13 Feburary 2015
This month’s guest article comes from Catherine, a gardener at Chenies Manor in Buckinghamshire. Read on to see her advice on making orchards better for bees…
If I had a large garden my dream would be to plant an orchard full of unusual old varieties of apples and other fruit trees. There are hundreds of local heritage varieties with different flavours, but sadly most are rarely available in supermarkets or greengrocers, so I would love to grow some of these in a wildlife-friendly way. As well as producing spring pollen and nectar for bumblebees and other pollinators, fruit trees also provide a useful habitat and food source for a wide range of wildlife.
Planting my own orchard may be a long way off, but fortunately fruit trees can also be grown in small spaces, so this winter I planted three apple trees and a crab apple in my little garden. Most fruit trees are grafted onto rootstocks which control their size and vigour, so I was able to choose a crab apple suitable for growing in a container, and apples for growing as cordons along my garden wall.
Fruit trees are insect-pollinated, with the open, bowl shape of the flowers making them easily accessible to bumblebees and other pollinators. Because apples, like most fruits, need to be cross-pollinated, it’s important to have more than one variety in flower at the same time (known as pollination partners), so that bees can transfer pollen between them. My four different trees will ensure this happens and we will also have three very different flavoured apples. Crab apples (which cross pollinate with apples) can be used in preserves, but are also very decorative and provide a useful autumn and early winter food for birds.
Even with dwarfing rootstocks you may not have space for more than one tree, but if there are apple trees in neighbouring gardens or crab apples in nearby parks or hedgerows, bees will often still find enough local pollen to cross-pollinate a lone apple tree.
For bumblebees, the main problem with fruit trees is that they only produce pollen for a short period in the spring. However it isn’t too difficult to extend this period by growing earlier and later flowering plants near to your fruit.
I work as a gardener at Chenies Manor where this is done in several ways. The orchard centre path is lined with beautiful Nepeta faassenii ‘Six Hills Giant’, more commonly known as catmint (see the photo to the right). This is very attractive to bumblebees, butterflies, hoverflies and honeybees. It flowers from May, just as the fruit blossom is coming to an end, and, if cut back when the flowers die off in midsummer, it will re-flower again in September/October. The orchard lawn at Chenies is also left to grow a little longer to provide some wildflowers, and there are plenty of pollen and nectar-rich plants in the adjacent vegetable and cut flower areas.
This is not such a problem in a small garden where there’s no space for a separate fruit area, and my apples are growing alongside many other plants with different flowering seasons. I try to keep note of what is in flower each week so that I can choose new plants to fill any gaps. To ensure that I choose bee-friendly plants I use resources like the RHS ‘Plants for Pollinators’ list, or the Pollinator Garden website, and look out for plants which seem to be attracting lots of bumblebees in nearby gardens and parks, as these are growing in similar conditions to my garden.
By making the garden as bumblebee-friendly as possible, I hope I can ensure plenty of fruit in the future as our apple trees mature, but, more importantly, my family can enjoy having a garden that is supporting wildlife.
The Bumblebee Conservation Trust has also produced a factsheet for managing traditional orchards. which you can find here.
