Turning lawns into lifelines
With pollinators in crisis, an urgency builds to remake open space into ‘insect restaurants’
“The Victorian English aesthetic of the lawn needs to change,” said Dr. Joseph “Doc” Grizzanti, founder of the Warwick Valley Winery and the Hudson Valley Pollinator Project. “Eighty-six percent of the land east of the Mississippi is privately owned. All we want is for people to plant food for insects.”
The precipitous decline of insects in the western world poses dire consequences not only for ecosystems but for the future of our food supply, and in backyards nationwide, people are starting to take action.
“If we get people to plant native plants instead of grass, we solve the problem,” said Grizzanti, who grew and gave away 2,000 milkweed plants last year as part of the Pollinator Project, run by the nonprofit Orange Environment. “We have a demo garden here at the winery and are starting a pollinator club. Every weekend the garden is full of winery patrons and butterflies.” To protect the pollinators it attracts, the winery’s large orchard – whose apples go into the winery’s signature hard cider – is located far from the gardens. It is sprayed only at night and was the first orchard in the Hudson Valley to stop using neonicotinoid pesticides, said Grizzanti, which are especially toxic to bees.
The three biggest threats to native plants and insects are pesticides, habitat loss, and, surprisingly, deer overpopulation. “Deer feed on the native plants that native pollinators require. The tools we have to manage deer are out of date and need to be addressed,” said Avalon Bunge of Partners for Climate Action Hudson Valley, which published the Hudson Valley Pollinator Action Guide and manages grants of up to $50,000 for ecological restoration in the lower Hudson Valley. “If we can support our pollinators,” said Bunge, “we will provide sustenance up and down the food chain.”
Turning open space into a restaurant for insects can happen anywhere: a pot on a balcony, a solar farm, a road median, a utility right-of-way, a suburban backyard. But we Northeasterners like our lawns – those hallowed slivers of the American dream, which often still consist of a mown expanse of chemically treated grass, painstakingly raked of leaves each fall. Getting people to let nature creep back into their turf sanctuary is no small task.
The controversial No Mow May movement, in which participants allow their lawns to grow wild for the month, has occasionally pitted neighbor against neighbor and even turned household members against one another. Some feel that letting dandelions flourish in a knee-high meadow is unsightly, brings down property values and invites pests.
But the realization that spraying your lawn in fact has major downstream effects is beginning to take hold in the general consciousness. The aesthetic of the perfect green turf carpet – that all-American badge of honor – is giving way to an appreciation that ecosystems with many interacting species are more stable, productive and resilient. A plant monoculture, whether of grass or corn, is much more susceptible to stressors like drought than an environment filled with a wide array of plants, animals and insects.
“The importance of biodiversity is that our wild ecosystems and our human ecosystems are interconnected, even in ways we do not yet understand,” said Deborah Seiler, director of communications for the Xerces Society for Invertebrate Conservation, an international nonprofit for invertebrate conservation whose work includes the Pollinator Habitat and Leave the Leaves yard signs you may have seen around.
Not mowing also protects the growth of ephemeral wildflowers, such as Virginia bluebells and Dutchman’s breeches, early short-blooming plants that feed pollinators until the longer blooming plants begin to flower.
Organizations such as Pollinator Pathway have sprung up to restore and connect habitat for migrating pollinators, attempting to create pollinator flyways across the country and to educate the public on how to join in.
“The lower Hudson Valley is a prime area for pollinator habitat because the Hudson River is a migratory route and is used by so many bees and butterflies,” said Donna Merrill, founder and director of Pollinator Pathway. “Native plants are so important because they are the only ones native insects can use to complete their life cycles.”
One unofficial stop on the pathway is the Pollination Meadow at the intersection of routes 17 and 17A in Tuxedo. Part of the first marked nature trail in the United States, its three-acre meadow is completely managed by volunteers, who do the thankless work of ripping out invasives such as dreaded mugwort. Designing landscapes, choosing plants, clearing land and planting are the fun parts. But these are all prelude to the hard part: the essential, never-ending job of weeding. It takes a band of committed volunteers to fend off invasives and ensure that a pollinator patch doesn’t turn into an overgrown eyesore.
“It’s a lot of work to maintain a native meadow,” said Kelly Spranger, one of the founders. “But we feel it is a moral imperative to try to help save the dwindling number of species. It’s gratifying when kids come here to learn about the butterflies and flowers and say, ‘This is where I want to have my birthday party.’”
