Asphodel

Value to bees

Nectar

Very high

Pollen

High

As a honey crop

Major honey crop — yields a surplus in good years

Which bees, and why

Worked heavily by honey bees and by a wide range of Mediterranean solitary bees. The open six-petalled flower offers no barrier to anything, which is why the visitor list is so broad.

Fully open flowers with exposed nectar and pollen — accessible to short-tongued and long-tongued insects alike.

Worth knowing

A major early nectar source in country that offers little else at that season, and rated highly for pollen as well.

Flowering

In flower

March to May (northern hemisphere)

An early Mediterranean flow, opening before the heat arrives and finished well before midsummer.

When nectar flows

Secretes freely in warm spring weather. Individual flowers last a day, but a spike opens in succession over weeks.

Year-to-year variation

Dependable in the Mediterranean spring, and a genuine honey crop only where asphodel dominates large areas of hillside — which is to say, where grazing pressure has been heaviest.

What it does to the honey

Asphodel nectar produces a very pale, unusually thick honey with a delicate perfume and a cool vegetal freshness. The density is the plant's most distinctive contribution — the honey is noticeably more viscous than its pallor suggests.

Growing it

Conditions

Full sun, poor dry stony soil, and no competition. It thrives precisely where nothing else will.

Size

60-150 cm in flower.

Native range

The Mediterranean basin, from Portugal east to Turkey and across North Africa.

Suits

Large gardens, Meadow or wildflower area

• Grown occasionally as an architectural plant for dry gardens, and it needs the drainage to be genuinely sharp.
• Its dominance in Mediterranean landscapes is a grazing indicator rather than a sign of ecological health — a hillside of asphodel is usually a hillside that has been eaten bare of everything else.

What it looks like

A clump of long strap-shaped grey-green leaves from a tuberous root, throwing up branched spikes a metre or more tall carrying many six-petalled white flowers with a brown midrib on each petal.