The Five Best Pollinator Plants to Add to Your Long Island, NY Garden
Do you want to attract more butterflies, bees, and hummingbirds to your garden? Here are the five best pollinator plants to add to your Long Island, NY garden.
Pollinators are essential, and growing plants that support them is a great way to attract beneficial wildlife into your garden. Not only are pollinator plants beautiful, but they also bring your garden to life and support vital ecosystems right in your backyard. Here are five of the best pollinator plants to add to your Long Island, NY garden.
Mahoney Associates is a leading full-service landscape firm dedicated to creating and maintaining the most beautiful landscapes in the Hamptons. Contact Mahoney online or call (631) 287-7666.
Why plant pollinator plants?
We love seeing a garden buzzing with life. It means pollinators like hummingbirds, butterflies, and bees are doing their job to bring nectar and pollen to your flowering plants so they keep them producing seeds and fruit. Somewhere between 75 to 95% of all flowering plants need pollinators to produce fruit. However, pollinators need help from pollinator plants.
What are the five best pollinator plants to add to your Long Island, NY garden?
Long Island, NY residents are blessed with many wonderful, hardy pollinator plants to choose from. They also bloom at different times throughout the season. Here is our take on the five best pollinator plants to add to your Long Island, NY garden to keep it producing life year-round.
Butterfly bush
Butterfly bush is a fast-growing perennial shrub with masses of long, spiked trusses that bloom from spring to autumn. Butterfly bush is beautiful to look at on its own, but the activity it will bring to your garden is spectacular. These bushes grow pretty tall, and the flowers are suitable for cutting.
Aster
Asters are perennials in the daisy family. Their bright purple or pink flowers bloom reliably from late summer to fall. Asters are versatile and can be a great addition to rock gardens, borders, and wildflower gardens. Asters do a great job attracting bees and butterflies and seed-eating chickadees, finches, and nuthatches.
Milkweed
Monarch butterflies love milkweed. It is the only plant monarchs eat and is an excellent plant supporting a declining monarch population. Milkweed is a native, herbaceous flowering perennial. The flowers that grow at the ends of long stems are attractive and beautifully fragranced.
Bee balm
Bee balm is a hardy perennial that can be planted in a garden or container. It will come back bigger and better each year. However, you must properly cut it back in late autumn so it continues to grow.
Bee balm is a natural antiseptic used in various herbal remedies. It also is a favorite of two of our favorite pollinators, the honey bee and the hummingbird. As if bee balm needed another reason to make it onto our list of the best pollinator plants to add to your Long Island, NY garden, it is a wonderful natural mosquito repellant.
Lupine
Lupines are excellent pollinators and will also help to improve your soil condition over time. Lupines are late-spring and early-summer flowers that thrive in dry, sandy soil. They are favorites of native and hive bees and hummingbirds. They are also the only host of the rare Karner Blue butterfly. Lupines will spread year after year, adding a gorgeous expanse of color and texture to your garden.
Who can help with full-service landscaping in Long Island?
At Mahoney Associates, we help families bring their dream garden or outdoor space to life. Moreover, we’re conscious of the environmental impact of every product and piece of equipment we use. This is evident in our fleet of electric cars, our organic programs for plant health care, and our landscape designs for revegetation, sensitive ecosystems, and pollinator gardens.
We start the design process by listening carefully to what you want your property to provide, functionally and aesthetically. As your full-service design-build firm, we provide excellent service from design to installation. We can even help with ongoing home landscape maintenance.