Program Meeting Tuesday 4/26/22: Native Pollinators and Native Plants

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Native Pollinators and Native Plants: Your Tiny Visitors and the Plants They Love

Our April presenter Bruce Newhouse asks: Did you ever wonder about all those flying and crawling critters visiting your flowers? Do you know how to tell a bee from a fly? Do you know that hummingbirds and some flies are good pollinators? Do you know how to plant a garden that will be the best possible place for native pollinators? If these kinds of questions go through your mind as you stare at your garden, this presentation is for you! We will familiarize ourselves with the most common native pollinators, and learn a few simple tricks to tell them apart. We’ll also learn some of the best things we can do to invite native pollinators into our yards, including which plants “rock the world” of the little creatures that run it.

Bruce is a native of the Willamette Valley, having spent his childhood days mostly in Lake Oswego, and many weekend days on his grandparents’ farm in Hillsboro. Eugene has been his home for many years. He probably got his love of plants from his mom and his love of the outdoors from fishing with his dad. After graduating from OSU with a BS in Environmental Science, he worked for 10 years as a county and city land use planner specializing in natural resources. In 1989, he became a private ecological consultant, and still gets excited doing inventory and assessment of sites from city natural areas to wilderness areas. He did botanical inventory and assessment for the Gahr Farm, a site in Gopher Valley, and the Noble Oaks Preserve for TNC.  He is a major contributor of images to the Oregon Flora Project, works with several nonprofits including NPSO, and has recently helped co-found the Lane County and Oregon mycoflora projects.

Bruce is the owner-operator of Eugene-based Salix Associates, which offers services in ecologically-based natural resources planning, including botanical/biodiversity surveying, wildlife habitat inventory and analysis, restoration and management planning, and related environmental planning tasks and issues. He also is an experienced science field and classroom instructor (University of Oregon, Oregon State University, Portland State University, Lane Community College, et al.) specializing in the identification of sedges, rushes, grasses, and more generally, rare, native and invasive plant species, butterflies, and fungi. And he serves as a volunteer ecological advisor to several nonprofit groups and committees in the greater Eugene area.