The ‘June gap’ is a strange phenomenon. It seems to be very
much a British concept and even here it appears to apply to some areas of the
country and not others. The basic idea is that once the spring flowers have
finished and the grasses have reached their full growth there is a dip in the
availability of forage for pollinators, roughly coinciding with the month of
June.
No doubt this was more noticeable when meadows made up a
larger proportion of our countryside; we have lost 97% of our traditional
lowland flower-rich meadows since the 1940s and the rural countryside is now
dominated by ryegrass and other wind-pollinated crops, making much of the year
a forage ‘gap’. Conversely, we also have a larger area of urban land, around
20-25% of which is made up of gardens, with their artificially high diversity
of flowers. Even so, it is worth bearing in mind that there is the potential
for bees to go hungry in June and it is only prudent to try and select plants
that will tide them through this period.
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| Hips don't lie |
One good choice would be a rose. Having said that, there are
over a hundred species and more than 6500 cultivars of the rose, and not all of
them are created equal. As with many groups of plants popular in the garden,
roses have been selected over hundreds of years for a variety of
characteristics, primarily scent and flower colour/size. Along the way the
ability to attract pollinators has been lost in some varieties, particularly
the double-flowered cultivars, where the reproductive structures are obscured
from view - and insect access - by concentric whorls of petals.
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| Rosa glauca |
So if you are gardening with pollinators in mind it is best
to go for single-flowered varieties or even some of the species roses available
on the market. My particular favourite is Rosa
glauca, whose intense pink petals contrast beautifully with blue-grey
foliage. The advantage of the species roses is that they are similar in flower
structure to our native roses, such as Rosa
canina, the Dog Rose, and the Field Rose, Rosa arvensis. Both are very attractive and work well in a native
hedge; why not give them space in your garden and maybe try a little rosehip
syrup in the Autumn?
