Attracting Beneficial Bugs to your Garden –
A Natural Approach to Pest Control

The Master Gardener’s Bookshelf

Attracting Beneficial Bugs to your Garden – A Natural Approach to Pest Control, Revised and Updated Second Edition, by Jessica Walliser

Review by Susan Wilhelm, Extension Master Gardener

Attracting Beneficial Bugs to your Garden – A Natural Approach to Pest Control, Revised and Updated Second Edition by Jessica Walliser will change the way you think about bugs and pest control in your garden. An American Horticultural Society book award winner, it is a practical guide to beneficial insects, the pests they eat, and how to attract and keep them in your existing garden.

Like many people, Walliser relied on pesticides in her early gardening career to deal with unwanted bugs, pointing out that “Until recently, the practice of gardening didn’t involve insects, other than to understand their role as pollinators and wipe any of the pesty types into oblivion.” However, as she learned more, she began to appreciate the numerous ways insects interact with plants and one another to create healthy gardens, as “pollinators, decomposers, predators, or food for someone higher up in the food chain.” As a result, she has “not sprayed a single plant with any insecticide (organic or otherwise)” for many years.

Attracting Beneficial Bugs begins by explaining who the beneficials are, what they do, how they do it, and why it matters. Beneficial insect profiles include close-up photos (sometimes including photos of the insects’ eggs or larvae), as well as information about what the insects eat and some of the flowers that help keep them in the landscape. For example, syrphid flies are major pollinators attracted by a diversity of flowers. The flies’ larvae eat soft-bodied insects including aphids, thrips, leafhoppers, scales, and caterpillars.

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Later chapters address strategies for attracting and retaining beneficial insects in a garden—explaining how, and on what, beneficial insects feed and providing profiles of the plants that research shows best attract them. For example, the North American native Rudbeckia species including Rudbeckia fulgida (orange coneflower) and Rudbeckia hirta (black-eyed Susan) support syrphid flies, tachinid flies, soldier beetles and some parasitic wasps. Lobularia maritima (sweet alyssum), native to southern Europe, attracts many beneficials including parasitic wasps that control many common cabbage pests. An easy-to-use summary chart further helps readers match beneficial insects and the plants that attract them to specific pests.

Equally important to having the right plants is knowing where to plant them. Walliser says “[c]reating a landscape with a diversity of plant-based foods is critical to the fitness of beneficial insects. Doing so minimizes nectar and pollen foraging time and allows the insects to spend their energies on finding prey or hosts.” She describes multiple strategies for accomplishing this, for example incorporating specific plants into existing flower beds or vegetable gardens or planting an insectary border. She also explains how interplanting (growing several different crops together), planting cover crops, and planting Helianthus annuus (common sunflowers, the ones with pollen)—can all help create habitat for beneficials.

The book also includes a thoughtful discussion of the commercial products available to increase beneficial insect populations, and interviews with entomologists such as Paula Shrewsbury, Ph.D., professor of entomology and extension specialist at the University of Maryland, College Park, who studies the impact of landscape diversity on beneficial insects.

Attracting Beneficial Bugs to Your Garden, A Natural Approach to Pest Control, Revised and Updated Second Edition (Cool Spring Press, 2022) is available from the Arlington Public Library and national booksellers.