Creating a Pollinator Friendly Garden.
Creating a garden that supports pollinators like bees, butterflies, and other beneficial insects is essential for maintaining biodiversity and ensuring the health of our ecosystems. By incorporating pollinator-friendly plants, you can provide vital nectar and pollen sources throughout the growing season.
Why should we want to create a Pollinator Friendly Garden?
Pollinators like bees, butterflies, and hoverflies are essential for crops grown in the UK, including apples, strawberries, raspberries and tomatoes. We have declining populations in many UK pollinator species, such as the native bumblebee, due to habitat loss, pesticides, and climate change. Nectar feeds hungry bees whilst pollen is collected to feed the young.
What can we do on a smaller scale as Gardeners?
- Plant nectar rich as well as pollen rich flowers in your patch of the planet, wherever you live is a great starting point.
- Bees will travel to find nectar so planting in cities and the countryside is equally important.
- Encouragefriends to plant flower patches for bees is another idea. Do plant swaps with gardening pals to widen the range of bee friendly plants in your garden.
- Neighbours can plant bee friendly plants in each of their gardens so that bees can buzz from one garden to the next collecting the precious nectar and pollen.
- Fruit trees, herbs and vegetables all flower at different times during the year so a mix of all these adds to the long pollinating season for the bee population.
By planting pollinator-friendly gardens, we can help native British species like the red-tailed bumblebee and the UK’s 59 butterfly species thrive.
What can I plant to help make my Garden Pollinator-Friendly?
Pollinator-friendly gardens can mimic wildflower meadows, supporting plants like clover, knapweed, and foxglove that are critical to the countryside. Native plants to the UK are always a good choice. Wildflowers like primroses, foxgloves, and bluebells are ideal. Include early bloomers (e.g., crocuses) and late bloomers (e.g., primroses) to support pollinators throughout the year.
There are lots of plants that will help our pollinators out there from your annual bedding and hanging basket plants to your perennials, fruits and herbs!
Annuals – Sunflowers, Cosmos, Cornflowers
Wildflowers – Ox-eye Daisy, Clover, native Bluebell, Knapweed and Poppy
Perennials – Foxglove, Achillea, Hellebore, winter flowering bulbs, Echinacea, Verbena, Lavender, Sedum and Verbascum
Fruits and Vegetables – Strawberry, Raspberry, Runner Beans and Broad Beans
Herbs – Rosemary, Thyme, Borage and Chives
Trees – Apple, Pear, Crab Apple, Holly and Willow
Pollinator Friendly Plants
What to look out for?
Look out for plants that say they are good for pollinators. You can alo look out for the 'RHS Plants for Pollinators' badge on plants. The RHS create a list every year of plants they feel are perfect for our pollinator friends.
Using scientific evidence, the extensive expertise of the Royal Horticultural Society (RHS), and valuable records from gardeners and beekeepers, the RHS has carefully selected a range of year-round flowering Plants for Pollinators to address the decline in pollinator populations. These plant lists, designed to provide essential nectar and pollen throughout the seasons, are regularly reviewed and updated by RHS scientists.
What else can I do?
Avoid pesticides as much as possible. Use natural pest control methods to keep your garden safe for pollinators, like garlic spray, vinegar, cinnamon etc....
Add water sources like a shallow water dish with pebbles to help thirsty insects and create nesting sites by leavng some areas wild or include bee hotels to encourage pollinator nesting.