Conflicting Signals

We love our flowers at the Genuine Faux Farm, and we make a big to-do about the German bearded iris and the day lilies, with the big, bright and showy flowers.  We also love our pollinators at the Genuine Faux Farm, and we make a similarly big to-do about how we strive to make our farm friendly for beneficial insects and other critters to flourish and thrive - all while pollinating our veggie and fruit crops.

But, when these big flowers bloom, we rarely see any pollinators visiting them.  Instead, we see pollinators on flowers like this:

Rudebekia, Purple Coneflower, Milkweed, and numerous smaller, less showy flowers like clover, goldenrod, or hyssop are the stars when it comes to pollinator attention.  And we know why that is.

You see, the highly hybridized day lilies are bred specifically for flower and plant characteristics that humans appreciate.  There is very little, if any, consideration for making sure the traits that make a lily flower interesting to a pollinator remain (or are enhanced).  In fact, there has been so many generations of selection to get flowers like the one I opened the blog with that I wouldn't be surprised that pollinators, if they could talk to us, would tell us that these are not, in their eyes, even flowers.

On the other hand, flowering plants that are native to our region or are closer to the native strains have been selected over time by the pollinators.  What I mean by that is that many of these plants rely on pollinators for their reproduction.  If pollinators do not visit, then these types of flower cease to reproduce successfully - so it is in their interest to show off for the pollinators.  If humans like them, that's fine too, because then we're less likely to mow them down or spray them, I guess.

On the other hand, an iris, like the one shown above survives and is able to propagate as long as humans show them favor.  So, the big blooms that don't tend to attract pollinators make sense because their path to survival is to impress US.  

This, of course, does not mean that these flowers fail to attract attention from other critters.  Deer have been known to take healthy bites of our day lilies and there are other insect pests that can give these plants some grief.  This is the source of some of the conflicting signals I referenced in the blog title comes from.

Even today, many of the big companies that propagate perennial plants that people like to put in their gardens still use neonicotinoids to provide a systemic resistance to pest insects that like to munch on decorative plants.  After all, a decorative plant with bites taken out of it seems much less decorative.  But the problem with this is the fact that neonics do not discriminate.  They kill pollinators just as readily as they do the pests that damage the plants.

This is why we got away from buying plants unless we could ascertain whether or not they were treated with these systemic insecticides.  Yet we still have these big beautiful plants here and there on our farm.

Are we sending conflicting signals?

Well, if we didn't send at least some conflicting signals about most anything we do, we would not be humans.  Humans are notoriously inconsistent.  But, we are doing the best we can to be as consistent as we are able.  We still love our big and bold flowers and we still love the less conspicuous flowers that the pollinators appreciate.  

We are consistent in our inconsistency.  We appreciate beauty in many forms.  We respect nature and how it works.  We do our best to find a balance.  We are always questioning whether we've got it right or not.  We do our best to adjust as we learn.

At present, our big beautiful blooms coexist with our pollinator habitats.  Neonicotinoid treatments are typically residual in a plant for one to two years.  So, any plants we may have unknowingly acquired with this insecticide (and are still alive) should have worked it out of their system.  Newer plants have generally been purchased after inquiring about pesticide treatments.  And we continue to work on providing wild space for our pollinators.

It's a worthwhile effort.  What do you think?