2021 Pollinator Garden

When COVID started in 2020, one of the projects I started was a small polinator garden on the side of our house. My intent was to grow native plants to help support the bees, butterflies, and other pollinators. My goal was to create this garden as inexpensive as possible, relying on seeds and buying clearance plants that still had life left in them. This past summer I was given so much beauty for those efforts. Planting trailing vines of moonflowers, scarlet runner beans, melons, pumpkins, and guards. Milkweed, marigold, zinnia, floxglove, dhalias, butterfly bush, lavender, and bee blam. Next year, I hope the poppies I planted this year will come up and bloom. My passion flower vines even produced FRUIT this year! The garden has been full of bees and butterflies.

I was able to create art among this garden, not only using it as an outdoor studio but as my muse in some of the most beautiful work I’ve helped create to date. Shifting my creative work these past 2 years has been some of the hardest times I’ve gone through creatively but I’m starting to see the reward in the hardship. The beauty is starting to emerge from that darkness.

I’ve been creating weekly flower arrangements from this garden. The pumpkins and guards are now adorning the steps to our doors, welcoming the fall season. This garden is as much part of my creative process as is the art that is produced from it. It all starts in the garden. I’ve already started thinking of ways to improve it next year, what additional seeds I want to plant, the art I plan on creating from those seeds. It is a beautiful process.