To support pollinators, people have turned to creating eco-friendly spaces around their homes, including replacing their grass lawns with flowering plants.
To support pollinators, people have turned to creating eco-friendly spaces around their homes, including replacing their grass lawns with flowering plants.
That’s no easy task, according to Carolyn Breece, Oregon State University Extension Service faculty research assistant in the OSU Honey Bee Lab. Since 2016, Breece has researched the best flowering lawn substitute. It turns out transitioning from an all-grass lawn to a flowering lawn is challenging.
“The first year it was beautiful,” Breece said. “After the end of the first year, things didn’t look so well in terms of pollinator plant diversity. I think if you’re going to put the effort into pollinator habitat, you’d be better off spending the effort on growing pollinator plants at the edges of lawn or eliminating lawn altogether.”
Over a series of trials, Breece used a variety of seed mixtures, including a control of perennial ryegrass, the best and most common grass west of the Cascades, Fleur de Lawn eco-mix, a bee meadow mixture, and several mixtures composed of different flower species (such as yarrow, alyssum, baby blue eyes, chamomile) with varying percentages of clover. The bee meadow mix consisted of perennial sunflower (Helianthus), black-eyed Susan, blanket flower (Gaillardia), California poppy, tickweed (Coreopsis), lupine, borage and phacelia.
Read more at: Oregon State University
Clover and ryegrass are the dominent plants in a pollinator lawn. (Photo Credit: Carolyn Breece)
