The best herbs for bees
30 plants
The single highest-value planting decision in a small garden. Culinary herbs are drought-proof, long-flowering, productive of nectar, and you were going to grow them anyway.
What to plant for bees
Bee plants grouped the way people actually search for them — herbs, trees, shrubs, wildflowers, bulbs, hedging and the rest, each with the rule that produced the list.
12 categories · 296 plants in the catalogue
Every list here is a rule, not a selection
Each category is a predicate over the structured fields of the plant records — growth form, garden context, botanical family — and the predicate is printed at the top of the page it produces. Nothing is hand-picked, which matters at 253 records: a curated list is a second source of truth that stops matching the catalogue the moment a plant is added.
The cost of that is honesty about edge cases. “Herbs” is not a botanical category, so the herb page selects the mint and carrot families in their garden forms and says so, rather than claiming a precision it does not have.
The best trees for bees
92 plants
A single mature tree can out-produce an entire border. If there is room for one, it is the most consequential thing that can be planted for bees.
The best shrubs for bees
58 plants
The compromise between a tree's volume and a border's flexibility — and where the long flowering seasons and the winter forage are.
The best flowering plants for bees
86 plants
The border workhorses. Perennials come back every year, flower for months, and several will flower twice if cut back at the right moment.
The best wildflowers for bees
101 plants
Meadow and grassland plants, and the specialist bees that ordinary garden planting never reaches. The soil matters more than the seed mix.
The best fruit trees for bees
26 plants
The relationship runs both ways: fruit trees feed bees through the critical weeks of spring, and the crop depends on the bees turning up.
The best climbers for bees
19 plants
Vertical space costs no ground area, and ivy on a wall is the single most valuable autumn forage plant in northern Europe.
The best bulbs for bees
11 plants
The cheapest improvement available to most gardens. Bulbs flower before anything else and occupy ground that will be shaded and idle by June.
The best annuals for bees
42 plants
Fast, generous and gone. The right answer when a garden needs forage this summer rather than in three years.
The best plants for bees in pots
95 plants
A balcony can genuinely feed bees. The constraint is not space so much as drought, wind and a shallow root run, and one group of plants handles all three.
The best hedging plants for bees
76 plants
A mixed native hedge supports more bee species than most borders, and the cheapest improvement to an existing one is to cut it less often.
The best field-scale plants for bees
57 plants
Where the landscape-level forage actually is. Margins, cover crops and green manures allowed to flower decide far more than gardens do.