“If you build it they will come,” Joe Sheldon said as he opened his talk before a room full of gardening enthusiasts.

Sheldon, a retired college professor, author and one of Whidbey Island’s resident experts on entomology, came to the Greenbank Garden Club’s monthly meeting Thursday to plant a seed in the minds of its members.

He wanted to create greater awareness about a global problem: the decline of native pollinators such as bees and butterflies.

Specifically, he wanted to share how gardeners can do their part on the island to help address the issue locally.

And part of that, he said, involves creating the sort of habitat in one’s garden and landscape using native plants and sometimes even building certain structures to attract beneficial insects.

“My passion is for living in healthy sustainable creation,” said Sheldon, who lives outside Coupeville next to the Pacific Rim Institute for Environmental Stewardship, a teaching stop that brought him to the island.

“What we do in our own backyards makes all the difference in the world.”

On his own five-acre property, Sheldon said the focus is on inviting nature’s birds, mammals and insects and producing his own food rather than a well-manicured landscape, though he has some lawn and ornamental plants.

“In my backyard, I don’t try to take the wild out of the creation,” Sheldon said. “I don’t believe in a manicured landscape. If you have a manicured landscape, you’re living in the landscape alone. Most of the creatures are not there with you. In my backyard, it oozes with life.”

Sheldon looks at the flying insects that carry pollen as a vital component.

He said the populations of both bees and butterflies on Whidbey have been greatly reduced, and in some cases lost, because of the loss of natural ecosystems and their associated native wildflowers.

Efforts are underway in portions of Central Whidbey to restore native prairies that once dominated the area’s landscape prior to the arrival of European settlers.

To do so, massive quantities of native plants have been reintroduced with more planned. The Pacific Rim Institute, where Sheldon remains actively involved, and the Whidbey Camano Land Trust are working on separate prairie restoration projects with the hope that native pollinators will benefit, and in some cases, return.

Taylor’s Checkerspot, for instance, is a federally-listed endangered butterfly that no longer exists on Whidbey.

The demise of native plants and native pollinators go hand in hand.

“Many of the insects, many of the butterflies, the moths and the bees were associated with a fairly narrow group of plants that they utilized for their food source,” Sheldon said. “Local extinction of the plants has caused local extinction of the pollinators.”

Sheldon pointed to numerous scientific articles that continue to document the global decline of pollinators with particular attention on the European honeybee.

The honeybee problem has been blamed on a combination of parasites, pesticides and a lack of flowers and,  more recently, colony collapse disorder.

Native pollinators such as bumble bees, Mason bees and butterflies can help do their part.

Some gardeners build structures filled with tubes to invite Mason bees into their yards.

“If you don’t have pollinators, you’re not going to have the fruit,” Sheldon said. “Your fruit trees are simply not going to be pollinated. You have some plants that are wind pollinated but many of the plants that we have on a regular basis are insect pollinated. Without the pollinators, we lose the plants. And that includes a lot of the vegetables that we’re growing.”

Asked if there was any native plant Sheldon might recommend for North or Central Whidbey, he suggested the common camas for a spring blooming plant. He recommended the showy fleabane, a bumble bee favorite, for a late summer or fall blooming plant.

It’s all about starting somewhere.

He suggested that a great place to start for ideas is to visit National Wildlife Federation’s website (nwf.org) and look at the backyard wildlife tips.

For him, speaking to garden clubs seemed like a logical choice.

“You need catalyst groups in an area so that they can go out and spread the word,” he said. “If we don’t start taking care of the creation that we live in, it’s our children and our grandchildren that are going to suffer.”