VAL BOURNE’S GARDEN WILDLIFE
Why our native evergreens are so important to wildlife
IF, like me, you’re gardening for wildlife, it’s vital to have plants that produce early flowers because the earliest bees in your garden are likely to be solitary bees or bumblebees. These bees will emerge early, after hibernating, because they have no food underground. They’ll appear on mild January afternoons and, if the flowers are in a warm position, nectar will flow in abundance. It’s the Lucozade of the insect world.
The queen bees emerge first and the earliest is usually a buff-tailed bumblebee (Bombus terrestris). These large queens visit crocus and hellebore flowers. One of my favourite early flowers is a British native hellebore with maroon-edged green bells, but these green bells want to attract flies so their flowers have a meaty, unpleasant smell. It’s called the stinking hellebore
(Helleborus foetidus). The pale-green bells are framed by dark, divided foliage, so this wilding is a handsome thing.
I don’t have to go far from home to see this native plant growing in woodland. Those pale-green bells have a luminescent quality in deep shade. When I’m walking in the woods there’s often another native with green flowers called Daphne laureola, or the spurge laurel, close by. This has evergreen, shiny rosettes and lime-green flowers. Both flourish in deep shade.
I grow Daphne laureola in my woodland garden because it’s a very handsome evergreen. It does have one bad habit, though, in that it produces black berries, which are eaten by birds and seedlings appear. Posher gardening friends grow Daphne pontica, a native of Bulgaria, northern Turkey and the Caucasus. This daphne needs much better drainage than my similar Gloucestershire version. Daphnes hate disturbance at the root, and although I’ve been gardening for decades I’ve never taken the secateurs to a Daphne because they’re notoriously capricious.
Daphne laureola doesn’t have a sweet scent, although I’ve never picked up an unpleasant odour, either. However, many daphnes are sweetly scented.
Daphne bholua ‘Jacqueline Postill’ has waxy pink flowers in January. If you see one for sale, try to snap it up because it’s always in short supply.
Daphnes are difficult to grow. You can take a cutting and it will root, but the next stage is much trickier, so most nurserymen tend to avoid growing them. This ‘growing-on’ problem makes them expensive.
I’ve got three ‘Jacqueline Postill’ plants in my woodland garden and they’ve been in the ground for more than 10 years. Although evergreen, ‘Jacqueline Postill’ tends to drop its leaves in my cold garden. Hard winters cut them back, but they generally reshoot. Two of mine have suffered this fate and are slowly making their way upwards again. The third has escaped. The bees love this plant almost as much as I do.
“Daphnes hate disturbance at the root”