This plan features only native (or near-native) plants. I have included this in order to show that you can have an area containing ‘wild’ flowers that doesn’t have to be a meadow. The plants may not be as well behaved as their cultivated counterparts, being more lax in their habit and with a tendency to seed themselves given the chance, but they are nonetheless attractive in their own way and are beloved by bees.
The plan is for a fairly modest space, covering an area some 2 metres by 2.5 metres. If you have a larger area to fill then it is easy to repeat the whole or part of the plan accordingly.
Focus and framework
Since the space is small, I have not included a focus or even any framework plants. If you have a larger area and want to include a focal point, I think I would choose Malus sylvestris – the native crab apple – for its white blossom in the spring and fruits in the autumn.
Flowers and fillers
This plan consists almost entirely of flowers which bloom mainly during the summer months. This could be regarded as falling short of the aim of providing a suitable source of food for bees for as long a period as possible, but I feel certain that you would probably not want to surrender your entire garden to this type of planting, so there are bound to be flowers available elsewhere in the garden to cover the spring period. If, however, you wanted to include a really good bee plant that flowers for an incredibly long period then you could do no worse than Taraxacum officinale (dandelion). The main problem with this plant is that it is very difficult to get rid of once you have it, and it will seed itself in places you didn’t know it was possible for anything to grow!
Plant families
Unusually, the Other families outnumber Primary families in this plan so we are drawing on a much more diverse collection of plants. All, however, are bee-friendly, so we can bend our rules a little now and then.