The view from Elizabeth McCarty’s window is a lot more colorful lately—and more friendly to bees. Earlier this spring, McCarty, an assistant professor and forest health specialist for the University of Georgia Warnell School of Forestry and Natural Resources who based at UGA’s Tifton campus, worked with a handful of lab staff and volunteers to transform a small square of dirt into a pollinator garden. Undergraduate and graduate students, lab techs and even a family member pitched in with mulching and weeding, along with the initial planting. With guidance from the State Botanical Garden of Georgia’s Connect to Protect program, McCarty assembled a plant list that included butterfly weed, aster, “mountain mint” and other native plants. More than six months later, the project is thriving and serving a variety of bees and butterflies. “While this is a small area, creating pollinator habitats in small spaces, where we can, is part of the concept behind Connect to Protect, Bee Campus USA and my own outreach activities to promote pollinator habitat in urban forests,” said McCarty. “We can do a lot of good for pollinator communities with smaller areas available to us.” The new garden outside McCarty’s lab is a living example of what can be created in a limited amount of space. Earlier this year is was just a dry patch of dirt between some evergreen bushes and a parking lot. Now, filled with perennials, it’s also full of life. The goal of the Connect to Protect program is to help foster education around native plants and the role they play in beneficial insect survival. Healthy ecosystems depend on native plants, which depend on and support pollinating insects. In turn, these insects provide food for other native wildlife. But providing places for these native plants to grow doesn’t require a lot of space—any patch of dirt can support native perennials. And because the native plants are already accustomed to an area’s climate, they have a better chance of withstanding whatever nature throws at them. This was an added bonus for McCarty, who had to leave the new garden unattended for long stretches this summer while conducting field work. As part of the Connect to Protect program, the new garden needed to meet certain requirements among its plants. This included species that could host pollinator larvae, plants that bloomed in spring, summer and fall, and garden elements that supported the full lifecycle of pollinators—for example, leaving some soil bare, keeping the stems of spent perennial blooms or including nesting boxes. The garden team also made sure the space was free of invasive plants and didn’t use broad-spectrum insecticides. Today, the garden continues to thrive and contains more than 20 species of native plants. It also supports the efforts of those on campus who are part of Tifton’s Bee Campus USA efforts. Bee Campus USA is a program that supports and encourages pollinator conservation on college and university campuses. For more information about the Connect to Protect program, visit the website for the State Botanical Garden of Georgia. The Botanical Garden offers support through training, signage, plant sourcing and lists, sample garden designs and sample budgets. Slide/Banner Caption: Purple asters blooming this fall.
