Planting for pollinators

Creating a perfect garden for you to enjoy and pollinators to thrive

Article courtesy of BeeHappyPlants.co.uk

Photos by Nature Chain

There is no better model of gardening for wildlife and ourselves, than nature itself. By, essentially, mimicking the best of nature’s symbiotic relationships, we can design our gardens as we would an edible forest garden or permaculture area, reduce the amount of maintenance our garden needs and increase its yields. By planting mainly perennials, including trees and shrubs, and self-sowing annuals, we instantly have the basis for a self-renewing, self-fertilizing and self-maintaining garden. We can reduce or eliminate pest control chemicals by providing food and shelter for birds, animals and insects that will keep insect pests in check without destroying them outright. We can reduce garden maintenance to mulching, some pruning, occasional weeding and minimal pest or disease management. Creating a garden that is perfect for pollinators and for us entails creating a whole garden ecosystem, which is far more than the sum of its parts. The rewards of this stewardship will be the harvest of herbs, fruits, vegetables, nuts, seeds or medicinal plants for decades or, perhaps, centuries to come. The cogs in this wheel of life that make it all possible are the pollinators, mainly bees, so it very much makes sense to design our gardens with bees in mind.

Wild versus cultivated plants

A major consideration will be our choice of plants. Perhaps, little over one hundred years ago, this would have been a simple process of elimination arriving at the most desirable plants, which are open-pollinated; that is pollinated by insects, usually bees, which transfer pollen from flower to flower leading to fruit and seed set. Now, we are faced with a plethora of red herrings. Looking for the perfect plants for bees and other pollinators has become much harder than our grandparents could possibly have imagined. The reason for this is that plant breeding has become a competitive hobby and big business. Most ornamental plants now for sale in garden centres are modern hybrids known as cultivars. They are bred for certain traits such as dwarfing, larger blooms, different colours or double blooms. They are propagated on a large scale by vegetative cutting, which means they are genetically identical. They have no need for pollinators, most produce no nectar or pollen and most are sterile. Of the few modern cultivars that do produce nectar, e.g. some modern lavender cultivars, their phytochemical constituents including nectar and pollen have been altered at a genetic level, and may not have the same properties as their wild forebears.

An exception to the acceptability of cultivars for use as ideal bee forage plants is the huge array of wonderful varieties of tree fruits, such as apples, plums, gages, cherries, pears and bush fruit such as currants, raspberries and strawberries. For most of these, the seed does not always grow true to type.

However, the seed is viable and sometimes reverts back to its wild form if grown. The resulting plants will also produce pollen and nectar for pollinators, who, in turn, help to produce fruit for us. The other exception is the array of old vegetable cultivars, all of which came originally from their weedy-looking wild ancestors. The old varieties were painstakingly bred over many years by our forebears. Vegetables were pollinated out in the field and each year, from say F1 to F10, with ‘F’ being one generation, seed was selected only from plants with desirable characteristics. These old varieties are known as ‘heritage’ or ‘heirloom’ varieties and they do grow true from their viable seed, which is often saved and passed on as gifts from year to year.

Plant open-pollinated and rare varieties

Our starting point in looking for perfect plants for our self-sustaining garden is to dismiss the artificially bred, non-insect pollinated, modern plants. Instead, we need to seek out ‘open pollinated’ varieties and wild species, insect or bee-pollinated plants. These wild species are the original, stable, genetic source of all our cultivars, old and new. As they have done for millions of years, wild plants will cleverly continue to adapt and evolve to stressors such as climate or atmospheric change, develop resistance to various diseases and even develop strategies for outwitting pests. The moot point for discussion here, is that these wild plants exist as they are, only because of their symbiosis with their pollinators. Without pollinators we would lose all these wild plants. Of course, there are some wind-pollinated wild plants, notably grasses, wheat, rice and maise, but also most annuals, such as oilseed rape and sunflowers, that will benefit from bee pollination with a slightly higher yield and better ‘fitness’, although they will set seed without it. An annual has only one chance to set seed and if it does not set seed it will suffer species decline. The majority of plant species used as food or medicine by humans are insect, mainly bee pollinated. Without realizing it, while we have been planting sterile hybrids originating from wild plants in our gardens, their wild ancestors are being displaced in the wild and many are now threatened with extinction.

How can we choose heritage varieties?

How can we distinguish between modern F1 hybrids and old heritage varieties of vegetables when buying seed? Between wild or artificially altered plants when looking for ornamental plants? There is a code of practice in plant labelling which stems from Carl Linnaeus, the brilliant eighteenth century, Swedish botanist who thought up a system for plant classification and naming. This is now known as the international code of botanical nomenclature, and the international code for cultivated plants. And luckily for us, horticulturists have had the good sense to adopt this practice and stick to it. When a plant or tree is labelled correctly it will bear first the genus then the species name followed, in lower case letters, either by a subspecies (subsp) or naturally evolved variety (var) without quotation marks. Labels you should avoid will bear the genus, then species name followed by a modern name written with the initial letter of the name in capitals, and quotation marks. It is this modern latter part of the name that shows it is a modern hybrid clone. This sounds at first complicated, but it is really quite simple! Here is an example of correct labelling for a wild species tree and a shrub, and some of their modern cousins:

• Crataegus laevigata. Genus is followed by species. This is a wild hawthorn tree, with good forage for bees.

• Crataegus laevigata ‘Plena’. This is a double-flowered white cultivar named ‘Plena’.

• Crataegus laevigata ‘Paul’s Scarlet’. This is a double-flowered and red cultivar. Both these cultivars have had their nectaries replaced by extra petals. They do not, therefore, produce nectar. What a shame!

• Leptospermum scoparium. This is a wild manuka species, producing copious nectar.

• Leptospermum scoparium ‘Red Damask’. This is a double-flowered cultivar, which does not produce nectar.