Thinking About Starting a Pollinator Garden? Then, The ‘3x3x3 Planting’ Method Makes It Much Easier

If you dropped out of your mathematics class in college to start a gardening business, the sad news is that you need to revisit those math books again. The good news is, this math will make life easy for your plants and flowers. In gardening, particularly, geometrical mathematics tells you the correct distance, right positioning, and appropriate gaps you need for your plants and flowering beds. One such method is “planting in drifts” to attract birds and pollinators with specific pops of colors. When Reddit user u/Keto4psych planted their garden in large “drifts,” their garden started buzzing with platoons of pollinators.

Planting in ‘drifts’

According to the general meaning, the word “drift” refers to a slow movement of something. In planting, drifts can be understood as ribbons that sway like waves and ripples, marking the borders, edges, or trails of the garden with curvy stripes of different colors. When the Reddit gardener, u/Keto4psych, planted a pink bed, a fall bed, and a white-and-yellow bed, their hillside garden became a party house buzzing with seething populations of swallowtail butterflies and dozens of bird species.

The gardener shared a carousel of photos displaying differently-colored native species they planted in the garden bed, including bee balms, raspberry wine, phlox paniculata, coneflowers, Mangnus, snake roots, solidago fireworks, helianthus, coreopsis, latris, rudbeckia, serviceberries, and hardwoods. Each type of flower appeared in a cluster, punctuated like a pop of color in the garden bed. Pinks in one place, yellow flowers in another, and white flowers in another.

Speaking to Homes & Gardens, horticultural expert Peggy Anne Montgomery said that this kind of “drift planting” is desirable in almost every situation. “It mimics nature, and the repetition is soothing to the eye. Bulbs always look better when planted en masse. The flowers can be small, so it takes quite a few of the small ones to show up.” A specific type of drift planting that many gardeners online have spoken about is the “3x3x3 planting.”

The '3 x 3 x 3 planting' method

Think of it as a Rubik’s cube, the one already solved. Each flower or plant belonging to a unique color category is clustered together in one patch of the garden bed, while the other is accommodated in a different patch on the same bed. The garden bed should resemble a box of color paints where each tiny bottle contains a different color. Pollinators like bumblebees, hummingbirds, or wasps flying nearby would spot these colors with their color-sensitive eyesight and would immediately swoop and plunge into your bed to sip delicious nectar and enjoy the pollen party.

Things to do

If you are considering planting in drifts in a general sense, you don’t need to think about the “3x3x3” measurement. But if your garden space is limited, you might as well consider this method. The 3 S’s in this method refer to “3 native plants” that bloom in “3 different seasons.” A 3x3x3 bed, for instance, would consist of a total of 27 plants or flowers, whatever you choose. The reason why you should select plants from 3 different seasonal varieties is so that your bed has a constant food supply for pollinators across the entire seasonal cycle.

The next step is plant placement. Experts at Gardening Know How suggest positioning each type of plant in groups of three and planting each group of those three plants within a 3-foot space. This spacing can vary depending on the area of your garden bed. For example, if you are placing plants in groups of five or seven, this spacing should be between 5 feet and seven feet.

But beware of cramping or clumping the plants too closely in a narrow space. When these plants grow up, their clusters may become too dense and get entangled with the neighboring clusters, prompting diseases or blocking growth. But as long as you’re using correct geometry and proportion to sprinkle the plants and flowers in the bed, “drift planting” can be a game-changing trick that can make your garden explode with a bounty of pollinating guests. And perhaps, at the end of the day, you’ll realize that math isn’t as boring as you always thought it to be. Not in the garden at least.

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