Plants That Attract Bees and Butterflies

Start With the Right Flowers

Pollinators are not fussy about pedigree, but they are fussy about access. A bee needs a flower it can land on, with nectar and pollen it can actually reach. That single fact should guide almost every planting decision you make.

Choose single, open flowers wherever possible. Double blooms — the tightly packed dahlias and roses that look lovely in a vase — often hide their nectar or have been bred until they produce none at all. If a flower looks as though a bee would have to fight its way in, it probably isn't worth the space.

Three other principles are worth keeping in mind:

• Plant in drifts, not singles. Three or five of the same plant together is far easier for pollinators to find than one lonely specimen.
• Aim for a continuous season. A garden with something in flower every week from March to November feeds far more insects than one that erupts gloriously for three weeks in July.
• Skip the pesticides. Even a single spray on a plant in flower can undo a whole summer's work.

Early Spring: Food for Hungry Queens

By late February, queen bumblebees are out of hibernation and searching for nectar to fuel the job of founding a new nest. There is often very little about. Anything you can offer now is disproportionately valuable.

Crocus is the star of the show — plant the corms in generous patches in grass or in pots by the door, and they will be visited on the first warm day. Add winter aconite, snowdrops and hellebores, whose nodding flowers are worked by early bees. Pulmonaria and lungwort bring pink-and-blue flowers in March and are a favourite of hairy-footed flower bees. Mahonia and flowering currant offer scent and nectar from a shrub-sized space.

And please, leave a few dandelions. They are one of the best early sources of both nectar and pollen in the whole country, and digging every one out is a small act of vandalism.

Late Spring and Early Summer: The Garden Wakes Up

This is when you can build real momentum. Alliums — Allium cristophii and Allium hollandicum 'Purple Sensation' — are globe-shaped landing pads that bees adore, and they leave handsome seedheads behind. Foxgloves are tailor-made for bumblebees, who are the only insects heavy enough to push open the tube and crawl inside.

Fill the gaps with hardy geraniums such as 'Rozanne', columbine, chives, sage and honesty. If you have room at the back of a border and can keep it in check, a patch of comfrey is one of the finest bee plants going. Cut it back after the first flush and it will flower again.

High Summer: Keeping the Nectar Flowing

Midsummer is easy — almost everything works. The trick is to keep it going rather than let the garden peak and stop.

• Lavender and catmint (Nepeta racemosa 'Walker's Low') for the front of a sunny border. Shear lavender lightly after flowering to keep it bushy.
• Salvias — Salvia nemorosa and its relatives — flower for months if deadheaded.
• Borage, phacelia and marjoram as pollinator magnets, with the bonus of being useful in the kitchen.
• Echinacea, scabious, knautia and verbena for butterflies, which need a flat surface to bask and feed on.
• Single dahlias and cosmos for colour right through to the first frosts.

Plant in clumps of at least three, and try to give the border a purple, blue, yellow or white thread running through it — those are the colours pollinators detect most readily.

Late Summer and Autumn: Fuel for the Winter Ahead

As the days shorten, bees are topping up reserves and new queens need to fatten up before hibernation. This is the season most gardens fail at.

Sedum (now properly called Hylotelephium), especially 'Herbstfreude', is unbeatable — a flat head of tiny pink flowers that can hold dozens of bees at once. Michaelmas daisies, helenium, rudbeckia and Japanese anemones carry the border into October.

Above all, resist tidying the ivy. Its late flowers are one of the last great nectar sources of the year for bees, hoverflies and butterflies, and its leaves feed the caterpillars of the holly blue.

If you want buddleia for butterflies, choose a variety that does not seed itself about so freely, or simply deadhead it diligently after flowering. Red admirals, peacocks and commas will thank you either way. And leave the seedheads on teasels, echinacea and alliums — they feed birds and shelter overwintering insects.

Pots, Patios and Community Plots

You do not need a garden. A decent-sized pot — think 30–40cm across, planted with peat-free compost — will support lavender, thyme, a compact salvia and some nasturtium, and that is a genuine pit stop for a tired bee. Keep pots watered; drought-stressed flowers stop producing nectar, which is why a saucer or a mulch matters more than most people realise.

On allotments, community gardens and shared green spaces, the same logic scales up beautifully. A pollinator strip along one edge — borage, phacelia, calendula and comfrey — costs almost nothing and benefits every plot on the site. Seed swaps and shared cutting beds are a lovely way to spread the plants around too.

Finally, do less. Leave a corner unstrimmed, let the grass grow a little longer in May, pile up some prunings, and hold off cutting back until spring. A slightly untidy garden is not a failing — it is habitat.