Root 2 Leaf Gardening recommends these top 10 pollinating plants to encourage bees and beneficial insects into your garden.

Let’s encourage more pollinating insects, bees, hoverflies, moths, ladybirds, lacewings, solitary wasps, and butterflies into our gardens by planting flowering plants.  By reducing the need for chemical controls, and using nature as a natural barrier to help control pests and pollinate plants.

To help encourage beneficial insects into your garden, create a bug hotel or set aside a habitat area.  Ladybirds and other predators can over winter and live during the growing season.  These beneficial insects can also over winter in hollowed out stems of herbaceous plants.

Flowers that bees prefer are simple open flowers like ox-eye daisy, foxgloves, lupins, lavender, hollyhocks, jasmine, honeysuckle and roses.  Growing herbs are also a good source of nectar. Bees and beneficial insects adore flowering sweet marjoram, rosemary, sage, lemon balm, mint, borage.

Hoverflies play an important part in our gardens as well feeding on flowers for nectar, their larvae feed on aphids.  Flowers to encourage hoverflies into our gardens are open and flat topped, especially from the Asteraceae (daisy) and Aplaceae (carrot) family. Plants like achillea, ox-eye daisy, leucanthemums and sunflowers are ideal.

Wildflowers will also attract beneficial insects and bees into our gardens, so if you can set aside an area for this, your garden will become more bio diverse.

As dusk falls, the sweet fragrance of night scented plants will attract different moths to your garden.  Plants like honeysuckle, jasmine, Nicotiana sylvestris (tobacco plant), Zaluzianskya ovate (night scented phlox).

Ivy – Hedera is also a good source of nectar in the autumn for insects, supplying an abundance of yellow green flowers in clusters when the summer flowers have faded.

Anemone x hybrid “Honorine jobert”

Clump forming perennial growing to a height of 1 metre, with green leaves divided into three lobes.  Broad white petals are surrounded with a circle of golden stamens. The reverse of the petals are flushed with pink.  This perennial will flower from late summer to early autumn.

 

Foxgloves – Digtalis purpurea

Foxgloves are biennials, these plants live for two years producing a rosette of leaves in their first year and flowers in the second year.  A single flowering racemes has tubular bell shaped flowers with a spotted inside.  Flowers come in a variety of shading colours ranging from pink, purple and white. Foxgloves don’t need staking or feeding and are drought tolerant and their seeds will freely set.  Bumblebees can often be found foraging on the flowers

Honeysuckle – Lonicera periclymenum “Serotina”

Honeysuckle genus of evergreen, deciduous and semi-evergreen shrubs and woody stemmed twinning climbers.  Serotina is a twinning deciduous shrub, fragrant flowers that are 2 lipped petal lobed, tubular with deep red purple outer petals with yellow terminal clusters.  A vigorous climbing honeysuckle.

Rosa Albertine

Albertine is a highly scented climbing rose having multi-stemmed salmon pink flower heads that are very fragrant, opening in early summer.  It is a vigorous climber, providing nectar for bees and many other types of pollinating insects.

Helianthus “Lemon Queen”

A strong growing perennial sunflower, with green foliage and bright yellow daisy like flowers. This plant having a rich source of nectar, is ideal for attracting bees, hoverflies, butterflies and moths.  The plant will require dividing every 2-3 years, growing to a height of up to 2 metres.

Centaurea dealbata

Centaurea are perfect plants for attracting pollinators to our gardens.

This perennial is clump forming growing up to 60cm in height. This plant flowers in the summer and early autumn, with gorgeous bright lilac fringed flowers and narrow oval lobed leaves. This perennial enjoys full sun or half shade.

Helenium – Sunset

Heleniums are available in a variety of colour shades from yellow, orange to red.  Flowering from mid-summer to autumn.  Sunset is a herbaceous perennial, upright and clump forming, ideal for pollinators.  Prefers full sun and well drained soil.

Lupins

An Ideal plant for your cottage garden can be grown in containers and garden borders.  Large racemes of pea like flowers are produced in a variety of bold bright colours and some varieties are bi-colour.  Excellent plant for pollinators.

Jasminum x stephanense

A strong growing climbing deciduous shrub with twinning stems, pinnate leaves with small pink flowers with a darker flush of pink from the stamens.  Bumblebees are known for cutting the back of the flower to get to the nectar.

Verbena bonariensis

A herbaceous perennial with erect branching  square stems  bearing small clusters of highly scented purple flowers from summer to autumn with narrow leaves.  Growing up to 2 metres in height, a smaller compact version of this plant is lollipop.  A favourite plant for butterflies.