Plant collection

Nectar Plants for Birds

Nectar plants for birds mostly mean hummingbird plants, and All About Birds lists trumpet creeper, cardinal flower, honeysuckle, jewelweed and bee-balm as the flowers Ruby-throated Hummingbirds feed at ⁵.

The three below are native and profiled on this site; growing facts are from the Wildflower Center and the native-plant case is Audubon's ¹.

Cardinal flower spike — the classic of the nectar plants for birds, feeding hummingbirds — Photo: USGS Bee Inventory and Monitoring Lab from Beltsville, Maryland, USA, Public domain, via Wikimedia Commons.

The three nectar plants for birds

Cardinal flower (Lobelia cardinalis): red spikes May–October, wet soil, and a plant that depends on hummingbirds for pollination ². Wild bergamot (Monarda fistulosa) — the bee-balm of All About Birds' list — lavender pompoms May–September in almost any soil, highly deer resistant ³. Trumpet honeysuckle (Lonicera sempervirens): a native vine with red trumpets March–June that attract hummingbirds, then berries for finches, thrushes and robins ⁴.

Nectar plants and the feeder

Plants and a sugar-water feeder work together. Ruby-throated Hummingbirds prefer red or orange flowers but need no dye in feeder water — about one-quarter cup of sugar per cup of water, changed before it clouds — and they also catch insects in midair for protein, which the native plants supply ⁵. Stagger bloom times so something is open from spring arrival to fall departure.

Why native plants first

Native plants are those that occur naturally in the region where they evolved, and Audubon calls them the ecological basis on which birds depend: without them and the insects that co-evolved with them, local birds cannot survive ¹. The scale matters — a native oak supports over 500 species of caterpillars where a ginkgo hosts five, and it takes more than 6,000 caterpillars to raise one brood of chickadees ¹. Most nursery landscaping plants are alien species, so choosing natives is the single landscaping decision with the clearest effect on bird populations ¹.

The alternative is what most yards already have. Audubon notes that manicured lawn now covers over 40 million acres of the United States as a green monoculture, that the traditional suburban lawn carries on average ten times more chemical pesticide per acre than farmland, and that the continental U.S. has lost 150 million acres of habitat and farmland to sprawl ¹. Every bed of natives that replaces turf is habitat that lawn cannot be, and long-lived native trees such as oaks and maples also store carbon ¹.

Check the native range before buying: the Wildflower Center record for this species lists the states and provinces where it occurs naturally ², and Audubon's zip-code native plant database narrows that to your area and the bird groups each plant attracts ¹. Once established, native plants generally need little maintenance and far less water than lawn, and they do not need the pesticides that make a yard poor bird habitat ¹.

Each plant above links to its own profile with the Wildflower Center's native range, so you can confirm it occurs naturally where you live before buying ¹.

More plant guides

Cardinal Flower →Trumpet Honeysuckle →Common Buttonbush →Wild Bergamot →American Elderberry →Canadian Serviceberry →Flowering Dogwood →Winterberry →Native plants for birds →Berry plants for birds →Seed plants for birds →Shelter plants for birds →

Frequently asked questions

What are the best nectar plants for hummingbirds?

Native tubular flowers: cardinal flower, wild bergamot (bee-balm) and trumpet honeysuckle ²³⁴⁵.

Do nectar plants attract birds other than hummingbirds?

The flowers feed hummingbirds; the seed and fruit that follow feed finches and thrushes, and the insects they host feed everything else ¹.