Pollinators in pots!
Plant up containers of nectar-rich flowers and watch winged beauties sip their sweet bounty
If you’re heading for the garden centre this weekend, why not buy a little treat for your garden’s pollinators? Growing a few insect-friendly plants to grow in containers provides extra feeding stops for butterflies, bees, hoverflies, moths and the like.
Beauty is in the eye of the beholder when it comes to containers. As long as you make some drainage holes, just about anything vaguely pot-shaped will do the job; I’ve seen old wellies recycled to serve the purpose.
There are any number of options for your feeding stations. I like cranesbill and catmint (nepeta), while wild marjoram ( Origanum vulgare) and lamb’s ear ( Stachys byzantina) are great choices, too. The best small-scale, insect-friendly plant has to be ice plant ‘Iceberg’ ( Sedum spectabile ‘Iceberg’). Butterflies and bees love its tiny flowers, which will keep feeding them into autumn.
What’s great about container growing is that you can move plants around so they catch the best of the afternoon sun, which is a boon to basking butterflies. With more flowering plants, your garden should attract more butterflies and a wider range of species, with a good chance of spotting unfamiliar ones, such as the speckled wood.
The populations of most UK butterflies are in decline, but the speckled wood seems to be bucking the trend. Over the last 40 years numbers of this medium-sized, brown beauty have nearly doubled and it has moved into new parts of the country, such as East Anglia, the Midlands, the North and even Scotland. It’s thought that climate change has driven its spread.
This butterfly often turns up in gardens, but in its usual woodland habitat you often see them flitting around in glades and along paths and rides, where dappled sunlight reaches the forest floor.