Bees, Butterflies & Blooms: A Pollinator Paradise Bees, Butterflies & Blooms: A Pollinator Paradise Image Image   May 23 through September 30, 2025 Calling all pollinators and pollinator lovers! Morris Arboretum & Gardens becomes a paradise for bees, butterflies, and other pollinators in its newest exhibition, Bees, Butterflies & Blooms: A Pollinator Paradise . Each month brings together people, plants, and pollinators in meaningful ways. Throughout the entire season, visitors can enjoy a variety of fun events, from interactive workshops to engaging programs to specialty guided tours, making this exhibition a delightful and eye-opening experience for all ages. Get Tickets → Image Garden Railway: World Pollinators NOW THROUGH SEPTEMBER 30 Experience Garden Railway: World Pollinators , featuring charming miniature trains weaving through a landscape teeming with flowers and buzzing with life! Enjoy miniature trains as they speed along a third of a mile of track and weave through a landscape dotted with spectacular sculptures of pollinators from around the globe, each crafted with incredible detail using natural materials like bark, leaves, twigs, mosses, acorns, dried flowers, seeds, and resin. Learn More Image Hummingbird Hut NOW THROUGH SEPTEMBER 22 Covered in plants that these tiny, iridescent birds love, the Hummingbird Hut offers a close-up view as they flit from bloom to bloom, showcasing their delicate grace. BEES, BUTTERFLIES & BLOOMS KICK-OFF WEEKEND Saturday, May 24 and Sunday, May 25  Join us at the Hummingbird Hut  for storytime, crafts, and science fun all day long! Learn about the connections between plants and pollinators, particularly our friend, the hummingbird! Learn how they pollinate, and how you can attract them to your home.  POLLINATOR FRIDAYS Select Fridays at 11 am Learn about the importance of pollinators with fun activities for all ages: 6/6 -  Butterflies 7/11 - Moths 8/1 - Bees Image Wings & Wildflowers OPENS SATURDAY, JULY 19 Step into a …

The Importance of Pollinators Over 80 percent of flowering plants and about a third of our food plants depend on bees for pollination. Image Aster in the Rose Garden. Photo by Lynn Weaver. At the height of the dinosaur age, roughly 130 million years ago, the first flowering plants appeared.  Whereas pinecones are suited for wind pollination, flowers are designed specifically to attract and accommodate insects, birds and, rarely, mammals. Flowering plants arose as if from nowhere in the fossil record and rapidly increased in variety over the next 50 million years. Today, they account for about 94 percent of plants on earth—that is nearly 400,000 species! Compare that to the mere 20,000 ferns, clubmosses, cycads, and conifers alive today. What happened 130 million years ago to facilitate this remarkable explosion of flowers? In a letter to his friend Dr. Joseph Hooker, Charles Darwin wrote, famously, “The rapid development as far as we can judge of all the higher plants within recent geological times is an abominable mystery.” While we may never know for sure, the answer to this mystery is likely bees. About the same time flowering plants began their rapid evolution, the first bees appeared in the fossil record. Sweat bees, bumble bees, leaf-cutter bees, miner bees, honeybees—over 80 percent of modern flowering plants and about a third of our food plants depend on them for pollination. Bees, along with other pollinators such as moths, butterflies, and hummingbirds, are exponentially more efficient than wind at transporting pollen, and for several reasons are much more effective at driving evolution and variety, too. Although the honeybee is not native to Pennsylvania, the Keystone State is home to more than 430 species of native bees, along with 125 kinds of butterflies, 350 types of pollinating moths, and one species of hummingbird! So far, we have documented almost 200 native bees, and, of course, plenty of ruby-throated hummingbirds on our grounds here at the …