Attracting Bees and Butterflies with Native Plants

Why Native Plants Feed Our Pollinators Best

Walk along any old hedgerow in June and you will see what a properly stocked larder looks like. Foxgloves leaning out of the shade, betony threading purple through the grass verge, bird's-foot trefoil scrambling over tussocks — all of them humming. Our bees and butterflies evolved alongside these plants over thousands of years, and they recognise them in a way they simply do not recognise a bedding geranium from a garden centre shelf.

The relationship is practical, not sentimental. Native flowers tend to open at the right moment, offer nectar in the right shape for our bumblebees' tongues, and hold their seed heads well into winter. If you want a garden that buzzes from March to October without much fiddling, start with the plants that belong here.

Foxgloves for the Long-Tongued Bumblebees

The common foxglove (Digitalis purpurea) is the single best plant I know for garden bumblebees, the ones with tongues long enough to reach the nectar at the back of that deep bell. A single spike can carry dozens of flowers, opening from the bottom upwards, which means one plant keeps feeding bees for weeks on end.

Sow it in late spring or early summer and scatter the seed thinly on the surface — it needs light to germinate. Foxgloves are biennial, so you get a rosette the first year and towering flower spikes the second. Let a couple of spikes set seed and they will naturalise themselves, popping up in gravel, along a wall base, or at the edge of a border. They are happiest in dappled shade with a bit of moisture, but they will tolerate sun if the soil stays reasonably cool.

Betony and Bird's-Foot Trefoil for the Smaller Bees

Not every bee has a long tongue, so you need short-tubed flowers too. Betony (Betonica officinalis, once called Stachys officinalis) is a quiet hero. It forms neat clumps of wrinkled green leaves, sends up dense purple-pink whorls in high summer, and every single one of those flowers is shallow enough for a honeybee or a small solitary bee to work without effort. It suits a sunny border or a meadow patch, and it is happy in most soils as long as they drain.

Bird's-foot trefoil is the one to plant if you have a rough lawn, a bank, or a strip of neglected verge. The yellow, red-tinged flowers look like little cloven hooves or, depending on your imagination, a bird's foot. It is a legume, so it fixes nitrogen and actually improves poor soil. Common blue butterflies and several of our day-flying moths use it as a larval food plant, and the bees crowd to it through June and July. Sow it into existing grass and it will slowly knit its way through.

• Foxglove — long-tongued bumblebees, shadeloving, self-seeds freely
• Betony — short-tongued bees, dry sunny spots, long flowering season
• Bird's-foot trefoil — common blue butterflies, poor soil, low maintenance

Other Native Plants Worth Making Room For

A garden with only three nectar plants has a hungry gap in spring and autumn. Fill it out with a few more natives that earn their keep.

• Field scabious — soft lavender pincushions that butterflies adore through late summer
• Wild marjoram — a magnet for hoverflies and small bees, and a lovely kitchen herb
• Common knapweed — tough, drought-proof, and one of the best all-round nectar sources in the meadow
• Yellow rattle — semi-parasitic on grass, which is exactly what you want if you are trying to turn a lawn into a meadow
• Honeysuckle — evening scent for moths, and a nesting site for our dormice and small birds in a hedge
• Sallow and hawthorn — early catkins when there is almost nothing else out, plus larval food for brimstones and purple hairstreaks

Plant in generous drifts rather than single specimens. Polllinators find a metre-wide patch of one species far more easily than a lonely plant lost among ornamentals. Repeat the same plant in two or three places and you have created a flight path across the garden.

Leave the Seed Heads and the Hollow Stems

This is the part that makes the biggest difference and costs nothing. From late September, resist the urge to cut everything back. Seed heads of teasel, knapweed and scabious feed goldfinches and provide winter shelter. Umbellifer seed heads — fennel, wild carrot, hogweed — hold tiny overwintering insects that birds pick off through the cold months.

Hollow stems matter just as much. Many of our small solitary bees and some wasps overwinter as larvae or adults inside hollow or pithy stems. Cut back your perennial stems to about 20–40cm in spring, leaving the stubs standing, and you have created free nesting habitat. Better still, leave a bundle of stems tied and tucked into a sheltered corner. Never burn the prunings until late spring.

Leave a patch of leaf litter and undisturbed soil at the base of a hedge too. Bumblebee queens hibernate in loose soil and tussocky grass, and butterfly pupae often lie just below the surface. A little tidiness withheld is a great deal of life preserved.

Working Native Plants into a Hedge

If you have a boundary to plant, a mixed native hedge gives you nectar, berries, nesting cover and an autumn harvest for traditional crafts all at once. A classic mix of hawthorn, blackthorn, hazel, field maple, dog rose, and guelder rose will establish quickly and last for decades. Plant bare-root whips between November and March, in a double row about 30cm apart, and mulch well.

Hazel coppiced on a rotation gives you supple rods for hurdles and wattle edging. Willow, cut in winter, provides withies for weaving and basketry. Dog rose and bramble offer hips and blackberries for jams and country wines. And the whole thing, from the first catkins in February to the last hips in November, is feeding something.

Start small. Even a metre of border sown with betony and trefoil, with the stems left standing through winter, will bring more bees into your garden than you expect. The plants are native, the work is modest, and the reward is a garden that genuinely belongs here.