Dog rose
The wild rose of European hedgerows, and a plant worth understanding precisely: it offers abundant pollen and no nectar at all. Bees work it heavily for pollen alone, which is a useful corrective to the idea that any flower a bee visits is a nectar source.
Value to bees
- Nectar
- None
- Pollen
- Very high
- As a honey crop
- Not a honey source
- Which bees, and why
- Bees visit for pollen alone, and buzz the anthers to release it. Leafcutter bees also cut the neat semicircular notches from rose leaves that alarm so many gardeners and harm the plant not at all.
Completely open flowers with fully exposed anthers, and no nectar to reach.
- Worth knowing
- No nectar at all and an outstanding pollen source. This is exactly the distinction that makes rating nectar and pollen separately worthwhile — a single bee-friendliness score would either overstate or dismiss it.
Flowering
- In flower
- June to July (northern hemisphere)
A midsummer flowering of three to four weeks.
Growing it
- Conditions
- Sun or part shade on almost any soil. Vigorous and entirely undemanding.
- Size
- Scrambling to 3-5 m through hedge and scrub.
- Native range
- Europe, North Africa and western Asia, in hedgerow, scrub and woodland edge.
- Suits
- Hedgerow, Large gardens, Meadow or wildflower area
- Plant single-flowered wild and species roses rather than double cultivars — a double rose has had its stamens bred into extra petals and offers nothing at all.
- Excellent in a mixed native hedge, where it scrambles through the other shrubs.
- Leave the hips for birds through winter.
What it looks like
A scrambling thorny shrub with arching stems, pinnate leaves and single pale pink to white five-petalled flowers with a boss of golden stamens, followed by red hips.
Sources
- Field Guide to the Bees of Great Britain and Ireland — Bloomsbury (2015) · Field guide
- Assessment Report on Pollinators, Pollination and Food Production — Intergovernmental Science-Policy Platform on Biodiversity and Ecosystem Services (IPBES) (2016) · Systematic review Link
How sources are selected and weighted is set out in the sources and evidence policy.
Guides covering this plant
- Pollen plants explainedPollen is protein and it is what bee larvae are made of. A garden with abundant nectar and no pollen supports adult bees and produces no new ones.
- How to make a garden genuinely useful to beesMost bee-friendly advice covers flowers in June, which is the one thing bees are least short of. The gaps are at the ends of the year — and half the problem is not flowers at all.
- Summer plants for beesSummer looks abundant and contains a real gap. The weeks between the spring blossom finishing and high summer starting are thinner than most gardens realise, and colonies are at peak population when it happens.
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?