- Howdy, I'm John Hart Asher.

This week on "Central Texas Gardener," let's please the native bees and other pollinator buddies.

At Doug and Ann's home in Jarrell, wildlife graze four acres of native plant gardens on former Blackland Prairie ranchland.

Dr. Sean Griffin from the Wildflower Center explores how native bees and plants interact.

Pick a few drought-tough groundcovers with William Glenn, plus Daphne Richards answers all your questions.

So, let's get growing, right here, right now.

- [Announcer] "Central Texas Gardener" is made possible by generous support from Lisa and Desi Rhoden, Diane Land and Steve Adler, and by the Travis County Master Gardeners Association.

(gentle music) (gentle music continues) - These days, wildlife graze four acres of native plant gardens on former Blackland Prairie ranchland in Jarrell, home to Doug and Ann Garrett.

- We call it the three B ranch, the bird, bee, and butterfly paradise.

And that's what we've worked to do.

My name is Doug Garrett.

My wife Ann and I moved into this house in 2010 and started the yard then.

It was a pasture, a cow ranch, cattle ranch at the time.

We ran a shredder over it and started putting in four-inch pots.

About 1,500 plants later, (laughs) we've got close to three and a half, four acres of native Texas flower gardens, pollinator-friendly, native clump grasses, and shrubs.

One of the things that we really were attracted to about this property was, first of all, the pond, which is beautiful.

It's creek bottomland.

And the whole development is a wildlife cooperative so designated by the fourth generation landowner who wanted to keep this in the state that it was, rather than having it turned into a bunch of little pink houses all in a row.

So everybody in the development manages their land for the benefit of the wildlife.

And, you know, bees, birds and butterflies, deer, foxes, bobcats, a cougar, red foxes, you name it.

We got it all out here.

It's quite the show.

It's quite a show, a great place to live.

This is wonderful Blackland prairie clay, about two feet deep.

Creek bottom, Salado creek's right back there to back the property.

But it is full of rocks.

It's got more rocks in it than chocolate chip cookie dough has chips in it when you make it yourself.

(Doug laughs) We started digging up these rocks, trying to put plants in with a rock bar and a shovel.

We ruined no less than a dozen shovels.

We got embarrassed going back to the Craftsman store to turn our shovels in broke, and that was so many we busted.

I bent two rock bars, and we unearthed all these huge boulders that you see surrounding all the beds.

Moved it with, mostly with the big rocks, with two-wheeled dolly.

I worked my way through college in a warehouse, and I'm pretty good with a two-wheeled dolly.

We kept digging up these really weird globular rocks.

They were just like, formed as perfect circles anywhere from the size of a softball up to a beach ball.

And they have all kinds of dimples in them.

When you bust it open, we found that it was a form of flint called chert, which is a very not just regular flint, but the best flint for making tools, knives, arrowheads, spearheads.

And for that reason, this area around here was been found to be one of the oldest continuously settled parts of North America, right over here in Florence, at the Gault site.

UT has been doing archeology for a decade or so now, and they've gotten back to 18,000 years ago, and there were people living here continuously since then.

As a building science geek, which is what I was for most of my career.

It was about understanding nature, understanding how systems work and just working with them instead of trying to force them to be something they can't be.

And what I understand now is that the plant above ground that we see is very dependent upon a huge culture of fungi and bacteria that do all the real work.

We believe in just kinda listening to the plants and letting them decide where they want to grow.

A lot of it's trial and error.

You know, we planted all this area with lantanas at one time, and then we found out when it rains hard, water stands there, comes down, hits the slope of the property and stands there three inches deep for five days.

Lantanas don't like that, they die.

So it's all Gulf muhly and Louisiana iris and plants that like that sort of thing there.

So you just have to figure out your land in your yard.

Where's the water go?

Where does the sun go?

You know, under the mama oak.

Huge oak mott.

No sun.

We couldn't even get much of anything to grow there.

But then we finally found out.

Turk's cap and beautyberry.

They like shade like that.

And they've gone crazy.

And they make it a beautiful area now.

So you got to figure out what you got and what can grow there, and then grow more of it.

