How to design a Garden that Bees and Butterflies will love

A pollinator-friendly garden is a vibrant, biodiverse space designed to attract and support bees, butterflies, birds, and other pollinators. It combines native plants, colourful flowers, and thoughtful landscaping to create a sustainable haven for these essential insects. Creating your own in Sydney involves selecting plants, designing a garden that attracts these insects and a small amount of tender loving care. Here’s our some of our tips on how you can create a pollinator garden.

The best plants for pollinators – Choose native!

Native plants are well-adapted to Sydney’s climate and are excellent at supporting local pollinators. The best plants for pollinators include varieties like Grevillea, Banksia, Brachyscome, Anigozanthos and Callistemon (Bottlebrush) which will provide nectar and pollen. Aim for original species and avoid hybrids; while they may have beautiful colour variations, they lack natural nectar and pollen. Carefully choose plants for your garden that provide year-round blooms and colour, this is important to ensure food is available for pollinators throughout the year and creates a great pollinator garden design.

Purchasing a few plants of each variety can help! Did you know bees and pollinators are more likely to visit when flowers of the same type are clustered together?  Planting in clusters mimics natural ecosystems, creating a familiar environment for pollinators and encourages them to visit. Aim for clusters of 3-5 plants of the same species, this size is large enough to attract pollinator attention, but still manageable in a home garden.

How to attract pollinators by creating a diverse habitat

In your pollinator garden design and create areas of shelter through trees, shrubs and ground covers this will create protection for nesting and safeguard from predators. Try to include a water source in your garden design this will ensure pollinators can drink safely. Anything from a shallow dish to a water feature with running water can be used.

While designing, you might want to cover every square centimetre with plants, but fear not, bare soil and deadwood can be attracting for ground nesting bees and insects. Australia has over 1,700 species of bees and over 70% of these bees’ nest in the ground!

Bees and butterflies rely on sight to locate flowers. A large cluster of shapes and colours is more noticeable than scattered individual plants, especially from a distance. Did you know different pollinators are attracted to different flower shapes and colours! Bees prefer blue, yellow, and white flowers, butterflies are drawn to red, orange, and pink and birds like tubular flowers in bright colours. So, if you’d like a bee-friendly garden or a garden full of butterflies choose wisely depending on which pollinators you’d like to attract!

Pesticides

While creating a pollinator friendly garden, it is best to avoid using chemical pesticides and herbicides. Ideally relying on natural pest control measures such as beneficial insects, companion planting, maintaining healthy plants and promoting biodiversity will ‘naturally’ keep the pests away. Should a few pesky ones get in, some of our organic or eco-pest control sprays will remove predators while protecting pollinators.

Maintain Your Garden

An apple a day might keep the doctor away, but a walk through your pollinator garden will help, not only your mental health, but the success of your garden! Keep an eye out for plants that need a bit of extra water or mulch, weeds that are competing with native plants, areas of dry soil, plants that are competing with others. The list might seem endless, but if you put in the time to walk your garden each day, believe us, you’ll see more than you think! Are you ready to start designing your pollinator friendly garden today?