Plants that draw pollinating fauna are gaining increased focus among farmers and landscape designers alike. Attractive plantings like the milkweed, which draw monarch butterflies, are important for maintaining the ecosystem and plant health.

Pollinator gardens are spreading into backyards, farmsteads, and other fertile spaces throughout the nation, in an effort to encourage plant growth and healthy crops.

Tom Meek, district manager for the Clay County Conservation District in Clay Center, Kansas, shared methods that attract pollinators with a recent gathering of master gardeners in Green, Kansas, according to the Clay Center Dispatch. The discussion included plant specific types of plants and the role pollinator plants play in a healthy garden.

Honeybees and Monarch butterflies are the most well known pollinators, but they can also include moths, bats, birds and other mammals. The Conservation Reserve program authorizes a pollinator seed mix with common and affordable pollinator plants.

The plants included in these programs can be also used in a butterfly garden or rain garden in a backyard.

Plants that attract pollinators include:

Alfalfa is a good all-around non-native plant that is very popular among pollinators, Meek said.

Bee Balm or Horse Mint is "a fairly easy plant to grow," Meek said. It grows in about any type of soil, including rocky soil. This plant is "very attractive" to bees, hummingbirds and other pollinators.

Catsclaw sensitive briars are interesting pollinator plants for their claw like stickers, and sensitive leaves that fold up when touched.

Gayfeather is another dayflower that produces a purple plume of small flowers that pollinators like.

Maximilian Sunflower is an extremely hardy and prolific native plant used in the conservation mix. Meek said it grows so well they can have to plant less than 2 percent of the seeds in the pollinator seed packs, or the sunflowers would take over.

Milkweed attracts monarch butterflies that eat the plant at the larva stage. This diet gives the monarch a bitter taste, and as a result, birds avoid them.

New England aster is a native plant that blooms in the fall. These lavender flowers will also attract pollinators.

Prairie clover (and white prairie clover) will also attract pollinators.

Prairie cone sunflowers, white and purple coneflowers, and "Mexican Red Hat" coneflowers will attract pollinators and are hardy native rangeland plants.

Yucca plant, more common in Western Kansas, is pollinated exclusively by the yucca moth, whose caterpillar eats the seeds of the plant. When laying eggs, yucca moths leave a chemical signature on that plant so yucca moths know not to lay eggs there.

In planting pollinator plants, Meek recommended using a pre-plant herbicide early in the spring, to return in April and plant using a no-till practice, and to be selective in the herbicide used for weed control after planting, preferably one designed for native rangeland plants.