Celebrate love with garden for birds, bees and butterflies

No matter how you celebrate the sweetest of all holidays, you can honor Valentine’s Day all year long — the growing season, that is — with a special garden that celebrates love.

St. Valentine’s Day has always been my favorite holiday and a recent foray into gardening books — old and new — has made clear the enormous number of beautiful red-pink flowers that could be used to create a valentine — or sweetheart — garden.

Last year at this time, I wrote a column about creating a valentine garden using flowers that were meaningful. It was interesting and fun to research but this time around I decided to go with the glory of the flowers themselves, choosing for color, scent, beauty and attraction to the eye as well as birds, bees and butterflies. After all, without them, there would be no gardens. (That includes spiders, caterpillars, salamanders and garden snakes, too!)

To establish such a garden, it would be great if an existing perennial “focal point” could be used for starters. Peonies are a natural and roses — preferably small shrub types, come to mind as well. Lavender, lilies and Iris are also in the running. If you have such an asset, with a bit of space for some surround planting, you can create a pretty little — or large — area to treat the eye of visitors and enhance the lives off the winged visitors.

I have a lot of gardening books, but one of my favorites is a classic on butterfly gardening with illustrations by Edith Holden — writer of “The Country Diary of an Edwardian Lady” — with some of her notes and prose included as well. The author actually described the way a garden looks to a butterfly (or bird, etc.,) that is flying over and pointed out that a single flower is not likely to catch their eye, whereas a clump of one color will do the trick.

While red is the chosen color of valentines, butterflies love white flowers, so consider patches of daisies, white lilies, Lilies of the Valley, Valerian, or Baby’s breath.

Hummingbirds are attracted to reds and pinks — and that list is endless: Sweet Williams, bleeding hearts, Monarda, red-and-white and/or ruffled pink columbine, Foxglove (perfect for hummingbird beaks), Pinks, Mallow, Phlox, Penstemon, Betony, Salvia and Lobelia — for starters. Many of these choices are available in other colors too, and that’s a good thing. Different bees go for different flowers — as do the many pollinating flies.

The Viola family is a given — from wild violets (purple, white or yellow), pansies large and small and the tri-color viola — or Johnny Jump-up — “Heart’s ease” — offer innocent beauty and fragrance.

Shades of blue are found in love in a Mist, Larkspur, Forget-me-not, an enormous selection of Campanula or “bluebells” — from small ground-cover bells to delicate “harebells” to big blowsy “cups and saucers” are all hardy and beloved of buzzing pollen-seekers.

Don’t forget greenery! Hosta and Heuchera (Coral bells) are two of my favorites — hardy and sporting beautiful variegations as well as lovely ethereal flowers.

If you haven’t a focal perennial, perhaps you could mount a small trellis of wicker or wrought iron to support Clematis — our small-flowered work-free natives — Western Virgin’s Bower Columbiana is periwinkle blue with bell-flowers that beckon honey- and bumblebees (I’ve watched them!) and white-flowered Virgin’s Bower (ligusticifolia) — or our native Honeysuckle, or seed some annual

Sweet Peas for glorious color and fragrance.

Have a bird-bath for hot-day bathing and drinking for the birds, and place a butterfly “puddler” on a flat rock where those lovely creatures and their beneficial filmy-winged cousins — lacewings, dragonflies, etc., can refresh as well. Mine is a terra-cotta leaf about a foot wide and 1/2-inch deep, with bright glass marbles in the water for pretty perching.

Obviously, this little garden will not be launched until snow season is over, so if you’re a seed-planter, start them soon! As for me, I prefer waiting for one of our many wonderful independent greenhouse/nurseries to open and buy ready-started plants. If you buy from a big-box store, please pull and read lable-bottoms carefully for the word “neonic” and if it’s there, refuse to buy them. Neonics are bee- and pollinator killers of the worst sort and an evil foisted on innocent gardeners by the Bayer company. They’ve been outlawed in Britain — Hooray for Prince Charles!

In mid-summer when your little Love Garden blooms, you’ll have many “Valentine days” to enjoy your efforts. Meanwhile, join me in making up the plant list; that’s half the fun!

Valle Novak writes the Country Chef and Weekend Gardener columns for the Daily Bee. She can be reached at bcdailybee@bonnercountydailybee.com or by phone at 208-265-4688.