Plant recommender

Find plants that fill one specific gap — a month, a space, a kind of forage, or a particular bee — with the reason each one matched.

Month

Leave unset for any month. The gaps worth filling are usually at the ends of the year.

Where you are planting

What you want it to supply

Anything useful
Nectar and pollen together
Nectar — feeds adult foragers
Pollen — feeds brood, and the limiting resource in spring

For a particular bee

Only bees some plant record actually names are offered.

Clear

All 296 plants

In catalogue order. Nothing is ranked — a plant with moderate nectar in February beats one with very high nectar in June, and no single ordering can say that.

Why nectar and pollen are asked separately

Nectar and pollen are rated separately throughout this catalogue because they are different resources doing different jobs. Nectar is carbohydrate for adult foragers; pollen is protein for brood, and pollen rather than nectar is usually what limits a colony in spring. A planting that supplies only nectar feeds the adults and starves the next generation.

Why it does not filter by region

This tool does not filter by region, because it has no way to know yours and the consequences of guessing wrong are real — ivy, buddleia, purple loosestrife, gorse, broom and several others are seriously invasive outside northwestern Europe. Matches carrying an invasiveness note are flagged, and the plant's own page states where the problem is.

Written up per region instead: Britain and Ireland, the United States, Australia, New Zealand, Mediterranean climates.

Bee-plant relationships in the catalogue are the well-documented ones, not an exhaustive record of who visits what. Treat an empty bee filter result as a gap in the records rather than in nature.
It cannot know your soil, and soil pH decides whether a good many of these plants will grow at all.
It does not filter by region and will not guess one. Matches carrying an invasiveness note are flagged instead, because recommending ivy in Oregon or gorse in New Zealand would be actively harmful.
Flowering windows are northern-hemisphere temperate and are a guide rather than a schedule — nectar secretion is far more weather-dependent than flowering is.