If You Plant It, They Will Come: Planting For Pollinators; Red Sox Heartbreak

A Monarch butterfly imbibes the black-eyed susan nectar in our front garden

Four years ago, I began to focus on planting our property for pollinators: bees, butterflies, and birds. A ghostly, whispering voice didn’t tell me to do it, as one told Kevin Costner’s character in the popular movie of 1989, Field Of Dreams—“If you build it, they will come”—but I have added small gardens and planted our field for pollinators over the four years. I’ve concentrated on attracting pollinators and helping provide their food, nesting, and safe harbors for molting. Whatever I’ve accomplished, it’s a drop in the ocean compared to the pressure we put on pollinators— without whom we could not survive, make no mistake—with our insecticides, pesticides, and asphalting over of their food and nesting sources.

This year, the bee balm is full of humming birds (we also dangle feeders around the front deck, which feed them in their hungry spring and are ignored in late summer). The hydrangeas are buzzing with Bumblebees. The milkweed has proliferated in the field, home and grocery store to Monarch butterflies in all stages of their life cycle. Everywhere you look, at every plant— the purple and cream coneflowers, the borage brightly shining in a pot, on the hyssops, prairie blazing stars, goldenrod, the tomato flowers, and even the petunias in the flower baskets—pollinators are feeding, flying, and buzzing. Several species of butterflies flit from the butterfly bush to the bee balm to the black-eyed susans, floating down like ballerinas and folding their wings neatly to sip before becoming alarmed by my looming, inquisitive presence.

The goal is to provide the plants necessary to pollinators for three of our four seasons. It’s a tall order, one I’m sure I have not achieved, especially since we have to mow the field—including the milkweed and the Monarch chrysalises tucked under the leaves — once a year to keep trees from growing. Still, the pollinators have come, no matter my lack of confidence, and I will persist in this project—I will plant.

The time to mow is racing up on us: it must be done before the man who mows must clean, oil and return the equipment to winter quarters. A return to winter quarters is the theme of September. The male hummingbirds departed some weeks ago. A female was visiting the butterfly bush yesterday, loading up for her trip from Massachusetts to Central America, but with yesterday’s cold and rain, she may be gone, too (update: I haven’t seen her this morning). The Monarchs will stay longer into the month, but then they will start their flight to Mexico (and how these tiny creatures make these long trips in such a short time is beyond me, and worthy of another post).

It’s the only thing about the coming season change that makes me sad—our winters are long, and it will be a long time before these visitors—so vital and so entertaining— return.

No, it’s not the only thing to make me sad this year. In Field of Dreams, James Earl Jones’ character did not talk about pollinators to Kevin Costner’s character, but about the dream of baseball come back to life in the baseball field carved out of a cornfield, complete with living, paying fans and dead players (1920s Shoeless Joe Jackson and others of his Black Sox team).

My baseball players—my 2018-World-Series-champions-regular-season-record-breaking-106-game-winning Boston Red Sox team—seem dead as well. They haven’t been able to find their way around the bases since the first alarm bell that was 2019 Game 1 in Seattle. Now, with no hope of the playoffs in their future, their shoulders slump, they are young men made old.

I watched one game from start to finish this week; paid homage. Last season, all pistons were firing. This season, some of the players rally and hit remarkable home runs, bring runs in, make amazing plays, and ahem, infrequently, pitch well. But the team can’t rally as one entity and hasn’t been able to do so all season—and nobody knows why, even they don’t—other than it’s the common curse of champions in the subsequent year. Whatever happens to them at the end of the season—trades, free agencies, even minor league assignments—they too will pack up and fly off to their winter quarters this month.

It takes more than a lovingly preserved ballpark like Fenway to make a great team, as longtime fans can attest. It takes more than I can plant and more than our garden and field can grow to nurture the millions of pollinators we need, under the gun as they are—but it’s a start, a contribution. If I plant more, will more come? I’ll write and ask James Earl Jones.