Principle #2: Provide food, shelter, and breeding sites for insects and birds by planting biodiverse clusters of perennials, shrubs, and trees in refugia gardens that interconnect.
Important Ecological Functions
Click on each link for more details about each ecological function.
- Food: Because of their ability to capture sunlight energy and use it to “fix” carbon, plants determine the baseline productivity of entire ecosystems. They are sources of fruits, nuts, berries, leaves, flowers, stems, tubers, and seeds that serve as food sources for plant-eating animals and humans.
- Protection: Plants provide safe shelter (cover) for a vast range of animals: insects, birds, mammals, amphibians, reptiles, etc. Many serve as hosts for beneficial species, including pollinators and predators of pests. Some also confer chemical protection to specialist herbivores.
- Regulation: Plants provide essential ecosystem services by regulating water filtration and percolation, enriching/regenerating soils, and releasing oxygen into the atmosphere.
- Resilience: Species diversity and genetic diversity are important buffers against disease and environmental stress, lending greater resilience to an ecosystem in the face of climate change. Underground networks involving plant roots and fungal mycelia form mutualistic interactions that may facilitate acclimation of interconnected plant communities to multiple stresses at once.
“If a plant also attracts insects, butterflies and birds, it’s truly an ideal plant.”
Piet Oudolf
More Refugia Gardening Principles and Practices
1-Diversifying for the future
*Why not natives only?
2-Focusing on ecological functions
3-Enhancing natural landscapes
4-Co-creating with nature
5-Cultivating relational caring
Refugia Gardening 