We're busy gathering photos of favorite Greater Sudbury and Ontario wildflowers that you can plant. We'll add more soon!
Consult the charts below to select plants that are native to Greater Sudbury for your pollinator garden! The David Suzuki Foundation's Butterflyway Project recommends that local pollinator gardens should have 50% of native plant biomass in their gardens.
You can sort alphabetically or filter by typing a word into the blocks above the columns eg type in "sun" in the Light column to get all plants that are recommended for sunny gardens.
The plant information was taken from Canada Pollinator Partnerships' list for the Greater Sudbury area:
https://pollinatorpartnership.ca/assets/generalFiles/Algonquin.2017.pdf
To look up plant information to guide your choices, try this database:
https://can-plant.ca/
Light guidelines:
- Full Sun means 6 full hours of direct sunlight. Those 6 hours could be from 8am – 3pm or 12 noon – 6pm. Or the time could be split between some hours in the morning and some in the afternoon. So, 6 hours of direct sunlight at any time of the day. For the rest of the daylight hours, it is assumed that the site will get some light, but it doesn’t need to be direct sunlight.
- Partial Sun and Partial Shade are often used as alternatives to each other, and are used to denote 3 – 6 hours of direct sunlight each day. However, some plants require several hours of sunlight during the day in order to set flowers and fruit, and partial shade typically refers to a need for shade from the strong, late afternoon sun. Dappled sunlight is similar to partial shade, and is the soft sunlight you can enjoy under a deciduous tree and is the requirement of woodland plants. For ease of reference, we're using "partial" to help you sort the plants, and you may want to do a bit more research on each plant's requirement.
- Shade means less than 3 hours of direct sunlight each day, preferably the cooler morning light. Filtered light for some of the rest of the day is preferred.
Bloom period:
You can sort/filter by bloom period too, although many plants will cross periods.
- Early: March, April, May
- Mid: June, July, August
- Late: September, October, November
Pollinators:
- The pollinators listed in the Pollinators column are species that benefit from the plants. You can filter plants that are good for butterflies for example by typing in the word "butterflies" in that column header box.
- The Butterfly Host column indicates which plants are plants that adult butterflies depend upon to raise their larval young. Female butterflies lay their eggs directly onto their host plant of choice since caterpillars cannot travel far to feed.
Note: these charts are best viewed on a computer or in landscape mode on a mobile.