The Bee-Friendly Label Is Lying to You

The seed mix is the problem. Not because it's wrong, exactly, but because it has become a shortcut that lets designers feel they've done the work when they've really just sprinkled some annual colour and moved on. I've watched clients scatter a £4 packet of "bee-friendly wildflowers" across a raised bed, photograph the resulting Centaurea cyanus and Papaver rhoeas in June, and conclude that their garden is now ecologically sorted. It isn't. It's pretty for eight weeks and then it's a tangle of dying stems. The bees, meanwhile, have already gone looking for something else.

Designing seriously for pollinators means thinking across the entire season, across multiple insect guilds, and across the two fundamentally different needs — feeding and breeding — that most planting plans address only one of, if that. It means having an opinion about bare soil. It means deciding what you think about hollow stems in February. These are not marginal considerations. They are, I'd argue, more important than whether your Salvia is native or introduced.

March Is When It Actually Matters

The gap that kills pollinator populations isn't in July. July is fine. Most gardens are overflowing with nectar in July — lavender, Nepeta, Knautia macedonica, the whole familiar chorus. The gap is in early spring, when queen bumblebees are emerging from hibernation having eaten nothing since October, and in late autumn, when the last foragers are trying to build fat reserves before the cold. A garden that peaks in midsummer and offers nothing in March and October is not a pollinator garden. It's a pollinator rest stop with no facilities.

The early season is where I've found the most design traction. Salix species — even a compact Salix hastata 'Wehrhahnii' — offer pollen in February and March when almost nothing else does, and they're beautiful objects in their own right, covered in silver catkins before a single leaf has opened. Cornus mas flowers in February on bare wood and is chronically underused by designers who seem to think it lacks presence; it has a great deal of presence, and it feeds early pollinators when the competition for their attention is essentially zero. Pulmonaria species bridge the gap between late winter and the main spring season, and the tubular flowers are long enough to select for longer-tongued bees — which brings me to a distinction that most seed-mix thinking never gets near.

Pollen and Nectar Are Not the Same Thing

A plant can be rich in nectar and almost worthless as a pollen source, or the reverse. This matters because different insects need different things at different life stages. Solitary bees, in particular, collect pollen to provision their nest cells — it's the protein source that raises their larvae. Nectar fuels adult flight. A garden planted entirely with nectar-rich, pollen-poor flowers — some double-flowered cultivars, certain forms, many modern bedding selections — feeds the adults and starves the next generation.