Winter is raging outside but my avian friends are zapping around with great energy, working their way through my supplies of safflower and sunflower seed, taking sips from the bird bath and gathering the bounty of seed that still remains on Joe Pye, Anise Hyssop, Purple Coneflower and many more stars of summer.
A
small selection of seed, all native, all gathered fresh in 2020, is for sale on this site. And the
2021 plant list has been posted, for those who like to spend the next few months dreaming of spring.
To help with your planning, you could not do better than to get Heather Holm's book,
Pollinators of Native Plants: Attract, Observe and Identify Pollinators and Beneficial Insects with Native Plants. It is far more than an insect guide. In fact, it's realy a plant guide with some 65 perennials described in detail, including their flowering period and conditions - sun or shade, moist or dry, sand, loam or clay. All beautifully illustrated with diagrams and great photos. An excellent Christmas gift!
For those who want to delve further into the world of bees, there's
Bees: An Identification and Native Plant Forage Guide, also by Heather Holm, offering more detail on bee species, and more information about what plants they like, and how those plants grow.
And, this just added,
Befriending Bumble Bees: A Practical Guide to Raising Local Bumble Bees, by a team of entomologists from the University of Minnesota, is a comprehensivce guide to bumble bees, of which there are 250 species worldwide, 40 in North America, 21 east of the 100th meridian. Many are in decline, so we all need to understand them better.
Also available are Return of the Native gift certificates. Books and certificates are listed under
Garden Accessories 
