Garden Pollinator Project
Creating vibrant, native, pesticide-free gardens to help pollinators travel safely across Beverly
What’s new: Thanks to a generous private donation, we’re giving away starter kits, offering rebates for native gardens, and continuing to map gardens across Beverly to complete the network for our pollinators. We’ll also be sharing plenty of pollinator and pesticide education—and putting it into practice at our growing demonstration gardens.
Pollinator Kit Giveaway
Free kits to help you start your own native pollinator garden!
We’re giving away 200 pollinator garden kits — each with four native plants and a snazzy yard sign to show your support to our project. Perfect for beginner gardeners or anyone with a spare sunny patch.
Giveaway dates:
May 17, 9-10am at Beverly Cove Improvement Association (view event details)
May 18, 9-10:30am at Obear Park, Beverly (part of our Earth Spring Beverly Plant Swap)
Get involved: Help is needed to distribute garden kits! Sign up to volunteer at a giveaway.
Garden Rebate Program
Get rewarded for planting bigger, better native gardens.
Want to go big? We’re offering up to $500 in rebates for pollinator gardens that meet our size and native plant criteria.
Apply: Check back in late April for eligibility criteria and application details. In the meantime, feel free to reach out with questions.
The Beverly Pollinator Pathway Map
Track the gardens. Complete the network.
Our interactive map tracks the locations of gardens filled with native plants and (based on how far different bees can travel) highlights the network of pathways for safer pollinator travel. Use the forms linked below to add your garden, explore others, and help us reach our goal of 300 medium-sized gardens to reduce “range anxiety” for our pollinators.
Get on the map:
Showcase your support for pollinators with a garden sign!
We collaborated with Beverly Main Streets and local student illustrators to create custom signs for the City of Beverly.
Native Pollinator Demonstration Gardens
Flagship spaces filled with native pollinator plantings for beauty, learning, and inspiration.
Dane Street Beach Garden
93 Lothrop Street, Beverly MA
Originally installed by Green Beverly and NOFA, this demonstration garden (located around the flagpole) showcases a variety of native pollinator plantings for the many visitors enjoying our popular Dane Street Beach.
Volunteers are needed for weekly watering and some weeding events. Interested? Sign up here.
Cove Community Center Garden
19 E Corning Street, Beverly MA
We’re planting a large native demonstration garden at the Beverly Cove Community Center. It will serve as an educational space, community hub, and living example of what’s possible with native plants.
Help is needed as we get started. Join a volunteer work day.
Pollinator Education and Action
Knowledge grows action.
Pollinators are more than just bees. Moths, wasps, butterflies, birds, flies, beetles, and even ants and slugs do the job as well. We’re spreading awareness about the importance of native pollinators, incorporating native plantings into our gardens, and the harms of pesticides and herbicides (aka the ’cides).
Keep an eye out for a series of workshops in 2025 (volunteers and suggestions welcome!). In the meantime, read on for resources and steps to incorporate pollinator-friendly practices on your property.
Take action:
Along with other sustainable lawn and garden practices, plant pollinator plants—specifically “native” pollinator plants (see below for a list of plants in our area).
Don’t use pesticides.
Leave material for pollinators to nest in like dead trees or snags (learn more about this practice from the Xerces Society)
Remember to add your garden to our pollinator pathway map!
FAQ and Resources
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Birds (especially hummingbirds), bats, bees (native bees and honey bees), wasps, butterflies, moths, flies, beetles, and other small mammals that travel from plant to plant carrying pollen on their bodies.
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Plants need the pollinators to help them grow and many of the foods that we enjoy come from plants that need pollination!
The Pollinator Partnership explains it this way, “Somewhere between 75% and 95% [1] of all flowering plants on the earth need help with pollination – they need pollinators. Pollinators provide pollination services to over 180,000 different plant species and more than 1200 crops. That means that 1 out of every three bites of food you eat is there because of pollinators [2,3]. If we want to talk dollars and cents, pollinators add 217 billion dollars to the global economy [4,5], and honey bees alone are responsible for between 1.2 and 5.4 billion dollars in agricultural productivity in the United States [6]. In addition to the food that we eat, pollinators support healthy ecosystems that clean the air, stabilize soils, protect from severe weather, and support other wildlife [7].
The Audabon explains the threat to our pollinators this way: “Many species of pollinators are experiencing dramatic declines. Populations of native bees and other pollinators are threatened by climate change, pesticide exposure, habitat degradation and agricultural intensification, declining populations of native flowering plants, and introduced pathogens.”
Read this article from Mass.gov to catch a glimpse of the problem and how we can be part of the solution.
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The Massachusetts Department of Agriculture has developed a list of native pollinator-friendly plants that are commonly found in local nurseries. An online searchable version of the list is available here.
Additional lists can be found at the Mass Pollinator Network.
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Massachusetts organizations that talk about pollinators:
National organizations that talk about pollinators:
