Plant a Birdseed Garden to Nurture a Natural Bird Habitat

Butterfly gardens are wildly popular because flowers are not only beautiful but they attract ethereal creatures who create a positive experience with nature. This connection nurtures a protectiveness for nature.

It's magical to watch a butterfly getting nectar from a flower - like this pearl crescent butterfly on a lance-leaf tickseed (Coreopsis lanceolata)

When winter comes and the butterflies are gone, choosing native plants with both architecturally interesting and functionally valuable seedheads will create a parallel magical winter wonderland where birds take the place of butterflies.

When flowers fade to shades of brown all that remains are seedheads to nurture foraging hungry winter birds such as ruby-crowned kinglets

Native plants like hyssop (Agastache) seedheads offer both garden structure and a perch for smaller birds to eat their seeds.

This hyssop (Agastache) seedhead has already been visited by hungry little birds.

Seedheads are the dried fruiting or flowering part of the plant containing the seeds. There are many reason for leaving seedheads for birds:

• To continue getting protein and fat, many insect-eating birds switch to seeds in the winter.

Once the flowers have faded and the butterflies are gone on the lance leaf tickseed (Coreopsis lanceolata), the seeds are a magnet for a variety of songbirds

• Seedheads let birds gather seeds in the way nature intended. Small birds perch on the seedheads and larger birds forage on the ground where the seeds fall.

• Seedheads provide food for a variety of birds that are too shy to visit open feeders.

• Plants with seedheads provide birds safe cover from the elements and predators.

• Once the seeds have been eaten, many seedheads, including joe-pye weed, milkweed, thimbleweed and aster, have seedheads with fluff (pappus) for birds to use as nesting material in the spring.

If the stems are left standing, In the spring birds can use the fluff aka as pappus from plants like climbing aster (Symphyotrichum carolinianum) as nesting material

Native plants have evolved to be closely related to the native birds that need them. The variety of winter birds in a yard is directly related to how many native seedheads there are; different birds are attracted to different seedheads.

American goldfinches depend on a variety of native seeds to survive the winter. This photo of a goldfinch foraging for seeds on the seedhead of evening primrose (Oenothera biennis) was taken in January.

Once the landscape turns brown, call your yard filled with standing stems a birdseed garden - the cheery winter sight of goldfinches, bluebirds, and cardinals feasting on nutrition-rich seedheads in your yard showcases the functional benefit as well as the beauty of rewilding with native plants.

The eye-catching symmetry of the seedheads of rudbeckia species and their popularity with winter birds make a good case for coexisting with nature in your yard