Introduction

Have nothing in your house
that you do not know to be useful
or believe to be beautiful.

 

This was the advice of William Morris, the influential craftsman, writer and social reformer of the 19th century, who is probably best remembered nowadays for his organic, garden-inspired designs for interior furnishing. You may wonder why I have chosen this quotation about interior design to begin a book about garden design and, more specifically, about plants and planting plans for a bee garden. Well, let’s adjust the quotation slightly, so that it reads:

Have no plant in your garden
that you do not know to be useful to bees
or believe to be beautiful.

 

This now captures the essence, I think, of what I am trying to achieve here.

It probably goes without saying – but I make no apology for saying it again – that bees are vital to our planet’s ecology and economy, and to our own well-being. The bad news is that without the pollinating services of bees of all kinds, our food supply would be severely compromised. The good news is that we can all do something to help. If each of us grew just a handful of bee-friendly plants in our gardens, this would provide an enormous resource for our buzzy friends – in fact, the phrase ‘Think globally, act locally’ could have been invented for bee-friendly gardeners!

So, what I would like to see in every garden are plants and flowers which are helpful to bees and which, at the same time, we find beautiful to look at.

It is, of course, the plants in a garden that are of paramount importance if we want to design a garden for bees. Many people think that in order to provide a suitable habitat for bees they have to plant a wild flower meadow or allow their garden to ‘go native’, eschewing their beloved garden plants. Certainly, bees adore wild and native flowers, but they also delight in a whole range of cultivated garden plants that are readily available at garden centres and nurseries.

Flowers provide bees with the food they need to survive, so this book will deal predominantly with questions like which plants are best for bees, and how we can arrange them together in suitable groupings that are attractive to bees as well as aesthetically pleasing to us. The plants that I have selected are just that – a selection – and are by no means the only ones that support bees. My choice of plants is subjective: I have chosen plants that are, from my experience and research, good for bees; but they are also ones that I personally like. I hope you will like my choice, too.

I have provided a range of garden plans later in the book. Rather than whole garden designs, with their accompanying hard landscaping and other features, you will find planting plans for different situations and of varying styles. I hope that you will be inspired enough by some of these planting ideas to try to transfer them to your own garden. You may find, of course, that you need to adapt the plans to suit your space; they are certainly not meant to be prescriptive, but to be ideas that aim to help you create your own ‘bee border’. One whole garden design is included, however, which brings together some of the planting plans. This garden is a real one, and is, in fact, owned by a beekeeper.

You will notice that throughout the book I refer mostly (but not exclusively) to honeybees. There are two reasons for this. First, I help my friend, and bee mentor, Toady, look after his honeybees, so they have a special place in my heart. Second, and perhaps more importantly for this book, is that generally speaking, what is suitable in the way of flowers for honeybees is bound to be acceptable to both bumblebees and solitary bees, and indeed many other pollinating insects. (This is to do with the length of the bee’s proboscis, which is generally shorter in honeybees than in other bees, so if a honeybee can reach the nectar, then other bees will be able to do so too.)

The first thing we will do in this book is assess the conditions in your garden – things like aspect and soil – that will affect how well (or otherwise) your plants will grow.

In Chapter 2 we give some thought to design ‘tools’ and how we can use them to create an attractive border. I also suggest a useful method of how we can arrange plants into groups, which will help us choose which ones to put together to make a good planting plan.

In Chapter 3 we look at ‘bee-specific’ things. We begin by examining very briefly some general factors that can make our garden as a whole more beefriendly: things like providing water and suitable habitats for bumblebees and solitary bees – and, if you wish to keep honeybees for yourself, appropriate locations for beehives. We then focus on what makes a plant bee-friendly, and lastly look at which particular plant families are attractive to bees.

Chapter 4 is full of planting plans to give you some concrete ideas of how to put it all into practice.

Hardiness zone

My experience as a gardener is restricted to the British Isles, so all the recommendations I make and examples I give in this book are based on this. Our climate has been categorized as falling generally within hardiness zone 8a or 8b, so if you are gardening outside the British Isles, adjustments must be made.

Latin names of plants

I use Latin names of plants in all the planting plans. Where plant names appear in the text, I nearly always give the common name as well as the Latin one. The reason for doing this is that common names for plants can vary from region to region (a bluebell in Scotland is not the same as a bluebell in England, for example), so knowing the proper, undisputed Latin name is invaluable, especially when it comes to looking for plants in a nursery or online. The exceptions are vegetables; these are generally referred to by their common name. You will find an index of common names of plants and their Latin equivalents towards the end of the book.

Plant families

A word about the names of plant families. As a consequence of ongoing research, particularly with regard to DNA identification, reclassification of some plants has taken place. Some have been reclassified and put into different families, and some families have ceased to exist altogether. The latest reclassification, by the Angiosperm Phylogeny Group (APG), took place in 2009. However, in order to be as consistent as possible, I have used the family designation for each plant as found in The Royal Horticultural Society Encyclopedia of Plants and Flowers, 5th edition (see Further Reading).