Small scabious
A chalk grassland perennial with pale lilac pincushion heads, flowering long into autumn and supporting a specialist mining bee that collects scabious pollen and nothing else. It is one of the best late-season plants for a dry sunny garden and one of the more reliable ways to support an oligolectic bee deliberately.
Value to bees
- Nectar
- High
- Pollen
- High
- As a honey crop
- Not a honey source
- Which bees, and why
- The large scabious mining bee, Andrena hattorfiana, provisions its cells with scabious and knapweed pollen alone and is scarce across its range. Planting scabious in the right landscape is one of the few genuinely targeted things a gardener can do for a rare specialist.
The florets are shallow and openly presented on a flat head that acts as a landing platform, so bees, butterflies and hoverflies all use it readily.
- Worth knowing
- Excellent on both counts, and valuable specifically for how late it continues.
Flowering
- In flower
- June to October (northern hemisphere)
An unusually long season, continuing well into autumn if deadheaded.
Growing it
- Conditions
- Full sun on free-draining alkaline soil. It is genuinely at home on thin chalk and dislikes heavy wet ground.
- Size
- 30-70 cm tall.
- Native range
- Europe and western Asia, on chalk and limestone grassland and dry banks.
- Suits
- Small gardens, Large gardens, Meadow or wildflower area, Containers and window boxes
- Excellent on chalk and limestone, and short-lived on heavy clay.
- Deadhead regularly and it will flower until the first frosts.
- Leave the final seedheads standing over winter for birds and for overwintering invertebrates.
What it looks like
Finely divided grey-green leaves in a basal rosette, with wiry stems carrying flat lilac-blue pincushion heads about 3 cm across, the outer florets larger than the inner.
Sources
- Field Guide to the Bees of Great Britain and Ireland — Bloomsbury (2015) · Field guide
- HoneyHQ editorial synthesis — HEKNO Ltd · HoneyHQ synthesis
How sources are selected and weighted is set out in the sources and evidence policy.
Guides covering this plant
- 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.
- 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.
- 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.
- 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?