Embroidered bees and wildflower planting: how our Cornish community is helping pollinators
By Vicky Harrison, founder of Embroidered Bees for West Penwith, and co-founder of Treneere Grows, from Penzance
I am stood in the wildflower garden with a robin singing loudly in the trees behind me. The sun is shining and there are new signs of life everywhere. It’s a little oasis of calm. I’ve just seen a Red mason bee, several female Hairy-footed flower bees and a huge Red-tailed bumblebee queen gorging on the spring flowers.
It’s the start of our second growing season and we’ve been waiting anxiously to see what reappears and what we lost in the drought last year. This wildflower garden has been made on a roundabout that is dry and hard, and was filled with lots of debris, making the ground stony and difficult to work. It’s right in the middle of Treneere Estate, Penzance, Cornwall. A driver honks their horn and puts a thumb up. We are winning over the neighbours.
Luckily as we stand here, myself and Jenny, the co-founder of Treneere Grows, can see things sprouting up everywhere. I get down on my knees and search for the clary plants that last year hosted tiny bees who slept all up the stems. I am growing fifty more plants at home to encourage more of these very sweet tiny bees.
Sometimes it seems like an eternity since we started this project. In 2019 I spent almost a year learning to grow wildflowers at Bosavern Farm. I had been concerned for a long time about wild bees and wanted to find ways to help them. At home I began to grow some and give them away on my front step with notes about how they could help the bees. As I learnt more, I really felt this was something that could make a small difference. If we all grew the correct plants, the insects would return.
I wanted to do something else for bees, so in 2019 I started two projects…
Bee-utiful handsewn art
The first is the Embroidered Bees for West Penwith Project. It took a break during covid but is now up and running again. It is an ongoing project making a huge art quilt. I run workshops or people make at home. It’s a way of people learning about and researching our native bees, including bumblebees, solitary bees, and honeybees. The participant then embroiders a bee on a hexagonal piece of fabric and it is sewn into the quilt. As the quilt grows, so does the community knowledge about bees. Eventually we will exhibit the quilt and ask for donations towards wildflower planting and projects.
Did you know…? There are over 270 different species of bee in the UK! 24 of these species are bumblebees, one species is the honeybee, but the biggest group are the solitary bees with over 250 species.
It’s one of those projects that ebbs and flows with new people coming on board and different ideas emerging at sessions. One participant, Vivienne, has begun to paint the flowers in our community wildflower garden and is then embroidering them to add to the art quilt. She told me it has revived her interest in learning about wildflowers.
I am just about to sew another 57 bees into the quilt. Some are the same kinds of bees, some very general and some specific such as an embroidery of a Long-horned bee. These have a few sites in West Penwith. Others include Green-eyed flower bees, which have been spotted in our local subtropical Morrab Gardens, Pantaloon bees (AKA bees with big pants) and Ashy mining bees.
The project does have an impact. One participant Sue replanted her front garden with bee-friendly plants, which resulted in the arrival leaf cutter bees for the very first time. Another built a big bee hotel in her garden. It’s very addictive. Many participants go home and start growing!
Planting for pollinators on Treneere roundabout
The second project I started was a Facebook group and seed and plant swap event for pollinators. A few people came along and swapped plants but the best part was the discussion about the need to create wildflower areas.
It was at this meeting I met Jenny Wren and eventually in early 2020 we formed Treneere Grows, with central aims of improving biodiversity and teaching people how to grow wildflowers in their own gardens. It’s been a long and bumpy journey, having to jump through many hoops, but today as I stand here it is all worth it!
There are 15 beds in the wildflower garden. We began growing in early 2020 . Each species we grow is researched for its usefulness to insects and wildlife or for its impact on the health of the soil. We grow mostly from seed in our own little gardens. Last summer I could not move for pots. Growing this way helps us really learn about the plants and be able to recognise them if they self-seed. Our gardens also get visited by lots of curious bees and other insects. Yesterday a huge Hummingbird hawk-moth descended on some flowering ragged robin I am growing for a damp area.
Most of the plants are native perennials, many grown from locally collected seed, but we have included a few non-natives which are useful to insects. We have a moth bed where we plant specific plants for egg laying such as lady’s bedstraw for hawk-moths, a blue butterfly bed full of birdsfoot trefoils and a wild herb bed. Small Copper butterflies are provided with sorrel as their larvae foodplant. A variety of evening primrose (not native) attracts our moths at night.
The wild herb bed is stuffed with wild marjoram which is loved by many species of bees and I’ve been told leaf-cutter bees go wild for it. Certainly it is always covered in insects and bees.
There is a large meadow bed where we experimented with yellow rattle. It’s interesting seeing nature take care of itself. In this bed we have field scabious in the hope of attracting Scabious mining bees which are now very rare. One of the problems for insects is that some of them forage only on specific flowers so we like to plant them just in case.
In the summer we ran a workshop with our friends at Whole Again Communities CIC and taught young people how to collect seed. They were fascinated by facts such as red campion has male and female plants, and loved hunting to see if they could find different kinds of bees. In autumn we were also able to collect our own seed from corncockles, poppies and clary which we took home to begin again.
The tall weld was one of the first plants to flower last year and it attracted lots of tiny black bees with white or yellow faces, possibly masked bees, and for the whole summer one patch of red clover was patrolled by a very handsome Wool carder bee. In the sunshine the place hummed with White-tailed bumblebees and Red-tailed bumblebees, which love greater birdsfoot trefoil, and a myriad of bees we haven’t yet formally identified. There are plants here for both long and short tongued bees and from spring right through into late autumn.
It’s a difficult job as the grass encroaches on the beds all the time and people walk over them in winter, but slowly some things are taking hold. It’s important to improve the soil so we planted lots of chicory, red clover and vetches all to bring up nutrients and improve the soil quality. The thing about these plants is that the bees love them too. The chicories flower for a very long time and, because they have a deep tap root, can survive drought.
We have also planted in swathes of the same plant as we know bees use a lot of energy collecting and so it’s important to plant things close together in patches of the same plant. There are red campions, white campions, dark mullein, comfrey, knapweed, selfheal and ox-eye daisies. We are planning to fill a bed with clary for the tiny sleepy bees.
By Autumn 2022 the whole garden was humming with life, bees going about their business, Clouded yellow butterflies, Common blue butterflies breeding in the birdsfoot trefoil, grasshoppers bouncing about, hundreds of hoverflies, ladybirds, beetles, it was all happening. Underground we found May bugs. They live there for up to four years before they emerge for a few weeks in spring and are food for some of the larger bats. This was hugely satisfying given that an initial survey before we planted found one Red-tailed bumblebee and one ant.
The future is looking bright as we have just planted an area outside out local shops with lots of herbs and two shade beds under the trees, and fruit trees and spring bulbs in another area. In the autumn we will be planting another large area next to a pathway across the road from the wildflower garden. We have also been giving away wildflowers and helping people plants them in their gardens. We want to create as much habitat as possible. We even persuaded our local council to let us dig up the grass verge next to the pavement and plant things like thyme and selfheal.
Ultimately, we want to create a wildflower corridor right through the Treneere Estate!
If you live in or around Penzance and want to get involved, find us on Facebook by searching ‘Treneere Grows’ or ‘Embroidered Bees for West Penwith’.
More ways to help
Looking to create a bumblebee-friendly space in your local area? Check our our Bee the change resources here.
