A Pollinator Garden is More than Wildflowers

A natural grass-dominated meadow in the shade

Splitbeard bluestem - Andropogon ternarius

Lopsided Indiangrass - Sorghastrum secundum

Sites on social media that are promoting pollinator gardens are rife with posts about wildflowers. Folks seeking to make their landscapes pollinator friendly seem to be almost-universally focused on wildflowers. What these well-meaning people seem to not understand is the importance of native grasses. Meadows, prairies, and other wildflower-dominated systems are mostly grass. Grasses form the backbone of every one of these plant communities. It isn't the wildflowers. They simply provide most of the color - but a living landscape is not about color, it's about creating habitat, and this habitat requires us to incorporate native grasses.
It is true that the vast majority of grasses, and their graminoid relatives, are wind pollinated. They do not provide nectar and pollen for the most part, but despite that they are significant. More so than we often understand.  They provide structure, they provide food for birds, they create habitat conditions necessary for cover to all living things, and they provide larval food for a vast number of butterflies often overlooked by those more-fixated on the more-glamorous species such as monarchs and swallowtails.
Every prairie and meadow is mostly grass. Grass is not superfluous nor is it unnecessary to a functioning ecosystem. A pollinator garden is not equivalent to a wildflower garden. The wildflowers we choose to plant come from systems dominated by grasses. We can choose to ignore them in our plantings, because they not as "sexy" or because we can't revel in the bees that pollinate our flowers instead, but we do so at the detriment of creating a real living landscape. Grasses are not there for aesthetics. they are there for everything else.
I have added grasses to every wildflower project I've been involved in over the past 33 years, including my new landscape here in Pasco County. I grow several species in my Hawthorn Hill nursery, but each year, I sell very few. People want wildflowers for their pollinators and for the color they provide. It's been one of my major frustrations. Trying to "sell" a public, fixated on wildflowers, native grasses to also add to their landscapes has been a largely losing battle over the past several decades.
Just as a real pollinator garden provides a diversity of wildflower species to be truly effective and needs to be more than letting an area go fallow and then trying to identify the lawn weeds as "good" or "bad", a pollinator garden requires a purposeful incorporation of native grasses. They do not all provide the same services. Some are notoriously aggressive in a small planting area. Some get too large in a smaller residential setting and do not mix well with less-robust wildflowers. Some simply do not feed birds or serve as significant larval host plants. Grasses need to be used according to the setting that you find yourself in and that meet your ecological goals. They also need to be native to your region. It is definitely not about simply letting whatever grasses pop out of your turf remain. There are invasive non-native grasses just as there are non-native wildflowers and there are some grasses, native or otherwise, that provide more habitat value than others.
I rely heavily on my friend and butterfly expert Marc Minno's book - Florida Butterfly Caterpillars and Their Host Plants, for information on which grasses serve best to support the needs of grass-dependent butterflies. He lists 40 unique grass skippers that use native grasses as host plants. Why more butterfly/pollinator enthusiasts fail to consider these species in their landscape designs baffles me. None of the butterflies use gulf muhly (Muhlenbergia capillaris) yet I suspect it is the most commonly planted native grass in Florida landscapes. No one can deny that it is a beautiful sight to behold in fall when its pink flower heads are in bloom, but it is not an effective native grass compared to those species actually required by our native butterflies and it's seeds are far less important to seed-eating birds that arrive here in fall. It is a beauty queen that can't answer the question posed to the contestants that's supposed to test their mental acuity........ Muhly grass is a bit "vacant" intellectually.
The native plant industry also has been slow to add grasses to their offerings to the public. Species, like wiregrass (Aristida stricta) are grown by the millions for habitat restoration projects, but even it is often difficult to find and purchase at a retail native plant nursery. The market of homeowners just doesn't support its widespread offering. Native grasses that are sometimes offered, are done so far more on aesthetic reasons than ecological ones. It's up to us to change that. We need a paradigm shift if we are going to make that happen. We need to demand native grasses for their ecological roles and we then need to purchase and use them.
Wildlife, including most of our pollinators, hide in grasses - not in beds of wildflowers, they overwinter in their stems and duff. Seed-eating birds, that arrive here in fall, eat grass seed - just not every species in the same way. Caterpillars of the so-called grass skippers feed nestlings in the same way that trees and shrubs do. Caterpillars, after all, are caterpillars. Other invertebrates, like grasshoppers and katydids require grasses far more than wildflowers and they too feed birds. In the winter, in most locations, a wildflower planting is virtually devoid of habitat IF it isn't supported by the stalks of native grasses.
Even the small wildflower planting area like I have here has native grasses. They are vital to what I am trying to accomplish. I also will continue to grow a few here at Hawthorn Hill, despite the dismal luck I've had placing them into good homes. I encourage all of you to take them more seriously than you might. We need more species to be grown and used if we are going to counter the effects of widespread habitat loss caused by development.