The Bee-Friendly Garden: Design an Abundant, Flower-Filled Yard that Nurtures Bees and Supports Biodiversity by Kate Frey and Gretchen LeBuhn is a gorgeous book filled with pretty pictures and useful advice to help anyone create a yard or garden filled with flowers that bees love. This book creates a great conversational piece. It would also be a lovely little coffee table book.
The layout of the book is fairly straightforward. This 224 page softcover book starts out with a preface to why the authors made this book and an introduction that tells us the benefits of a bee-friendly garden. There are 6 chapters that talk about bees, plants for pollinators, what bees require in a garden and how to make your garden safer for them, bee garden design, and how to help the bees by protecting and promoting. After the chapters there is a resource list, plant lists divided by region, photography credits, and an index to help you find things easier within the book.
Here is the chapter layout:
- Chapter 1: Our Friends, the Bees
- Chapter 2: Plants For Your Bee-Friendly Garden
- Chapter 3: Bee-Friendly Plants for Edible Gardens
- Chapter 4: Bee Garden Basics
- Chapter 5: Designing Your Bee Garden
- Chapter 6: Beyond Your Own Backyard - Becoming a Bee Activist
I love pollinators! Not just bees, but some species of ants, bats, beetles, birds, butterflies, flies, moths, wasps, as well as other unusual animals are also essential and beneficial to flowering plants. If we didn't have these creatures then there wouldn't be much to eat or look at. Unfortunately bees and some of these other creatures need our help to survive. With the rise in colony collapse disorder (CCD) in honeybee populations and decline in native bees we need to be vigilant in protecting them, promoting ways to help them, educating the public, and creating a safer, more inviting world for them to live in.
National Pollinator Week is June 20 - 26, 2016 and even though I believe that pollinators should be celebrated, protected, and promoted every day, this week is special. It is a time that we all should put aside to help these creatures out. I will be incorporating lessons in my homeschooling about pollinators during that week. My children have already been assisting me in the garden. I believe we have an obligation to teach our children when they are young about what good they can do to help out in the world.
On my own property I have started to invite more species of pollinators to my garden and yard. I spent two weeks ripping out English ivy to procure the way for flowering plants that bees love, like ajuga and columbine. I have planted a large pot of violas for my porch and am slowly adding more and more flowering plants to my landscape. Little by little I see more dancing, buzzing bees around my garden and not just honeybees, but native bumblebees, sweat bees, miner bees, and mason bees too. I have also noticed another pollinator, the hummingbirds, loving some of my flowers. Pollinators do so much good in my gardens that I want to give back to them and plant even more nourishment so they will thrive.
I have learned that planting flowering plants for the pollinators will also benefit me and if you do the same it will benefit you as well. Some benefits include: increasing and improving the quantity, quality, flavor, size of produce for food producing plants; your landscape being more abundantly beautiful throughout the seasons, learning how to have organic and pesticide free plants, your plants helping enrich the soil and bringing in beneficial insects, birds, and butterflies; and being healthier and happier as you reconnect with the outdoors making your gardens grow. I love how this wonderful cycle helps with our threatened food security and the very well being of this planet!
This book is a wonderful addition to my collection. It has helped me better understand how I can make a difference in my own landscape and in turn help some of the 4,000+ species of native bees in North America as well as the honeybees too. It helps us become ever more mindful of the plants we should (and should not!) plant to help the precious bees flourish. By purchasing, reading, and implementing the words in this book you will be taking one more step in preserving these wonderful pollinators and sustaining the world. Even a tiny change for the better is better than no change at all.
BUY IT
DISCLOSURE/DISCLAIMER: Thanks to Blogging For Books for sending me this book for free to review. My thoughts are mine and my family's own opinion and have not been altered by anyone else. I did not receive any other compensation for doing this review. Affiliate links may be in this posting. Thanks for supporting my blog.
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