What is the impact of putting in a native garden or certainly what's the impact if a lot of people put in a native garden?

That's kind of what we've been talking about here on the podcast with Mary Phillips, who's the head of Garden for Wildlife at the National Wildlife Federation.

You know, I know Mary, we've talked about some of the data you've seen on your website and I know you guys have had all sorts of different initiatives and have tracked a lot of that.

And so I guess I'm curious if there's a particular area that really stood out and then what the ensuing impact of that was.

Absolutely. Thanks Kevin. So we've done a couple different really big campaigns to get people out gardening for pollinators and other wildlife.

And right now with our Garden for Wildlife effort and as we move into our 50th year of that, we actually have a new goal of getting to a million new gardens that we can actually track because people are actually purchasing these DIY combinations of plants that actually perform very well with really high numbers for wildlife.

And that's based on our Keystone plant lists that actually show how many specific butterflies, pollen specialist bees, how many pollen specialist bees and those are native bees.

We have 4,000 native bees across the United States and they actually have covolved with these native plants and they really need a lot of diversity to actually thrive in these areas.

What we're doing is we're going to be able to track that going forward with where these actual plants are being planted through our current initiative.

But what we did a couple years ago to kind of get the ball rolling was the million pollinator garden challenge and we worked with 50 national organizations to get the word out.

And we were able to track where people were doing concentrated numbers of pollinator gardens and we called these pollinator garden hotspots.

And these actually created stepping stones of habitat amongst urban areas and suburban areas.

And two of the areas that we saw where the bee species numbers reached up real pinnacle were in the desert southwest and east within the Smoky Mountain region.

And specifically the Phoenix, Mesa, Scottsdale, Arizona metro areas plus some of the smaller towns of Santa Fe, New Mexico.

We're actually top performing pollinator garden cities based on the per capita of gardens in parallel to their population.

And in the Smoky Mountain region, which is kind of the North Carolina Tennessee, there were towns across two states that contributed more than 35,000 gardens at that time.

And because we were able to look at that, we really looked at a number of studies out there and we have these studies on our website of how pollinator diversity was tracked across a lot of these cities and states.

And Ohio and also Iowa, there's significant studies being done about these pollinator garden densities and that real opportunity to become pollinator garden hotspots.

I'm really curious about what you guys think made those areas pop like that.

Like what made them a hotspot was that particular campaign or messaging or what do you think it was?

Yeah, it was so the million pollinator campaign was then taken on locally by a number of associations and everyone from keep America beautiful to be city USA to all of our certified wildlife habitat folks.

We have community wildlife habitats in a lot of communities and they just really rallied around this message between 2015 and 2018.

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