Garden And Gardener

Everything for the Gardener and their Garden

How to encourage pollinating insects to your garden

by Sarah - February 16th, 2012.
Filed under: General Gardening.

There is a fantastic short series on BBC 2 at the moment called Bees, Butterflies and Blooms which is Sarah Raven’s attempt to get more pollinating insect friendly plants across the UK. It’s on iplayer at the moment and is well worth a watch.

in the second episode she visits Harrogate’s Britain in Bloom team and encourages them to plant beds with more biodiversity in. They plant a couple of beds up and the immense number of insects on these beds is impressive when there are none on the normal bedding displays.

Sarah also challenges the UK gardening industry, the Horticultural Trades Association and the Royal Horticultural Society to champion pollinating insects by launching a ‘pollinator-friendly’ logo at the Chelsea Flower Show. The logo and label would enable gardeners to identify the best plants for bees and butterflies throughout garden centres and nurseries in the UK.

And at home, Sarah meets expert garden naturalist Steve Head, and explores her own garden’s suitability for insect pollinators. Inspired by what she discovers, she develops a nectar garden – a mini oasis for pollinators.

The moth collector she had in the garden discovered an elephant hawk moth that was really pretty and one that looked like a twig.

Well worth a watch!

And Sarah Raven has several gardening books available: Sarah Raven’s books at Amazon