POLLINATOR GARDENS
Design with Life in Mind
This month, we're exploring one of the most exciting and rewarding areas of garden design: POLLINATOR GARDENS.
A pollinator garden is a purposeful, layered design that provides food, shelter and water for the creatures that keep our natural world functioning. And the best part? These gardens can be breathtakingly beautiful.
In this month's guide, we'll walk through ways you can adjust your planting designs to help pollinators thrive. We'll cover who you're designing for, how to build a plant palette that works across every season, and how to incorporate habitat features that make a garden ecologically impactful.
Whether you're designing for a client or your own outdoor space, this guide will give you a solid foundation and a new lens through which to design gardens.
Let's dig in!
GOODNESS FOR YOU THIS MONTH
Below you will find several items to help you learn more about POLLINATOR GARDENS. From written words to video to applied activities to our Design Library to group discussions. Explore our topic from different angles and gain a new perspective. Click below to download a PDF of your Garden Design Guide and activity. Further down you will find a video and links to our community, plus two live Monthly Meetups!
VIDEO: Build Your Pollinator Plant Palette
This video shows how how I approached this month's activity, by using an AI tool to create a plant palette. Make sure to download the activity above for more details and to copy the provided AI prompts.
RESOURCES in our DESIGN LIBRARY
Below are some past Garden Design Guides to help you with this month's topic.
MATRIX PLANTINGS
The most impactful of the three plant layers. It exists to suppress weeds, control erosion, and overall covers the soil. Also called green or living mulch. It's functional and can be aesthetically unifying too.
PLANT LAYERS
In wild plant communities plants naturally grow in three general layers, so let's use this idea to help us organize plants vertically in our own designs. The three PLANT LAYERS include: structural, seasonal theme and groundcover/matrix.
DESIGNED PLANT COMMUNITIES
Designed plant communities are a fresh way of thinking about planting design…more about relationships than individual plants. Instead of focusing on single specimens, this approach looks at how groups of plants can work together, much like they do in nature.
POLLINATOR GARDEN PLANS
Below are some planting guides from Monrovia Nursery that include several pollinator garden plans that I designed. Use these to think about how you can organize your plantings into an outdoor space. FYI...there is a little bit of overlap between them.
OUR COMMUNITY
Don't forget to hang out with us this month.
Check in to share your activity. Try it yourself and/or learn from the submissions of your peers. No need to stress. Just enjoy!
ACTIVITY:
Build Your Pollinator Plant Palette
This month, you'll choose one pollinator to design for, then build a simple plant palette that supports it, suits your region, and keeps something in bloom across every season.
Do you have a question?
Do you have a question on this month's topic or another design question? Let's all learn together!
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Click below to add it to our community.
Moved closer to a goal?
Share your win with us.
Tell us what you’ve done this month that got you one step closer to your dream...we’re ready to celebrate with you!
LIVE SESSIONS
We have two this month: our normal Monthly MeetUp, plus we have a guest speaker. These will be recorded in case you can't make it (then posted right back here). Check out all UPCOMING MEETUPS here.
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Please CLICK HERE to sign up for a Small Group Introduction session with me and four of your peers.
Pollinator Plants
We're excited to have Megan McConnell from Monrovia Nursery join us to discuss some cool pollinator plants that we can include in our own garden designs.
Friday, May 8
11 AM PT | Noon MT | 1 PM CT | 2 PM ET
London: 7 PM BST
Sydney: May 9 at 4 AM AEST
Monthly MeetUp
Let's catch up on this month's topic, plus share our activities. I can't wait to see you!
Thursday, May 21
Noon PT | 1 PM MT | 2 PM CT | 3 PM ET
London: 8 PM BST
Sydney: May 22 at 5 AM AEST
I'd love your feedback once you've devoured all this goodness.
Drop me a note at the email below and let me know what you loved and what could be improved. Thank you!
Please contact me at hello@papergardenworkshop.com