(Doug laughs) That's the only thing you can do, you know, unless you're gonna work real hard.

I see people trying to grow azaleas here.

And I'm like, seriously?

Really?

(Doug laughs) An acid-loving plant.

You're gonna grow it on top of 300 feet of limestone?

(Doug laughs) Go ahead.

I don't want to work that hard.

Sometimes we'll put a plant some place and then we'll notice that it's moving year by year.

It's like, okay, it's over here.

Now it's 20 feet over there.

And you're like, ah, it didn't like it.

That's too shady for it, I think.

It wants to be over here.

And without us doing anything, it'll just reseed itself down to another area and we're like, okay, you want to be there, that's fine.

And we don't have to do anything and it looks good, attracts tons of butterflies and bees.

We're good to go with that.

So, I don't try to force gardens to be certain things and have plants be in like little rows or anything.

Like, I bet you 30% of the plants in this yard are volunteers.

We started off with a couple of four-inch pots and all this stuff just spread and we've let it go where it wanted to go.

I decided I wanted moving water.

I just went and got a about two feet of eighth-inch copper, stuff you use for plumbing your ice maker in your fridge.

Got a cheap plastic planter.

Drilled a half-inch hole in it near the bottom, took a grommet, stuck the grommet in there.

Shove the piece of copper through it on the inside.

You can go to the plumbing department, and they'll have a little connector that you just snap onto the end of the eighth of an inch.

It's got a regular ball valve in it.

You can adjust the drip rate as you want.

You just fill, put about 3 or 4 gallons of water in the pot in the morning.

When you're filling up, washing out the rest of the birdbath.

And for all day long you got drip, drip, drip, drip and it's moving water.

I tell you how much the birds are appreciative of this.

I went organic after I sprayed my pecan trees with malathion one time, got a wind blow back and it broke out in a rash from head to toe and said, "That's not good.

There's got to be a better way to do this than those things."

That was back in '86, '85.

I've quit using all the chemicals.

So we do all this with, you know, seaweed, fish emulsion, blackstrap molasses.

I like the way that the light shines through those crystals.

I got myself a two-foot chunk of number 3 rebar.

And I drilled a half inch hole in a tree stump for a cut down cedar that I, you know, left the stump there because it was too big to remove the whole thing and started putting these bars into these, you know, rebars in it and hanging these crystals on it.

They rotate in the sun, in the wind.

They sparkle and shoot all kinds of light.

It's kinda like looking at a vertical kaleidoscope.

I just kept collecting it over the years.

Just one of those ideas.

And then she just paints everything.

She's always been into wrought iron and she, we had all these wrought iron yard art.

And then she decided it wasn't pretty enough.

So she started painting all of it.

It also gives us a way to name the beds, 'cause when you get to, like, 50 beds, it'll drive you crazy trying to figure out which one the other person's referring to.

I wouldn't call us artists, but I'd call her an artist.

But I just mess around with stuff.

I just enjoy having that reward for, you know, like, Ann says: "You do the work and then you see the reward, the result, and you know that you made that happen."

I enjoy learning about new things.

Always enjoyed learning all of my career in life.

There's endless amounts you can learn about plants and nature and how to grow them, different ones.

And it's just something that when it's done and I come out and spend a lot of time sitting out here with a glass of sweet tea, you know, on nice days, just to watch all the butterflies and bees and hummingbirds and songbirds and everything that just populates this yard all the time.

And the color, it's amazing.

- What are native bees and how do they interact with native plants?

Today, we're really delighted to meet with Dr. Sean Griffin, director of science and conservation at the Lady Bird Johnson Wildflower Center, to hear what he's discovered in his restoration-focused research.

Dr. Griffin, welcome to the show.

- Yeah.

Thanks, John.

- Today, we're gonna talk about some pollinators, but first, I want to back up and talk about your focus as a researcher at the center and what are some of the projects that y'all are looking at right now?

- Yeah, so as a restoration ecologist, working at the Wildflower Center is kind of amazing because we have this long legacy of restoration-focused research.

So our biggest project is this 25-year study that was established by Dr. Mark Simmons to understand land management and how to manage our land in Central Texas.

And this study was set up to look at the effects of prescribed burning across three different seasons as well as mowing and other restoration techniques because fire historically would've been a really important driver of plant communities across Texas, especially in this time where we're seeing a lot of drought and changes in the environment.

We're able to use this long-term data set to understand how we should better manage our lands and how we expect plants and animals to respond.

Talking about pollinators, we're able to use this long-term data set to understand how what we do on the land and how everything is changing is affecting the plants that pollinators use for food.

- When we talk about pollinators though, we aren't necessarily just talking about bees, correct?

- Yeah, so pollinators is kind of this umbrella term that we use to describe any animals that provide pollination services to plants.

And so pollination is the transport of pollen from one flower to another.

It enables plant reproduction.

And bees are probably our most important pollinators for most plants because they're evolved for a life with plants, they have specialized hair to carry pollen.

But they're not the only pollinators.

What a lot of people don't realize is, actually, a lot of flies are really important pollinators, especially in times of year when it's cold or rainy, when it's not good conditions for bees.

Moths and butterflies can also serve as pollinators.

They're often not as hairy as bees, they're not adapted to that life, but they can carry pollen really long distances.

And they're also evolved to specialize in certain plants.

- [John] I've seen some pretty hirsute moths though.

- That's true.

That's true.

(John laughs) Some of the moths are better and actually, to some extent, it's not understood how important moths are to pollination.

So it's kind of interesting.

Another pollinator that we really love here in Texas are the hummingbirds.

And hummingbirds are something that we're thinking about a lot with our work right now because some of our rarest plants in Texas are actually evolved to be pollinated by hummingbirds and other animals that you wouldn't think of as pollinators.

You can always tell a hummingbird plant versus a plant that's evolved to have bee pollinators because bees actually can't see red.

To them, it looks gray or looks like a different color because they don't have those receptors.

- A lot of people are worried about colony collapse with honeybees.

Those European honeybees.

But, really, your focus, I presume, is really a bit more on the native bees.

What's the difference between sort of honeybees and our native bees?

Because those are solitary, right?

- Yeah, it's a great question.

So honeybees, like you mentioned, are a non-native species that were brought in from Europe.

They're really important for our agriculture.

And there was this big campaign with colony collapse and other diseases to save the bees.

But what people didn't really realize through all of that is that the honeybees and the number of honeybees that we have in the US are actually largely dictated by markets.

And so if honeybees are affected by disease, farmers will actually compensate and raise more colonies, they'll increase the prices.

So we just don't worry as much about the honeybees beyond agriculture.

What we study in our work is the native bees.

They're not all solitary, but a lot of them are solitary.

These bees, actually, we have 4,000 in the United States.

And Texas has some of the highest native bee diversity in the country.

I think one of the highest diversities even in the world.

We have over a thousand species just in Texas.

And a lot of these are highly specialized.

Some of them will only come out for short periods of time.

And working in a place with this kind of bee diversity is really motivating because we really want to protect these really interesting species.

- There's so many bees.

They just found a new species with the blue mining bee that's only in Oklahoma and Texas.

- It's incredible that we're still discovering species like that.

- [John] What's sort of habitat that people, if they want to attract these native bees, what do they need to be looking at within their landscape?

- So a lot of the bees that I'm thinking about these days are the bumblebees.

A lot of these are not specialized and you may not think that they're in danger because people are really used to seeing them around the garden.

But bumblebees, especially in Central Texas, are one of our most important bees for pollination of native plants.

So they are large, they're hairy, they make these colonies, and they forage a lot of the year.

And so a lot of plants are adapted specifically to these bees as one of the most important pollinators in the system.

Another thing about bumblebees is that they require large amounts of habitat in order to survive.

So some of the other solitary bees, like sweat bees, may not need as much habitat in order to thrive.

But bumblebees need an acre or more of good habitat in order to survive.

And so this means that in the city, you'll actually see areas that may not have enough habitat to support them and you won't see the bumblebees.

