a large wildflower meadow. How to build a pollinator garden | U.S. Fish & Wildlife Service (fws.gov); Choosing Pollinator-Friendly Native Plants in Home Gardening or Landscaping | Mass.gov
• Don't own property? Try a pollinator window box! Window Box | Pollinator.org
• Do less maintenance. This sounds counterintuitive, but leaving past-bloom flowers and resisting the urge to prune will continue to provide food and shelter for many pollinator species, especially over winter. Allowing leaf litter to remain on the ground over winter, rather than raking, also creates habitat for species that need ground cover to hibernate.

Pollinator Garden Facts:

• About 75% of all flowering plants rely on animal pollinators and over 200,000 species of animals act as pollinators. Of those, about 1,000 are hummingbirds, bats, and small mammals. The rest are insects such as beetles, bees, ants, wasps, butterflies, and moths.
• Worldwide, approximately 1,000 plants grown for food, beverages, fibers, spices, and medicines need to be pollinated by animals in order to produce the goods on which we depend.

Source: Pollination Fast Facts: Gardeners, www.pollinator.org/pollinator.org/assets/generalFiles/Pollination-Fast-Facts-Gardeners-2019.pdf. Accessed 10 June 2024. 

Resources:

• Choosing Pollinator-Friendly Native Plants in Home Gardening or Landscaping | Mass.gov
• Growing Wild Massachusetts | Mass.gov
• How to build a pollinator garden | U.S. Fish & Wildlife Service (fws.gov)
• Gardening for Pollinators | US Forest Service (usda.gov)
• Homepage | Pollinator.org
• Window Box | Pollinator.org