Brighten your garden or windowsill and nourish hungry bees through the chill, too, with James Wong’s top 10 cold-weather blooms
This romantic expression returns to the pages of gardening media each year, as reliably as the first winter chill in the air: ‘putting the garden to bed’.
The implication is that, as the leaves fall from the trees and many plants enter dormancy, all life in the garden somehow comes to a standstill. But in reality, this simply isn’t the case.
The pace of life in the natural world might slow down in winter but it far from stops, especially when it comes to wildlife. Add the fact that climate change is already making the season not just increasingly mild but measurably shorter, and this old adage is starting to feel ever less helpful.
In fact, for wildlife gardeners keen to support species such as our much-loved pollinators, I’d argue winter is often the most crucial time to make a difference. Even in deep winter, honeybees will often venture out on milder days when temperatures reach 10°C or above for a ‘cleansing flight’. It might sound like a yoga pose, but it’s essentially a polite way to describe a bathroom break.
HIBERNATION HIATUS
These fastidious creatures have evolved to be able to hold on for weeks at a time in cold weather, to prevent a build up of waste that could cause infection in the hive, until conditions are right to deposit it elsewhere. While on these short flights, the bees will often also forage within a limited distance from their hives. But it’s not just honeybees that do this.
In the southern half of the UK, particularly in larger urban spaces, where miles of concrete act like a storage heater to create milder conditions, some bumblebee species that would normally enter hibernation are now remaining active for most, if not all the year. Without the right environmental triggers to cause them to stop creating new colonies, all this activity makes for lots of hungry bees.
The increasing levels of activity of some bees, at a time when their natural food sources are limited and the distances they can forage are hampered by the cold, mean providing food sources in your garden can be a crucial lifeline. And the best thing is, pretty much everything you do to help out these pollinators also makes your garden more attractive to humans, too, providing colour and
