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DAE think the 'native plants only' crowd goes too far? My 8 year old Japanese maple in Portland is the most alive thing on my block
Last April I counted 14 bee species on that one tree while my neighbor's all-native yard sat mostly empty, so maybe a non-native tree in a city is doing more for bugs than a patch of native grass, and I want to know if anyone else has actually counted pollinators instead of just repeating the rule.
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derek_lee23d ago
I did the same thing two summers ago with a flowering quince in my front yard, just sat out there with a notebook for 20 minutes at a time. Got 11 kinds of bees over a week, plus hoverflies and a couple wasps I still can't name. The native-only strip by my fence got maybe 4 kinds, mostly honeybees when the sedum opened. What sold me was the timing. That quince blooms in March when almost nothing native is up yet, so it feeds the early bees that would otherwise have nothing. A yard with both does better than either one alone, and most people arguing about this don't seem to count anything.
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