NC Piedmont Pollinator Bloom Calendar, 40 Native Plants for Bees (PDF)

THE NC PIEDMONT POLLINATOR BLOOM CALENDAR

A 17-page printable guide. Forty NC natives sequenced month by month from bloom dates NC State actually prints. Nothing inferred, nothing borrowed from another state.

THIS IS A SEQUENCE, NOT ANOTHER PLANT LIST.

Almost every pollinator list is a bag of good plants that all flower in July. The bees do not need July. They need February, and they need October.

Working from NC State's own bloom months, two things become obvious. May through October is saturated: every one of those months has ten or more documented natives, and effort spent there is wasted. December and January are a genuine hole, coverable by exactly one plant each, and one of those two is pollinated by moths rather than bees.

WHAT IS INSIDE

- Month by month succession tables from February to first frost, with bloom months quoted from the NC State Plant Toolbox
- Mature size, light, soil and the exact Toolbox Attracts wording for each plant
- Which months are genuinely thin in the Piedmont, and the specific plants that close them
- Nine specialist bees named by NC State, including the bee that takes pollen from only one plant
- Larval host plants documented by NC State, and milkweed: NC's real guidance plus the tropical milkweed warning
- Nesting habitat, bare ground, and when to cut perennial stems
- What NC says about butterfly bush, and the three native replacements it names

THE DESIGN FINDING MOST LISTS MISS

March fills with eight documented natives and five of the eight are trees or shrubs. Herbaceous perennials contribute almost nothing before April. The early spring gap is a woody plant problem, not a perennial border problem, and a pollinator bed with no flowering woody plants is empty in March no matter how well chosen the perennials are.

AND ONE CAUTION ABOUT THE DATABASE ITSELF

Ten plants in this calendar omit Bees from the Toolbox Attracts field while their own Wildlife Value paragraphs describe bees using them. If you filter the Toolbox for bee plants you will filter out most of the best bee plants in North Carolina. The guide explains what to read instead.

FORMAT

Instant digital download. One PDF, 17 pages, US Letter, print at home or read on a tablet. No physical item ships.

WHAT THIS IS AND IS NOT

An educational guide compiled from the NC State Extension Plant Toolbox and publications, NC Cooperative Extension county centers, the NC Botanical Garden and the NC Native Plant Society. Written for the North Carolina Piedmont. Bloom months are averages and shift with the season and the site. This is not a planting plan for a specific address.

Alex Purdy, Carolina Terrain, Waxhaw, North Carolina. NC Landscape Contractor License CL.1872. I am a licensed contractor, not a professional engineer and not a registered landscape architect.

If this guide helped, a review helps other North Carolina homeowners find it.