Plant a square metre of native forage

Why this works

Wild bees are habitat-limited. They need flowering forage with continuity through the season, nesting substrate (bare soil, undisturbed stems, or cavities depending on species), and minimal pesticide exposure. A single square metre of regionally-appropriate native flowering plants in a yard, balcony container, schoolyard corner, or community-garden bed provides forage; if left undisturbed and not sprayed, it also functions as nesting substrate for several solitary bee species. The intervention is small but it is not nothing — especially because most of these species have foraging ranges measured in hundreds of metres, so a sufficiently dense network of small patches behaves like a single large one.

The honest caveat: one square metre will not move a Red List status. It is real habitat at a tiny scale, and its main value is collective. If a million readers each plant one square metre, the cumulative new pollinator forage is a thousand square kilometres. That is a meaningful policy-relevant fraction of urban green space in most countries.

What you need

• A patch of soil you control — yard, balcony, schoolyard, allotment, community garden, or even one large planter (~50 cm × 50 cm minimum).
• Access to a regional native-plant nursery or a seed-swap network or a domestic native-seed mail-order vendor. Do not buy from a generic garden centre’s “pollinator mix” rack without checking provenance — many of these contain non-native species or treated seed.
• A regional native-plant list. Three good starting points:
  • Xerces Society pollinator-friendly plant lists (ecoregion-specific for North America)
  • Royal Horticultural Society — Plants for Pollinators (UK)
  • Bumblebee Conservation Trust — gardening for bumblebees (UK; principles transfer elsewhere)

For other regions: search your national or sub-national botanical society + the phrase “native pollinator plants”. Most temperate countries have one.

How to choose your plants

Aim for three to six species in your one square metre, chosen for:

• Native to your ecoregion. Not just native to your country — the same country can span multiple ecoregions with substantially different plant communities. The Xerces list (NA), the RHS list (UK), and most national botanical society lists are organised by ecoregion or hardiness zone for this reason.
• Bloom continuity from early spring to late autumn. A patch that flowers only in June is half as useful as one that flowers from March to October. Pick at least one early bloomer (think willow, dandelion if it counts as native in your context, early-season Salix or Pulmonaria), one mid-season (clover, foxglove, lavender, basil where appropriate), and one late-season (asters, sedums, ivy — yes, ivy is a major late-season pollinator resource where it’s native).
• Different floral shapes. Bumblebees with long tongues forage on tubular flowers; short-tongued solitary bees forage on open composites. Mixing flower morphologies serves more species.
• Easy to grow without irrigation. Plants that need constant watering rarely survive a normal life. Match plants to your soil and rainfall.

How to plant it

1. Clear a square metre. Remove grass and weeds. Loosen the top 10–15 cm. No fertiliser unless your soil is genuinely dead — most pollinator-friendly natives evolved on poor soils and rich soils favour aggressive non-natives that outcompete them.
2. Plant in spring or autumn. Mid-summer planting works only if you can irrigate.
3. Mulch lightly with leaf litter or fine bark. Leave at least a quarter of the patch bare; many solitary bee species nest in bare soil.
4. Do not spray anything on or near this patch. No herbicides, no pesticides, no fungicides. If you cannot guarantee that (e.g. your neighbour sprays), pick a corner farther from the spraying source.
5. Leave it alone in winter. Do not cut down dead stems until late spring — many solitary bee species overwinter inside them.

Bonus: turn it into a data point

Once your patch is flowering, photograph the bees that visit it and submit one or two clear photos to iNaturalist or directly to GBIF. A confirmed species ID from a single yard adds a real public data point to the species’ range map. In under-sampled regions, your one observation can genuinely fill a gap.

The companion project card on the library page covers the photo-submission step in detail.

What this is not

It is not a replacement for habitat-scale conservation. It is not a substitute for pesticide policy. It is not equivalent to protecting an existing meadow or hedgerow — mature semi-natural pollinator habitat is worth substantially more than newly-planted gardens, and where it exists it should be defended first.

It is a low-friction, replicable, individual action that gets you and the people around you into a relationship with the pollinators in your immediate area. That relationship is the actual deliverable.

This project card is published under CC BY-SA 4.0. Print, copy, translate, and adapt freely; please keep the source citations intact.