A garden alive with bees, butterflies, and hoverflies is healthier, more productive, and more beautiful for it. Supporting pollinators is also one of the easiest and most rewarding things any gardener can do.
Pollinators are in trouble, and gardens have become one of their most important refuges. Collectively, the nation’s back gardens add up to a vast nature reserve — and yours can be part of it. The good news is that a pollinator-friendly garden is not a wild, neglected one. It simply means choosing the right plants, flowering across a long season, and easing off the tidiness and the sprays.
Plant for a long season
The single most useful thing you can do is keep something in flower from late winter to autumn. Early crocus, hellebores, and pulmonaria feed queen bumblebees just out of hibernation, when little else is open. Through summer, lavender, catmint, salvias, and verbena hum with visitors. Late in the year, sedum, asters, and ivy — that most underrated of plants — carry pollinators to the season’s end. Aim for at least two or three pollinator plants in flower at any given moment.
Choose simple, open flowers
Not all flowers are equal. Single, open blooms — daisies, single roses, hardy geraniums, foxgloves — offer pollinators easy access to nectar and pollen. Many of the showiest double-flowered varieties, bred for their ruffled petals, offer little or nothing, and some have no nectar at all. As a rule of thumb, if you can see the center of the flower, so can a bee.
If you can see the center of the flower, so can a bee.
Leave a little wild
Pollinators need more than flowers. A patch of long grass, a few seed heads left standing over winter, a small log pile, and a shallow dish of water with a few stones to land on all make a difference. Solitary bees — which do a great deal of the pollinating — nest in bare soil, hollow stems, and crumbling walls. A garden does not have to look untidy to be welcoming; it just has to be a little more relaxed than a putting green.
Put down the spray
Insecticides do not distinguish between a pest and a pollinator. Wherever you possibly can, do without them — and never, ever spray anything that is in flower. A garden in good balance, full of predators and prey, very rarely needs them anyway. Give the ladybirds and hoverflies a few weeks and they will usually deal with the aphids for you, free of charge.