Another oasis for birds and bugs is the Black Bear Golf Club in Franklin, NJ, where a unique collaboration between the utility, New Jersey Audubon and Crystal Springs Resort in 2016 turned an electric line right-of-way through the golf course into a quarter-mile pollinator corridor planted with native grasses and wildflowers, along with bird boxes and two educational signboards along the cart path. With millions of line-miles set aside for electric and gas transmission nationwide, these corridors have unparalleled potential to support migrating pollinators, and power companies are increasingly taking up the mantle: cutting down on herbicide use, letting grass grow longer and planting low-growing natives.
Crystal Springs Resort in Hamburg, NJ features honeybee hives and bee nesting boxes on its property and local honey on its menus, leads corporate retreat groups in building bee boxes, and recently hosted globetrotting muralist Matt Willey, who this fall finished embellishing the ceiling of the resort’s Chef’s Garden Restaurant with a beehive. “Bees are the world’s most important pollinators, and over half of North America’s native bee species are in decline,” said resort CEO Julie Mulvihill, the force behind the resort’s multifaceted efforts to raise awareness. She reached out to Willey after seeing one of his murals in his hometown of Narrowsburg, NY.
Willey is on a decades-long campaign to hand-paint 50,000 honeybees, the number in a healthy hive, around the world. His activism helped get the Birds and Bees Protection Act passed in New York last winter, a nation-leading moratorium on the use of certain neonicotinoids. Of the dozens of installations under his belt, Crystal Springs was the first resort Willey has painted, and the subject was something of a throwback for the artist.
“I rarely paint all honeybee murals any more. But the space simply wanted it. For me, the honeybee and her hive will always be the gateway that led me into a better understanding of the world around me,” said Willey. “That said, I am currently expanding the project and bringing many other species (not just pollinators) into the art in the coming year.”
Pollinator patches come in all shapes and sizes. The Village Hall of Woodbury is sponsoring a New York State native food garden for pollinators. On a larger scale, Storm King Art Center in New Windsor is home to over 100 native grasses and wildflowers designed by landscape architect Darrel Morrison on over 100 acres. The Orange County Land Trust is restoring meadows that were former hayfields and making its Moonbeams Preserve an island of native species where pollinators can flourish.
Warwick, the first community in New York State to be designated a Monarch Village USA, has taken the pollination buzz to new heights. Warwick Valley Gardeners took home first place from the 2023 Federated Garden Clubs of New York for its charming pollinator garden in Pine Island Park. The village designated June “Monarch Month,” and town-wide, schools are planting pollinator gardens as outdoor learning centers.
“Kids can feel powerless in the world,” said Abigail Ashley, who spearheaded the Monarch Village enterprise and school programming. “Knowing that they can do little things in the garden to make a difference has a big impact. Hopefully the Monarch Village idea will move all over the country. It has an undercurrent of bringing communities together,” she said. “You can’t go wrong.”
Pollinator meadows are underway at Transformation Trails, the town’s newest park-in-progress in Wickham Woodlands (the former prison grounds), which will feature purple and gold wildflowers in a nod to the town’s school colors; and at Mountain Lake Park, where youth volunteers this fall planted mountain mint, wild bergamot and roundleaf groundsel.
“If we want a healthy biome, we have to plant pollinator hosts,” said Sally Greco of Sustainable Warwick’s Pollinator Pathway Committee. After conversations with Greco, Albert Wisner Public Library eliminated the use of pesticides in their landscaping, and the library has cleared out a spot for a future pollinator garden. Housing developments are following suit, like Homestead Village Condominiums in the Village of Warwick, which recently formed a nature committee and went pesticide-free on its extensive grounds.
“We have to make sure that we source our plants from committed vendors like Corwin’s in Warwick, not most big-box stores that sell natives treated with pesticides,” said Greco. “We need to crowd out the invasives and stop planting non-natives like butterfly bushes, even though they are pretty. There’s a movement going on. We woke up!”
Bees and butterflies come to mind. But bats, beetles and ants – which pollinate chocolate and coffee – play important roles too. In fact, anything that moves pollen from male stamens to female pistils of flowers is a pollinator, including birds, the wind and even humans, who have been known to use paintbrushes or toothbrushes to hand-pollinate plants and fruit trees.