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It’s taken a lot of work to rehabilitate the tiny patch of land at the centre of the small roundabout on Glen Drive and 10th Ave. in Vancouver, but for Katie Berlinguette, it was a labour of love.
“I live in an apartment, like a lot of Vancouverites, and I don’t have a patio or a yard,” she said, adding that when she went looking for space in a community garden earlier this spring, she found the wait list was long — about three to five years on average.
“During my internet search, I found the Green Streets Program, which is the next best thing.”
Soon, she had adopted the roundabout near her apartment that had a single overgrown rosebush that was almost six feet high. Now, the space she passes every day is a pollinator garden, filled with native plants like red-flowering currant and lupine, as well as edible plants and herbs. She also installed a solar-powered fountain.
She wanted to fill the space with drought tolerant plants, a huge priority, because it’s difficult to get water to the space.
“And then being environmentally conscious with native plants is very, very important, and it’s also what people in the neighbourhood have asked for.”
For the past few weeks, Berlinguette has been documenting her journey on TikTok in hopes of encouraging others to find ways to garden in the city.
“It’s a very busy cycle route and people are stopping every day that they see me and saying thank you.”
Small changes make a difference to urban spaces
To Kaushal Rathnayake, a pollinator biologist at the University of New Brunswick, protecting the habitat of pollinators like bees, butterflies and moths is crucial to protecting our own well-being.
Pollinators are an important part of healthy ecosystems, with almost three-quarters of the world’s plants relying on pollinators.
“We are destroying their habitats and we are destroying their food sources and we are creating inhospitable environments for these insects,” he said.
“Climate change is a big driver for their extinction, therefore, we have to conserve them and we have to take action to improve their well-being.”
No-Mow May, where residents are encouraged to let their lawns grow for the month so pollinators can thrive when they come out of hibernation, is an idea that’s caught on across Canada, as have pollinator gardens like the one Berlinguette tends to. But to properly support pollinators, experts say biodiversity is key, and that requires longer-term change on a larger scale.
That’s the heart of Jens Ulrich’s work as a PhD candidate at the University of British Columbia, where he just wrapped a three-year study showing that even small changes to urban green spaces — such as adding a small meadow in a city park — can make a huge difference for pollinator diversity.
A new study from UBC shows planting wildflower meadows and reducing mowing in city parks increased wild bee and hoverfly diversity. The findings from so-called “parks for bugs” are shaping city planning to make urban spaces more pollinator-friendly. Danielle Piper reports.
Ulrich has been collaborating with the City of Vancouver to see how park management impacts pollinators.
Eighteen parks were surveyed over the course of the study, with half maintained as they normally would be. For the other parks, Ulrich and his team created pollinator meadows by reducing mowing and adding wildflower seeds. They chose areas within the parks that had less foot traffic so the meadows would be less disruptive for those using the parks.
Oak Meadows Park, one of the nine areas that the team modified with pollinators in mind, now includes a meadow beside a soccer field. It features some taller vegetation, including some native plants like lupine.
The results of the study, published in Ecology Letters late last year, showed that the meadows had a huge impact. Many pollinators, such as bumblebees, sweat bees, honey bees, miner bees and hoverflies, came to the parks once the meadows were introduced, and stayed over the course of the three years.
“I believe we estimated that there’s about maybe 60 species per park in the parks with the meadows, versus closer to 30 species per park in our conventionally managed spaces,” said Ulrich.
The success of the project has resulted in the city keeping the nine meadows, and expanding the project to include meadows in more parks as well. Vancouver Parks Board landscape architect Jack Tupper, who worked with Ulrich, says that the city intends to change some of its six million square metres of lawn into a more beneficial habitat.
“This is something that every city should be doing,” said Tupper. “We found that the meadows that we’ve implemented between 2020 and 2023 were significantly beneficial to our city’s ecology.”
He said that the soil beneath the meadows retained moisture and stayed cooler — it also acted like a carbon sink, an area that absorbs more carbon from the atmosphere than it releases. They also found that the fungi and earthworm communities increased in the parks with meadows.
“We’re finding that the meadows are much more balanced environmentally and ecologically, which is really important through our summer months,” said Tupper.
He says seven per cent of the city’s lawns — around 42 hectares — have been transitioned to meadows, with the goal being to transition 10 per cent by 2030.
The city has also shared its findings with municipal colleagues across the country in the hope that they will do the same.
The importance of public pollinator spaces
Rathnayake, the pollinator biologist in N.B., first saw an uptick in pollinator gardens in the province around 2019. He has since seen municipalities, and the province, take initiative to create pollinator spaces.
Because there are more backyards than city parks, Rathnayake thinks both cities and individuals can help. His dream is to create a vast network of pollinator gardens and meadows that can be used to encourage pollinators in urban settings.
He says every municipality has a responsibility, “not only to have beautiful landscapes, but to support local biodiversity.”
He says Fredericton is doing a good job of setting an example and educating the public.
“If you go to the city and go to every roundabout, you would see that they are planting a lot of pollinator plants and they’re giving a little example for the people passing by every day that we need to take action.”
Rathnayake, who is also a volunteer educator for the Fredericton Botanical Garden, stresses that striving for biodiversity doesn’t have to mean sacrificing esthetics by leaving a whole yard left unmowed. Through this volunteer work, he teaches people what plants to use to create and maintain spaces in their own yards.
“You only need to have a little dedicated patch where you can have a nicely arranged pollinator garden.”
Moths, beetles, hummingbirds and flies are all pollinators — along with bees, of course — that can be helped by planting pollinator gardens.