Marjoram
Consistently one of the top-scoring plants in garden pollinator trials, and one of the cheapest to obtain — it is the oregano in the herb section. Wild marjoram flowers for weeks in high summer in a haze of tiny pink flowers, and the range of insects it attracts is exceptional even by the standards of the mint family. If a garden has room for one herb chosen for bees rather than cooking, this is it.
Value to bees
- Nectar
- Very high
- Pollen
- High
- As a honey crop
- Minor honey crop — a surplus only locally or occasionally
- Which bees, and why
- The flat-topped flower head works as a landing platform holding dozens of shallow florets, so an insect can work it without flying. That efficiency, plus fully accessible nectar, is why the visitor list runs to bees, butterflies, hoverflies and beetles at once.
Very short corolla with exposed nectar — usable by the shortest-tongued insects, including many that cannot feed from lavender or salvias at all.
- Worth knowing
- Repeatedly ranks at or near the top of controlled garden trials for total insect visits, and unusually it scores well for both bees and butterflies — few plants do both.
Flowering
- In flower
- July to September (northern hemisphere)
A long flowering season covering the late-summer gap, and extendable by deadheading.
- When nectar flows
- Secretes best in full sun and heat, and keeps producing through dry spells.
- Year-to-year variation
- Highly dependable. Mediterranean oregano honey exists as a regional speciality but the plant is not a honey crop at garden scale.
What it does to the honey
Greek and Turkish oregano honey carries a distinct herbal-resinous character close to thyme honey's, and the two are frequently mixed in the same Mediterranean crops.
Growing it
- Conditions
- Full sun and free-draining, preferably alkaline soil. It is happiest on poor ground and sulks on rich damp soil.
- Size
- 30-60 cm.
- Native range
- Europe, the Mediterranean and western Asia; naturalised widely.
- Suits
- Containers and window boxes, Small gardens, Large gardens, Meadow or wildflower area
- Buy the plain wild species rather than a golden or variegated cultivar — the ornamental forms flower less and some barely at all.
- Leave the dead flower heads standing over winter. They hold seed for birds and the hollow stems are overwintering habitat.
- Very easy from seed and cheap in quantity, which makes it the most cost-effective serious bee plant on this list.
What it looks like
A spreading woody-based perennial with small aromatic oval leaves and dense flat-topped clusters of tiny pink-purple flowers with protruding stamens, held above the foliage.
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
- How to actually help beesRanked by how much difference it makes, from the things that genuinely work down to the things that are mostly gestures. The first item on the list is not planting flowers.
- 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.
- Plants that attract honey bees specificallyHoney bees have short tongues and work in large numbers, which means they want different plants from bumblebees. Half the flowers sold as bee-friendly are out of their reach entirely.
- The best plants for beesA shortlist chosen on three criteria: how much nectar and pollen the plant produces, how accessible it is to different bees, and when it flowers. Season coverage matters more than any individual plant.
- The best flowers for beesHerbaceous flowers rather than trees and shrubs, chosen for output and length of season. Most of them are things you can grow in a border or a container.
- Bee plants through the yearThe gaps matter more than the peaks. Almost every garden has plenty in June and nothing in February, and it is the empty months that limit what a garden can support.
- 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.
- Bee plants for a small gardenA small garden cannot do everything, so it should do the things large gardens usually skip: the winter and early spring gaps, and nesting habitat. Both take almost no space.
- Bee plants for a balconyBees will find a balcony several floors up, and containers can be genuinely productive. The constraints are watering, wind and depth, and the plants that handle all three are mostly Mediterranean herbs.
- Why botanical family is the most useful thing to know about a bee plantCorolla depth, floret arrangement and whether nectar is exposed are inherited traits. Learn a family and you can predict a plant nobody has catalogued.
- A Mediterranean bee gardenThe one climate where the bee-friendly planting and the drought-tolerant planting are the same list. The Mediterranean gap is not winter — it is the dead of summer, and the plants that solve it are mostly herbs.
- The vegetable garden as bee habitatThe one part of a garden where the relationship runs both ways: bees decide the size of the crop, and the crop — plus what is allowed to bolt beside it — feeds the bees.
- Long-flowering plants for beesA plant in flower for five months does the work of three plants in flower for six weeks, and removes the timing problem that defeats most bee planting. These are the ones that keep going.
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?