I love to attract hummingbirds to
my garden. Their activity around the flowers and brilliant colors
make the hummingbirds fascinating to watch and great sport to photograph.
Hummingbird Garden Design is based first around feeding them. Never mind that we think
most of the flowers beautiful that hummingbirds find useful. Hummingbirds have the basic needs of any
hotel guest. Good food, something to drink and a nice place to sleep
and hang out. To these ends I include in a hummingbird garden design
a wide variety of plants so something is always in bloom. They like protective cover,
and a mixture of trees and shrubs helps. The Hummingbirds most often
rest up in an Oak Tree here in my garden and then feed on the flower of the moment.
A mixture of plants heights is very helpful. The hummingbirds will
find a safe place to rest with a good view. And some tinkling water
helps attract hummingbirds too. In the hummingbird photo below, you
can see a hummingbird about to get a drink.. And a few minutes later
the same hummingbird took a bath in one of the small basins with the water
running over his back. You can attract hummingbirds to your garden
using plants with tubular red flowers or red colored hummingbird
feeders. Here is our hummingbird
recipe. And our list of plants that will make your hummingbird
garden full of life and color. Red dye in the hummingbird food does little to attract the birds, and the dye is harmful to them. Best to use sugar water.
The hummingbirds are the smallest birds in the world. They weigh
less than a nickel. They are also the fastest. They have the
fewest feathers and the smallest nests, no surprise there. And they
have the fastest heartbeats. There are 338 species and only 23 species
have been recorded in the United States. Of those only 16 species have
been recorded nesting north of the border with Mexico. That means
that most of the hummingbird species live in South and Central America and
never make it here.
Hummingbirds are native to the Western Hemisphere. They have
coevolved with the plants from this Hemisphere. Their migrations are
legendary. Some go from South America to North
America. The amount of food required to keep such a small
organism warm and moving so fast has to be huge, they often eat their own body
weight in nectar every day. You can talk about a dog's life as
being pretty relaxing much of the time. Hummingbirds are quite the
opposite and have to eat and
drink constantly. I put out trickling fountains for attracting
hummingbirds. They love falling water and are attracted to the
sound of it. They require nectar laden plants. I plant
varieties of plants that they already know while they move North and
South through the seasons, this makes attracting them much easier because
they already know what their food looks like.
In general plants with long tubular orange or red flowers attract hummingbirds.
Plants in the honeysuckle and hibiscus families are also great choices to
attract hummingbirds. Migrating hummingbirds have already found many of the tropical
Salvia's as they went through South and
Central America and these plants will grow quite well here in Southern
California too. Other non-native plants that work well are the Aloes,
Red hot pokers, and other plants
in the mint and hibiscus families.
There is recently found fossil evidence that the hummingbirds once lived
in Europe too, 35 million years ago. A number of African and
Himalayan plants look like they would easily be pollinated by hovering
I attract a swarm of hummingbirds with our late blooming plants during
the fall migration. One the best plants to attract hummingbirds in
our garden is Cuphea
micropetala, one of the cigar plants. The tubular flowers are
orange with yellow tips and sticky with nectar. The plants bloom for
us from October until the first hard frost and there is always a hummingbird that
is the owner of the bush and 2 or more that think it should be theirs. In warmer
garden I have seen Leonotis
leonurus, the Lion's Tail, attract hummingbirds seemingly from
the whole neighborhood.
I have been intrigued watching a hummingbird work on plants that are
not native to our area. The hummingbirds have learned about a number of other
plants and feed on them differently. I watched a hummingbird
all through lunch one day feeding from a pink
Abutilon. Instead of feeding from the inside of the flower it
came in from the outside and reached in between the petals. The
feed for 2 or 3 minutes and visit about a third of the flowers and then
fly off. Then after a short break the hummingbird would return but rarely visit
the same flowers. Hummingbirds have an uncanny ability to remember
which flowers were visited recently. At first it looks so random, the way
the hummingbirds move from flower to flower but as you watch them you can see that
they rarely come back to the same blooms before there has been enough time
for more nectar to be generated by the flowers.
The hummingbirds defend their territory fiercely,
chasing off all of their competitors. A hedge of Cape honeysuckle can
wear you out doing maintenance on it. But watching the swarm of
hummingbirds that will work the length of it is tremendously amusing. One
bird cannot possibly defend all of it, though they each try.
I have seen similar Herculean hummingbird efforts on large Bottlebrush trees.