We bought a packet at the hardware store last week. It cost $4.99. It had a picture of a meadow on it — the kind of picture that makes you imagine your backyard turning into a Monet painting by July. The label said "Wildflower Mix — Beneficial for Pollinators." We took it home and read the back.
Here is what was in it: 60% annual ryegrass, 18% non-native poppies, 12% inert matter (which is gardening's polite term for sand and chaff), and 10% an unnamed mixture described only as "selected wildflower seed."
That last 10% was the only part that mattered. Of that 10%, after some patient reading of the fine print and some Latin-name decoding, we figured out that maybe 8% of the total packet was actually native to the eastern United States. The rest was filler, garnish, or naturalized European species — pretty in a photograph, useless to the food web here.
This is not a scandal. It's how most "wildflower" seed mixes are sold. The companies aren't lying; they're just letting you read what you want to read. If you read "Beneficial for Pollinators" as "this will feed bees," you're projecting. If you read it as "European honeybees can extract some nectar from European poppies," you're also right, technically. The label is technically true and practically useless.
The fix is simple, but it takes patience the first time you do it. Read the back of the packet. What you're looking for is a list of species, by Latin name, with the percentage of each by weight. If the packet doesn't list species by Latin name, put it back. If it lists Latin names but they're all European or Asian (anything starting with Papaver, Lobularia, Centaurea, Calendula — not native to North America), put it back. What you want is a packet that lists, by name, native species for your region: Rudbeckia, Echinacea, Asclepias, Solidago, Symphyotrichum, Liatris, Monarda.
The good news is that real native-seed mixes exist, and they're not much more expensive than the hardware-store ones. Prairie Moon Nursery, Roundstone Native Seed, Ernst Conservation Seeds — these are real companies that sell real native-seed mixes, and they list every species by Latin name on the back of the package because they know their customers care. A pound of regionally-appropriate native mix runs $20-40, and it covers more ground than you think. For a small patch, an ounce or two is plenty.
The harder thing to accept is that the photo on the front of the hardware-store packet is essentially a stock image. Your patch will not look like that. Real native meadows are messier, more architectural, less uniformly bright. They're also more interesting to look at across a year, and they actually contain insects, which the stock photo does not.
One more thing. If you've already bought a hardware-store packet and feel bad about it, don't. Plant it anyway, somewhere it won't dominate. Some of the species in those mixes are at least nectar sources, even if they're not host plants. Then go buy a real native mix for next time, and watch the difference in what shows up.
— The editors