It's a good indicator of, you know, neighbors or communities having green space if you see bumblebees around.

So what I really encourage people to think about is that every yard can be part of that habitat.

It may not be the entire habitat for any given bee, but you're kind of joining with your community and creating this network of community that bees can use to thrive.

- Right, so you don't just have to have an acre of land- - No, no.

- If it's collectively with everybody's incorporating a little bit of habitat.

That adds up pretty quick.

Some of our native bees like bare ground.

As gardeners, we tend to think of bare ground as an anathema or something.

And then I've also heard, you know, leave those stems out.

You know, maybe if you cut 'em, cut 'em back to a third.

They'll eventually go away between all the stuff that's growing.

But those stems will have some of those nesting bees come up and set up and lay their eggs in those hollow stems.

Is that correct?

- Absolutely.

I think the thing to consider with encouraging native bees in your yard or your land, in general, is to have a diversity of resources as much as possible.

So that's a diversity of flowers, lots of different species, ideally native plants that they're adapted to, but also a diversity of different nesting habitats.

So, like you're saying, having stems.

Try to leave some of those pithy stems up through the winter.

Those are great homes for bees.

Also, have some areas of your yard, it doesn't have to be your whole yard, but some areas that you leave bare, some areas where you leave some litter, because there's such a diversity of bees, again, here in Texas, that they all have a diversity of requirements.

And a lot of the bumblebees, actually, will nest in bunches of grass or in areas in abandoned mouse nests.

And so it's really important to leave some areas that may have some woody material to create those nesting habitats for bumblebees.

- What's your take on bee houses?

- So I am pro if you're able to take care of them.

So there's been a lot of really good work on bee hotels and that kind of nesting habitat.

And what they find is if you have those in your yard, you have those in your community, it's creating nesting resources that may not exist otherwise.

So that's really important.

But if you leave them out for long periods of time, they can build up disease and parasite loads.

And so that means that it's important to regularly, maybe every year or two, switch out the materials in those bee hotels.

Just to back up and explain what they are, they're usually these wooden boxes or some sort of box that's filled with either bamboo or some sort of tube that bees, solitary bees, can go in and make nests, lay their eggs.

And then usually they over winter in there, the young bees develop, and then fly out in the spring, which means that if you catch them after they fly, sometime in the early summer or mid-summer, then you can actually switch those nests out and replace them with other tube.

- Sean, thank you so much for coming in today.

We've gone over a lot of material.

But I know people are gonna be excited to really get in and start to create some wonderful bee habitat.

Well, next, let's check in with Daphne Richards.

(gentle music) - We usually don't think of tropical bougainvillea as a pollinator plant, but the tiny white flowers tucked inside the colorful, eye-catching bracts attract butterflies and bees.

Last fall, Joe Limon spotted this lovely bougainvillea on a neighborhood walk.

Then he noticed a large pollinator on a flower, just seconds before an anole jumped out of nowhere to snatch it.

Lots of pollinators flock to the pink to lavender flowers on Texas sage, aka Cenizo.

Kirsten Ueber wants to know how to prune her lanky shrubs.

She also wants to know if they have some type of fungal disease.

Actually, this infestation appears to be a very large colony of lichen, and the best course of action is to prune out all of the dead areas caused by it.

Unfortunately, the lichen infestation is emblematic of a wider long-term problem.

Lichens tend to grow in cool, moist, shady conditions, and the only way to completely control the population on these infested Cenizos would be to completely change the environment.

Texas sages are xeric, sun-loving shrubs that thrive in heat, so they'll continue to be stressed in this moist, shady situation, making them susceptible to lichen, fungi, and other environmental issues.

We'd love to hear from you.

Head to CentralTexasGardener.org to send us your questions, pictures, and videos.

- Next, add a few drought-tough groundcovers with William Glenn.

(gentle music) - Hello, I'm William Glenn with Greensleeves Nursery and today we are going to talk a little bit about groundcovers.

There are a lot of things out there called groundcovers.

As the name implies, these are things that cover the ground.

They tend to have a low form and a spreading habit.

