Autumn in the pollinator garden
Better late than never, hey? The extreme heatwave earlier this year led to a delayed flowering period. With the arrival of the welcome September rains came the eruptions of blooms - not a moment too soon for our garden pollinators.
Our little plot is currently a riot of colour and insect activity with Cosmos Sonata and Candycane exploding like fireworks, Peacock butterflies on the buddleia, bumblebees swarming the Red Valerian as well as using the petals of the atirrhinum ‘Butterflies’ as miniature landing pads. The chilli peppers are still producing flowers and ripening pillar-box red in the golden-hour sun.
This unseasonably warm October has been by far the most productive month in our garden calendar year, but is also a stark reminder that the seasons as we know them are shifting. It’s more important than ever to provide pollinator plants for the insects which are having their normal reproductive cycle thrown out by the changing climate.
The salvias, in particular, have been a roaring success with the bumblebees and they last long into the late autumn months. The most well-known and popular variety with the bees in our garden is the shrubby Salvia X Jamensis ‘Hot Lips.’ It seems to do very well in our clay soil and has flowered continually for 6 months this year. We also grow Salvia Greggii ‘Amethyst Lips’ along with the very attractive ‘California Sunset’ which is a magnet for bees. The fallen petals are hoovered up by slugs which in turn provide prey for ground beetles.
This year I conducted an experiment with 3 deciduous (those that tend to die back in the winter) salvia varieties in one large pot, to see if there were any colour variations which were more popular with the bees. I planted Salvia guaranitica ‘Amino’ (deep purple flowers on blue spikes), ‘Love & Wishes’ (deep velvet-pink flowers on dark stems) and ‘Phyllis Fancy’ (white flowers on dark stems). The pot is by the patio window which gave ample time to conduct several ‘bee counts’ over 5 minutes (and a cup of tea) in order to see which varieties attracted the most bees. The Amino was by far the most popular, with the Love & Wishes in second. Phyllis Fancy was visited less by the bees, but started blooming a month later than the others so will provide nectar later into the season than the pink and purple cultivars. Bees can see the colour purple more clearly than any other colour which makes Amino a particularly great choice for a pollinator garden and, if planted with roses, it prevents mildew which is an added bonus!
Autumn is my favourite time of the year in the garden. Some of my friends think it’s a sad time where all the year’s plans have come to fruition and now fade away. I think it’s a brilliant time to reflect on the year’s gardening successes and say ‘out with the old, in with the new’. This is a magical time of transition, all to a spectacular backdrop of the changing hues of the leaves. October is also the perfect time to be making that move to a more pollinator-friendly garden. This time of year is perfect for buying pollinator plants as bulbs and, given how unseasonably warm it has been, there’s still time to get your orders in! The Buff-Tailed Bumblebee has active nests from December to February so when buying bulbs and plants in autumn, I try to plan ahead and make sure there are bee-friendly flowers which will sustain the Buff-Tails over these lean months (and look glorious in an otherwise wintry garden too!) Here are some top tips for bulbs, flowers & shrubs to plant out now, ready for the coming winter:
Mahonia (‘Winter Sun’ does well in a container if you don’t have much room and the birds love the berries)
Viburnum x Bodnantense
Crocus bulbs
Snakeshead Fritillary (my absolute favourite, these look straight from the pages of Alice in Wonderland!)
Native Primrose (try to avoid the non-native colour variants)
Hellebores (I plant these in the front garden away from pets and children due to their toxicity)
Alliums (buy now for late Spring)
Daffodils and Snowdrops are not often visited by pollinators and, although pretty, we are slowly replacing them in our wildlife garden.
With all the recent rain, the grass is back with a vengeance. We have a lot of grass clippings going into our home-made compost heap at this time of year. Our compost heap is made of wooden slats with gaps between to enable bumblebees, nesting insects, beetles, grass snakes and slow worms to enter and exit. We cut a hole in the bottom of the lowest slat about the size of a house brick so that hedgehogs can come and go as they please, but also it makes it much easier to pull out the well-composted matter from the bottom of the bin. With such a warm October, many reptiles will be seeking shelter to ‘brumate’ (their version of hibernation when the metabolism slows right down).
Finally, there is something very satisfying about chopping things down to size with a decent pair of secateurs! One of the revelations of our pollinator garden over the last couple of years is how much honey bees, hoverflies and bumblebees all love raspberry flowers. The added bonus is the delicious organic fruit every summer which the kids love to pick themselves (straight into the mouth!) This time of year, the raspberry canes should be brutally cut back to about 3 ft above ground, then tied back. Biostretch is an environmentally-friendly plant tie which can be purchased from Amazon or other online retailers and is much better for the environment than plastic or rubber ties.
The unseasonably warm autumn weather is a great excuse to be out in the garden, quite literally ‘making hay whilst the sun shines’ (or composting it, in our case!) There’s something akin to wrapping Christmas presents in getting the crocus bulbs planned and planted for the next year. You know what’s inside but after the long wait under the tree, seeing them finally unwrapped from the soil is very special. It’s the anticipation which is half the fun.
Helen Bosher, Marden Wildlife