🌼 Community Pollinator Gardens

About this simulation

A community pollinator garden is a shared plot of raised beds, planted and tended by volunteers, that provides nectar and pollen for bees, butterflies and hoverflies through the growing season. This model shows how the layout, planting and upkeep decisions that a planning group makes translate into how healthy the garden looks and how much pollination activity it actually attracts.

How it works

• Raised beds — more beds mean more planting area and more distinct patches for pollinators to move between, but also more work for volunteers to maintain.
• Planting density — denser, more varied planting gives pollinators more flowers per visit and lifts garden health.
• Pollinator numbers — the population of bees and butterflies currently foraging the site; each visit to a flower is logged.
• Season — spring beds are still budding, summer is full bloom with peak forage, and autumn die-back thins the flowers and slows visits.
• Volunteer watering & weeding — turning this off lets beds dry out and become overgrown, dropping garden health and pollinator activity, just as a rota gap would in a real shared garden.

Controls

• Raised beds — number of planting beds arranged around the garden (3–9).
• Planting density — flowers planted per bed (10–60).
• Pollinator numbers — bees and butterflies foraging the garden (4–40).
• Season — spring / summer / autumn bloom stage.
• Volunteer watering & weeding — toggles regular bed maintenance on or off.
• ↺ Reset visits — zeroes the pollination-visit counter. Drag to rotate, scroll to zoom.

Did you know?

UK studies of community-run pollinator plots have found that even small, volunteer-tended patches of mixed native and pollinator-friendly planting can rival much larger conventional amenity grassland for bee and butterfly visits — upkeep and diversity matter more than raw size.