An attractively illustrated gift that is the ideal starting point for curious gardeners hoping to attract more bees to their plot.
With her husband Dale Gibson, Sarah Wyndham Lewis runs Bermondsey Street Bees and this charmingly illustrated tome has grown out of observations she has made of her own bee-friendly gardens in London and Sussex.
The reason she’d like more of us to follow suit is clearly set out in the first chapter. Despite being intrinsic to successful pollination and therefore to much of the food we eat, honeybees are under attack from loss of habitat; from insecticides and agrochemicals; from an array of pests and diseases; and from the potentially devastating loss of food sources.
What follows are useful lists of plants suitable for a range of spaces from windowsills to large gardens, and divided by season into flowers, edibles, and bushes, climbers and trees. This latter category is especially important; bees evolved as treedwellers and a single lime in flower apparently provides as much forage as half a football pitch’s worth of wildflower meadow.
Additional ten-of-the-best lists are a handy reference and provide more information on species and cultivars; though some pointers on ultimate size or soil requirements would have made these more useful. Planting advice is minimal but this simplicity is also beguiling – Wyndham Lewis’s message is that not everything needs to be complicated and simply popping in a plant that the bees are partial to is a very good start to helping them.
Chapters on the bees themselves furnish several interesting facts. Did you know, for example, that beekeepers can tell exactly what their bees are feeding on by the colour of the pollen on their legs?
Though not a gardening book, it makes light work of attracting more honeybees throughout the seasons.