A New Zealand bee garden

A flora that did not evolve for bees

New Zealand's native plants are pollinated by a mixed cast — flies, moths, beetles, birds and lizards as well as bees — and it shows in the flowers. Small, open, pale, shallow and unspecialised is the dominant pattern, and there is very little of the deep tubular flower that co-evolved with long-tongued bees elsewhere. That is convenient for the native bees, which are all short-tongued, and it means a garden of native shrubs supports them well without looking like a conventional bee border.

The native bees themselves are all solitary — Leioproctus, Lasioglossum and Hylaeus — mostly ground-nesting, and mostly active in a short summer window. Bare, sunny, undisturbed soil matters more to them than any planting decision.

The natives worth planting

• Manuka — the honey everyone knows, and a genuinely good early-summer forage shrub that establishes on poor ground.
• Kanuka — flowers slightly later and often more heavily than manuka, and is frequently confused with it.
• Pohutukawa — a substantial December nectar source on the coast, and the reason the New Zealand summer smells the way it does.
• Rewarewa — a major honey source, producing a dark red-tinged honey.
• Five-finger and towai — useful for extending the season either side of the summer peak.
• Hebe — the largest native genus, long-flowering, and the most garden-practical of all of these.

The plants to refuse, which is most of a European bee list

New Zealand's isolation makes it unusually vulnerable, and a disproportionate share of the plants recommended in the British guide on this site are serious weeds here. Two of them are also significant honey plants, which is exactly what makes them difficult.

1. 1GorseAmong the country's worst weeds, forming dense fire-prone thickets across hill country, and simultaneously a useful winter pollen source. Its one redeeming argument — that it acts as a nurse crop under which native forest can regenerate — is real and does not make it plantable.
2. 2HeatherIntroduced deliberately to the Tongariro area for grouse in 1912 and now covering tens of thousands of hectares of the central plateau, displacing native tussock. It is excellent bee forage and a landscape-scale ecological problem.
3. 3Buddleia, Himalayan balsam, cotoneaster and Japanese honeysuckleAll good bee plants, all invasive here, all colonising riverbanks and forest margins.
4. 4Broom, bramble, ragwort, viper's bugloss and fennelAll naturalised and all listed as pests in one region or another.