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The ten-petalled petunia

Bees love flowers; it’s the nectar that they’re after, however, not the beauty -even though some of them have favourite colours, it’s not a vacation for them. Not every flower has what they want: many hybrids were bred for their colours, so may not have easily available nectar and, like professional pole dancers, hide everything just out of sight. It’s sometimes a Where’s Waldo puzzle out there, too, and even with diagrams and pictures, I still find floral anatomy very confusing; pity the poor bee who is just trying to eke out a living, flower-to-flower.

I am not a gardener and the very idea of planting horticulturally designed non-binary flowers with little or no nectar on board seems like a tease. I mean, I’m not really up on gender stuff, so I don’t wish to give offence to floral freedom of choice or anything; I’m just thinking about the day job of a bee trying to support a burgeoning hive with a queen who keeps on laying eggs. That’s a lot of guilt if you mess up.

Of course, we all know how important pollination is for the world economy, but forget that; it’s important for me, eh? It’s important that there’s flour for my breakfast bagels (or whatever they use), and greens for my evening salad -not kale, though: it gives me gas; they can forget pollinating kale if they want. But anyway, pretty well everything I eat needs a pollinator -well, cows eat grass and that’s pollinated by the wind I guess. I’m not sure about chickens, either, but I’d like to think the free-range ones wander around in meadows dotted with flowers; I’d also like to believe none of the boneless breasts I buy ever had individual names.

Anyway, not to put too rude a point on it, what I’m trying to say is that if city people are going to plant flowers in their gardens, they should shy away from anything that doesn’t have easily available pollen and nectar.

And it helps if the flowers are the local variety with which residents of the area -human and insect- are comfortable[i].

When I was young, my mother was the gardener in our family. Each spring, we used to drive into downtown Winnipeg most Saturdays to buy garden supplies because my mother was very particular about what, and where she planted.

“You have to plant things that produce a lot of nectar for the insects, G,” she would tell me as I followed her around the garden as the snow was disappearing. I don’t know how she knew because her parents grew up way across the country in the lower mainland of British Columbia where they hardly had any winter, let alone blizzards like the prairies.

Anyway, she always told me that strawberries and raspberries were a good choice for spring, and wild mint for the summer insects. Then she switched to white asters, or something for the fall. I can’t actually remember their names, so her patient explanations were wasted on me, I’m afraid.

But, looking back on it, her concern for pollinators and insects seemed to be ahead of the time. “I won’t plant petunias, though, G,” I remember she once told me, shaking her head slowly at the very idea. “The new varieties apparently have so many petals there is hardly any room for nectar on them.”

I think my father felt guilty that my mother had pretty well taken complete control of the garden, however. In the autumn, as the falling leaves were collecting on the browning grass, he seemed to feel it was his duty (and mine) to rake all the leaves that had fallen onto the little fenced lawn behind our house and burn the whole pile of them. I used to love the smell of burning leaves that wafted over the fence from nearby yards where other fathers had no doubt been tasked with that very same job.

My mother, however, had a different idea about what should be done with the fallen leaves, twigs, and broken branches from the trees that stood guard in the lane behind our house. She was okay with burning some of it -she didn’t want my father to lose face with the neighbours- but she insisted he leave a small pile of it undisturbed in the far corner of the yard.

I heard them arguing about it one evening when our street was fragrant with burning piles in other yards. He wanted to tidy up the yard for the coming winter like all the other fathers, I suppose. It was a guy-thing I’m pretty sure, but my mother was adamant about leaving the little pile undisturbed. “Burn the rest, dear; G and I love the smell, but the little pile over there is special.” I remember she hugged my father at that point and stroked his hair. Men are so easily manipulated.

The next morning I asked her about the unburnt pile of leaves and twigs. “Why didn’t you want dad to burn everything so the yard would be clean?” There are so many mysteries when you’re young.

My mother put her arm around me and led me out to the remaining bits of flower stems in the now dead, or dying garden. She asked me to pull the dead stuff out and stack it on the pile my father had obediently kept in the corner of the yard. “If you leave plant stems and other leftovers from the garden on the pile, you help some of the insects who are going to pollinate again in the spring. It’s a place for them to hide when the really cold weather arrives.”

I must have looked confused at that, because she immediately took my hand and pointed at the pile.

“Where do you think our bumblebees can go to survive the winter, G? Or where the butterfly larvae could hang out and survive under the snow? I’m just giving them an extra chance.”

I’m not sure she actually knew if any of them would use the little pile, but she certainly convinced me… Mothers have special powers, though… and anyway, like my father, I was pretty easy to manipulate.

[i] https://www.bbc.com/future/article/20230222-the-beautiful-flowers-that-bees-cant-use

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