If you’ve been in a garden center lately or follow any garden accounts on social media, you probably know this week is Pollinator Week! Pollinators include birds, bats, moths, bees and more. They play such a huge role in our gardens, according to Pollinator.org, “pollinators provide pollination services to over 180,000 different plant species and more than 1200 crops.” That website is a great resource for pollinators. You can even enter your zip code, and they’ll provide a planting guide that will best suit your area. Planting Guide.

Here is my list of my favorite pollinator friendly perennials!

• Salvia: One of my favorite plants in general in the garden is salvia. Be sure to check the zone on the variety you plant as some are classified as annuals. Bees and hummingbirds will delight in any variety of this plant. Pictured below is the Black and Blue variety. Another popular one for pollinators is Hot Lips.

• Bee Balm – Monarda: This is my first year growing monarda, and so far so good! This variety is a little more compact and a couple weeks after planting it, it is covered in blooms.

• Sunflowers: (This is an annual, but too good not to include). You can see the bee going to town on this sunflower! Can you also see the cucumber beetle in the photo?? Sunflowers come in all sorts of colors and sizes. Pick the one that will work best in your garden. Some are single bloomers and others will produce multiple blooms on a single plant.

• Helenium: This is a profusely blooming perennial that comes back more prolific year after year. I’ve divided it multiple times and each clump expands to a larger plant each year. The stocks can get heavy and fall down. Make sure you’re dividing the plant as it gets larger and you can trim back the first flush of blooms to alleviate some weight off the plant.

• Russian Sage: This is a super easy plant to grow, they don’t like a lot of water and they don’t like fertilizer. You will need to keep them watered during their first season until they’re established, but after that they’re fairly drought tolerant.

• Lavender: Similar to Russian Sage, lavender is a low maintenance plant. They can get woody stems if not pruned, so just make sure you’re pruning them down in the fall so they continue to produce year after year. Hello praying mantis!

• Yarrow: This is on my list of things to plant this summer. Not only good for the pollinators, it also acts as a great filler flower for cut arrangements. It comes in a variety of colors as well. We planted this in my Grammy’s yard a couple of years ago.

• Sedum: This plant is a great one to feed the pollinators on into fall. It emerges in the spring as cute little florets, giving way to large succulent like stalks. The flowers start out a pale pink/white and turn a deep pink by fall. This is another one that can be divided year after year.

• Echinacia: Another plants with countless colors and varieties! I love this combo of the pink and peach on the same plant.

• Nepeta: While nepeta comes in a variety of colors, the most common is purple. The thing I like about nepeta (and lavender and Russian Sage) is the cooling feeling it will give your garden in those hot summer months with that purple color. Like some of the plants above, you can prune this plant after its first bloom and you’ll get more blooms throughout the summer.

I hope you’ve found this list helpful! Comment below on your favorite pollinator friendly plants, I’d love to add some new ones to my garden!