Alex Garcia with Botanical Developments plants sulfur buckwheat in a pollinator garden at the High Desert Museum.

A new garden planted at the High Desert Museum will teach visitors about the importance of protecting pollinators such as bees and butterflies, which are experiencing extreme population declines.

The quarter-acre garden near the otter exhibit was completed Tuesday and is full of 900 native plants, including 25 different species that will attract pollinators.

Plans for the garden started more than a year ago, said Dana Whitelaw, High Desert Museum executive director. The museum intends to make the garden a permanent fixture and a way to help the struggling pollinator species in the region, she said.

“Pollinators have been on our minds for a long time at the museum,” Whitelaw said.

The museum partnered with U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service and Discover Your Forest, a nonprofit that works with national forests in Central Oregon.

The fish and wildlife service provided $30,000 to plant the garden at the museum and for two other pollinator gardens at Sisters Middle School and the Crooked River Wetlands Complex.

Work to plant the three gardens was delayed in the spring due to the COVID-19 pandemic, but finally completed this fall.

At the museum, staff made sure the garden was planted where the sun could reach it through the dense trees, Whitelaw said.

This fall, staff will install educational signs at the garden to make it a feature of nature walks and other programs at the museum.

Whitelaw said without the signs, the garden is subtle, and people may not realize how important it is for pollinators. It’s hard for people to notice all the different insects pollinating the flowers in the garden, she said.

“We don’t get to see all of that activity,” Whitelaw said. “We plan on this garden to be a way to highlight not only the plant diversity but the insect diversity.”

According to national reports, the population loss of honeybees reached 40.7% last year, and the monarch butterfly population has dropped 90% in the past 20 years.

Increasing those populations has a direct benefit to food production, Whitelaw said. In Oregon, pollinators help grow blueberries, Marionberries, raspberries and pears.

“Connecting it to food systems and the natural and agricultural world is so important,” Whitelaw said.

The issue of pollinators’ dwindling populations has been a focus of wildlife officers and nonprofit organizations, said Rika Ayotte, executive director of Discover Your Forest.

The pollinator gardens are the latest effort to help the plant and insect species, Ayotte said.

“This is part of that multiple-tiered effort on conservation around pollinators,” she said.

Ayotte hopes the gardens will inspire people to plant their own and help with the ongoing effort of rebuilding the pollinator populations.

“Bees, bats and dozens of other pollinators are being impacted by climate change or loss of critical habitat or access to what they need to survive,” Ayotte said. “We are trying to reserve some of that.”

After more than a year of planning and postponing work due to the virus, Ayotte is happy the gardens are planted.

‘At this point,” she said, “we are just thrilled we are getting plants in the ground.”