A brilliant book about bringing bees into the garden



 Back in January, I bought myself a copy of Jan Miller-Kelin's book, Gardening for Butterflies, Bees and other benficial insects.  My first thoughts, were that this would be a valuable resource to learn more about the way that all 34 of the plant species in Meadowmat would interact to help support pollinating insects and indeed other creatures. Here's the link to my blogpost at the time. http://meadowmat.blogspot.com/2012/01/gardening-for-butterflies-bees-and.html



I'm happy to say that the book is amazing and I could certainly recommend it to professional garden designers as well as to interested amateur gardeners like myself. 

Here's an extract from the book, see what you think

There are a few rules of thumb in attracting butterflies into the garden:-

1. Butterflies are attracted foremost by sight, so home in on large clumps of the same flower.
2. They seem to prefer purples, deep pinks and sometimes yellow and white, and do not go to deep reds at all
3. They need to feed in warm, sunny places, sheltered from the wind.
4. The individual flowers hould be single; doubles and other fancy cultivars are often ignored.
5. The nectar plants need to be well-watered in times of drought so that enough runny nectar is produced.
6. Provide different laval food plants for different species and,
7. of course, there can't be any spraying of insecticides!

I never realised that butterflies are influenced by colour schemes.  If you'd like to read more, the book is available from http://www.amazon.co.uk/.