Pollinator garden

Build your pollinator garden guide

Tell us where you are and how much room you have. You will get a reference guide for your site: what to plant, how much seed to buy, and what to do in which month.

What you get

  • A plant list that grows where you live

    Native forbs filtered by your hardiness zone, your sun and soil, and — the part most lists skip — whether the species has actually been recorded in your state.

  • Bloom from spring through frost

    The mix is chosen for succession rather than for a single peak, so something is in flower across the whole season instead of everything at once in June.

  • Seed quantities for your square footage

    Weights per species and for the planting as a whole, at a sowing rate you can take to a supplier.

  • A calendar built from your frost dates

    Site prep, sowing and maintenance windows derived from the nearest NOAA station's normals — not from a generic month.

Your site

A street address, or just a ZIP code. It sets your hardiness zone, your frost dates and which plants actually grow in your state. Your finished guide is kept at a private link with a long random address, so you can come back to it without an account — the address you enter is stored with it.

In square feet. A 20 × 20 ft bed is 400. This sets both how many species the mix carries and how much seed to buy, so a rough measurement beats a guess.

Optional. Leaving it unset widens the plant list rather than narrowing it, so skip it if you are not sure.

Optional, and the same applies.

This takes a few seconds — five public datasets get consulted.

Data sources

US Census Geocoder (opens in a new tab) — address to coordinates; USDA Plant Hardiness Zone Map (2023) (opens in a new tab) — hardiness zone, via phzmapi.org; NOAA 1991–2020 Climate Normals (opens in a new tab) — frost dates and growing season; USDA PLANTS Database (opens in a new tab) — species, bloom periods, seed rates and photographs; GBIF (opens in a new tab) — where each species has actually been recorded.

All five are public and free to query. Plant photographs carry their own credit on each card.