Oh and while I have the soapbox out, native wildflowers do not have intrinsically greater value to pollinators than imported garden species.
Many good points in your post, but I just want to clarify that many of the moth and butterfly pollinator caterpillars need those native wildflowers, trees, and plants as a food source and the adults need them as a nursery for laying eggs. You're absolutely right though, they don't much care where their pollen originates when feeding as adults.
There were several studies last year that found that some pollinators, like honey bees, greatly favour native plants and will go along way extra to find them, even when other flowers were close to hand. One was run by the Botanic Garden of Wales.
re the pollinators not needing native plants. This may or may not be true of bees but the larval stages of many of our insects rely on native plants
The larval stages of many need specific plants, the adults often need much longer food availability than widely accessible natives alone are able to provide. Especially now, as plants and insects are drifting quite a long way out of synch with each other's life cycles as the climate shifts and as the bio-diversity of 'wild' habitats is curtailed by some agricultural practices.
The wider the mix we all grow the better, including 'weeds'.
Gardening on the edge of Exmoor, in Devon
“It's still magic even if you know how it's done.”
Referring back to raisingirl's comments about weeds. Weeds were defined to me as any plant growing where it is not wanted, and that seems pretty accurate to me. I have sycamore seedings appearing regularly and I ain't leaving them to grow, native or not!
A weed us a plant you don't like in a place you don't want it to be. Ceanothus,and forsythia are plants that I cannot think of any place I'd want them to be. Therefore they are weeds. Weeds are purely subjective. I encourage all kinds of weeds like scarlet Pimpernel, violets, purple toadflax, that big blue cornflower and that pink weed with the smell that many people don't like.
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In the sticks near Peterborough
The wider the mix we all grow the better, including 'weeds'.
“It's still magic even if you know how it's done.”