Bird's-foot trefoil
A low yellow-and-orange legume of old grassland, roadside verges and lawns, and one of the most valuable wildflowers in temperate Europe for both bees and butterflies. It supports a long list of specialist insects, tolerates mowing and poor soil, and is one of the very few genuinely useful things that will grow in a thin, unimproved, unfertilised sward.
Caution
Contains cyanogenic glycosides in small amounts. This is of no consequence in a meadow, and it is not a plant to eat.
Value to bees
- Nectar
- High
- Pollen
- High
- As a honey crop
- Feeds the colony but rarely yields a surplus
- Which bees, and why
- A keel flower requiring some force to open, so it favours bumblebees and larger solitary bees over honey bees. It is also the larval food plant of the common blue butterfly and of several burnet moths, which makes it valuable well beyond its nectar.
A pea flower that must be levered open. Honey bees can work it but do so less efficiently than bumblebees, which have the weight and the technique.
- Worth knowing
- Good for both, over a long season, from a plant that thrives on the poor unimproved ground most other forage will not tolerate.
Flowering
- In flower
- May to September (northern hemisphere)
A long season, and it will reflower after cutting, which makes it unusually tolerant of grassland management.
- When nectar flows
- Steady nectar production through the summer, and good tolerance of dry conditions.
- Year-to-year variation
- Very dependable. Not a honey crop at any meaningful scale.
Growing it
- Conditions
- Full sun, poor free-draining soil. It performs badly on rich ground, where grasses outcompete it.
- Size
- 10-40 cm, sprawling.
- Native range
- Europe, Asia and North Africa; naturalised widely.
- Suits
- Meadow or wildflower area, Small gardens, Large gardens
- Do not fertilise. This is a plant of impoverished soil, and adding nutrients lets grass smother it.
- One of the best species to introduce into a lawn left uncut through May and June, and it survives being mown afterwards.
- Widely available in wildflower seed mixes and one of the more reliable species to establish from them.
What it looks like
A low sprawling perennial with small five-part leaves and clusters of two to seven bright yellow pea flowers, often flushed red in bud, followed by slender seed pods radiating like a bird's foot.
Sources
- Field Guide to the Bees of Great Britain and Ireland — Bloomsbury (2015) · Field guide
- Bumblebees: Behaviour, Ecology, and Conservation — Oxford University Press (2010) · Monograph
How sources are selected and weighted is set out in the sources and evidence policy.
Guides covering this plant
- Making a wildflower area for beesA meadow is made by reducing fertility and weakening grass, not by scattering seed on a lawn. The single most useful plant in the process is a parasite.
- A bee-friendly garden in Britain and IrelandAround 270 bee species, one honey bee among them, and a climate that gives you flowering months at both ends of the year that most of the world does not get. The British gaps are February and late June, and both are fixable.
- Plants for solitary beesNine bee species in ten are solitary. They are small, short-tongued, short-lived and often tied to particular plants — which makes open shallow flowers, a long season and untidy ground more useful to them than a border of showy perennials.
Tools for planning planting
- Flowering calendar
What should I plant so that something is always in flower for bees?
- Bee-friendly garden planner
What should I plant in the space I actually have?
- Plant recommendation tool
Which plant fills this specific gap?