And there's a lot of things out there too that are non-native and maybe don't have such a great ecological benefit.

But we have plenty to choose from here in Central Texas, so I thought that today we could go over a few of those that would have an ecological niche, a benefit, a context that would maybe improve your garden in terms of having some of the wildlife that's associated with it, also with the little bit of lower maintenance that would be associated as opposed to say a lawn.

We use these plants in between larger plants, or if you're considering a lawn conversion or reducing the size of your lawn, there's some excellent choices out there beyond what we're gonna go over today.

The first one that we've got is a soft-hair marbleseed.

This one's a little bit taller when it blooms, but it is a absolutely stunning plant that has a pendulous bloom, white, that's followed by a little black seed that gives it its name, the marbleseed.

It's just a really classic, beautiful, dry shade groundcover that is typically not messed with by deer.

Next, we're gonna jump over into a couple of the skullcaps.

This here is a purple skullcap.

It stays squat and short.

It has nice little purple blooms on it.

It's in the salvia family.

And to circle back to deer resistance, a lot of times when you're looking for something that is deer-resistant, the rule of S is a good thing to remember.

Is it a salvia?

Is it spiny?

Is it stinky?

Is it silver?

Those things will help you.

If you get any two of those, you're pretty safe that it's going to be deer-resistant.

So that's the case with this one.

A purple little tubular flowers that are really beautiful and sometimes visited by maybe butterflies that are smaller and occasionally even see hummingbirds dancing around them.

So this is the purple skullcap.

And I will also show you the heartleaf skullcap, which is even more shade-tolerant.

Also a beautiful sort of periwinkle bloom on this one.

It's really an underused plant and does well in the shade.

So sometimes when you have some challenges with shade, this is gonna be a good one to sort of think about in terms of maybe just filling in a gap under a beautyberry, or maybe a Turk's cap, or something like that, where you've got some stems that you wanna hide under the skirt of this.

Let's hit one of our native grasses that's maybe not as well-known.

This here is called muhlenbergia utilis.

The common name is aparejo grass.

And it's kind of like a miniature bamboo muhly for those of you who are familiar.

But it's great for bank stabilization, erosion control, that sort of thing, because it has a vigorous outward growth.

But it also is gonna provide things like nesting material for birds.

It's just an underused plant.

You can mow it, you can walk on it, you can let it kinda go.

And it has a billowy, really pretty sort of effect out in the landscape.

So if you wanted a bit of a wilder look, this one is a really wonderful choice as a groundcover.

Next, we will hit one of the more popular ones.

This is woolly stemodia, and I think it's a great substitute for another popular native called silver ponyfoot.

Silver ponyfoot is a wonderful groundcover.

It's easy to take care of, but sometimes it fails after a year or two, and people are puzzled as to why.

This one really doesn't do that as often.

It likes dry and hot once it's established, and it also has pretty little kind of periwinkle blooms.

It'll cascade, it'll spread.

And it's just really a nice contrast in terms of color and foliage.

And then we're gonna go over this one.

This is a menodora.

This is a really pretty little groundcover.

It only gets about eight or 10 inches tall, and then it blooms with this tubular sort of peachy yellow that is very alluring to me as a gardener.

Really, a pretty addition if you want that sort of lily look and a really short plant.

Obviously, filling a low space.

And finally, we're gonna jump over to this.

Gregg's dalea.

Some people say dalea.

It is a member of the legume family, so it's gonna improve your soil.

It also has pretty little blooms that are purple.

Underused, wonderful as covering the ground like a blanket and also cascading over things.

So when you're thinking about making some green mulch, if you will, eliminating the look of the wood or the gravel and getting more green in there, consider some of these native perennials.

Local provenance is always preferred.

That means the seeds or the mother plant was locally obtained, and that will ensure or at least hedge against failure.

For "Backyard Basics," I'm William Glenn.

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As always, adopt the pace of nature; her secret is patience.

(gentle music) - [Announcer] Central Texas Gardener is made possible by generous support from Lisa and Desi Rhoden, Diane Land and Steve Adler, and by the Travis County Master Gardeners Association.

(gentle flute music)