Meadowsweet

Value to bees

Nectar

Low

Pollen

High

As a honey crop

Not a honey source

Which bees, and why

Worked for pollen by honey bees and small solitary bees, and visited very heavily by hoverflies and beetles. It is a better hoverfly plant than a bee plant, which matters if the aim is aphid control as well as pollination.

Tiny fully open flowers massed on a flat head — accessible to everything, and with little nectar in them to reach.

Worth knowing

Good pollen and negligible nectar — one of the clearer garden examples of why the two need separate ratings.

Flowering

In flower

June to September (northern hemisphere)

A long summer window on damp ground.

When nectar flows

Very little nectar. Meadowsweet is pollinated largely by flies and beetles drawn by the scent, and its offer to bees is pollen.

Year-to-year variation

Pollen is reliable every year on wet ground. It is not a nectar crop.

Growing it

Conditions

Sun or part shade, damp to wet soil. It is a plant of ditches, pond margins and heavy wet ground.

Size

60-150 cm.

Native range

Europe and western Asia, in damp meadows, ditches and fen.

Suits

Meadow or wildflower area, Large gardens, Hedgerow

• Ideal for a boggy corner or a pond margin where little else useful will grow.
• Spreads by rhizome on wet ground and can be vigorous; it is easily contained on drier soil.
• Traditionally strewn on floors for the scent and used to flavour mead, which is where the name most likely comes from — mead wort rather than meadow.

What it looks like

Tall reddish stems with dark pinnate leaves and dense frothy cymes of tiny creamy-white flowers with a strong sweet almond-and-antiseptic scent.