The Garden I Almost Tidied Away
It started with a patch of nettles I kept meaning to deal with.
They had tucked themselves behind the lavender and I would look at them and think, I really need to sort that out.
I never quite got around to it. Luckily, as it turned out.
One afternoon, I spotted a Yellow Admiral butterfly sitting right in the middle of them. Its wings slowly opened and closed in the sun, showing off those beautiful yellow bands against the dark brown.
So, instead of pulling the nettles out, I stood and watched.
That butterfly eventually found its way into one of my paintings, and the nettles stayed exactly where they were.
It's a lovely reminder that the parts of our gardens we think are messy or neglected can be the very places wildlife needs most. Sometimes the best thing we can do is stop fussing, leave a corner alone and see who turns up.
A garden with a little life in it
I love a garden that hums.
There's something wonderfully peaceful about sitting outside on a warm day and hearing bees moving through the lavender. Once you start paying attention, you notice that they are not simply buzzing about at random. They're busy, completely absorbed in moving from one flower to the next, gathering pollen and nectar and getting on with the important business of being a bee.
It is exactly the sort of small, easily missed moment that sits at the heart of The Quiet Wild.
You don't need a huge garden or an elaborate planting plan to encourage more bees and butterflies. My own garden is in Christchurch, and I've found that a handful of reliable plants, allowed to grow a little freely, can bring in an extraordinary amount of life.
These are the ones that have worked particularly well for me.
Lavender
Lavender is probably the most obvious plant on the list, but there is a reason it appears in every bee-friendly garden guide.
When mine is flowering, it is rarely without visitors. The bees work their way along the flower heads, one after another, while the whole border hums around them.
It copes well with Christchurch's dry summers, does not demand endless attention and smells beautiful when you brush past it. It has also appeared in my artwork more than once because bees and lavender seem to belong together.
If you only have room for one or two bee-friendly plants, lavender is a very good place to begin.
Borage
Borage is slightly unruly, but I think that is part of its charm.
It grows quickly, self-seeds enthusiastically and produces the most beautiful blue, star-shaped flowers. The bees absolutely love it.
It is not the sort of plant that sits politely where it is put, so you may find it appearing in unexpected places the following year. I don't particularly mind that. A garden with a few surprises is much more interesting than one where every plant behaves itself.
Calendula
Calendula is one of those cheerful plants that seems determined to keep flowering.
Its orange and yellow blooms bring colour into the garden for months, and both bees and butterflies visit them. Deadheading helps it continue flowering, although I am not going to pretend I always remember to do that.
It grows well here in Canterbury and is very easy to start from seed. It is particularly useful later in the season when some of the big summer performers are beginning to finish.
Phacelia
If you have never grown phacelia before, it is worth trying for the flowers alone.
They are a wonderful blue-purple colour with delicate curling flower heads, and the bees find them very quickly. On a warm day, the plants can be covered in them.
Phacelia is an annual, so it needs to be sown again, but it grows quickly and does not require an enormous amount of gardening expertise. Always a bonus!
Catmint
Catmint gives you soft purple flowers for a long stretch of the season, and the bees treat it rather like a second lavender.
It spills gently over the edges of borders and softens everything around it. After its first big flush of flowers, I cut it back and it usually rewards me by flowering again.
It is another good choice if you want something pretty, useful and not terribly demanding.
Dahlias and the late-summer garden
Dahlias come into their own when the garden is beginning to move towards autumn.
The open-centred varieties are best for bees because they can reach the pollen and nectar easily. Some of the very full, tightly packed dahlias may look spectacular to us, but they are not nearly as useful to a hungry bee trying to find its way to the middle.
Dahlias have also become a favourite subject in my bee paintings. There is something about all those layers of colour, with a small bee tucked among them, that captures the feeling of a late-summer garden perfectly.
They're not grand wildlife encounters. They are the tiny moments happening under our noses while we are hanging out the washing or walking past the flower bed.
Those are often the moments I most want to paint.
And then there are the nettles
Nettles are unlikely to win any garden beauty competitions.
They sting, they spread, and most of us have spent years treating them as something to get rid of. But they are also an important host plant for New Zealand's Red Admiral, or Kahukura, and Yellow Admiral butterflies.
The adult butterflies visit flowers for nectar, but nettles provide food for their caterpillars. Without the right host plants, butterflies may visit a garden, but they can't complete their whole life cycle there.
I have not found eggs or caterpillars on my nettles yet, but I have had quite a few Yellow Admirals visiting the garden. That is reason enough for me to keep the patch.
You do not need to hand your entire garden over to them. A small clump in a sunny, sheltered corner is enough. Mine sit behind the lavender, mostly out of the way.
And if anyone asks why you are deliberately growing nettles, you can tell them they are for the butterflies. That sounds much better than admitting you never got around to pulling them out.
Bees need more than one burst of flowers
One of the most helpful things we can do for bees is have something flowering across as much of the year as possible.
A garden bursting with flowers for a few weeks in summer is lovely, but bees also need food at the beginning and end of the season, when there is far less available.
You do not need to redesign the entire garden. Just pay attention to when your plants flower and add something to fill the quieter gaps.
In my garden, lavender, borage, calendula, phacelia, catmint and dahlias overlap across the warmer months. Native plants such as hebes can also provide valuable flowers, including at times when other plants are not doing much.
Planting several of the same flower together helps too. One lavender plant is useful, but a row of lavender is much easier for bees to find and gives them plenty to forage from once they arrive.
A few simple ways to welcome more bees
If you would like to bring more bees and butterflies into your garden, I would keep it simple:
- Plant flowers they can easily access, particularly open-centred varieties.
- Grow several of the same plant together rather than scattering single plants around the garden.
- Choose plants that flower at different times so there is food available across a longer season.
- Avoid spraying, particularly while plants are in flower.
- Add a shallow dish of water with stones or pebbles for safe landing spots.
- Leave one small corner a little untidy. Long grass, leaf litter, stems and fallen wood can all offer shelter.
- If nettles appear somewhere suitable, consider leaving a small patch for the Admirals.
Most importantly, give it time.
You may not plant something on Saturday and wake up to a butterfly sanctuary on Sunday. Wildlife has its own schedule and is generally quite unimpressed by ours.
But once the bees begin to find the flowers and the butterflies start passing through, the whole garden feels different. It becomes somewhere to pause and watch, rather than simply another thing that needs tidying.
Three small butterfly originals
The Yellow Admiral was not the only butterfly to make its way from the garden into my work.
I currently have three small butterfly originals available, each capturing one of those brief flashes of colour that can stop you in the middle of whatever you are doing and make you look a little closer.
They may be smaller paintings, but that is part of their charm. They are quiet, intimate pieces celebrating the tiny wild visitors we so easily overlook.
Each original is framed, ready to hang and available for $495.
From the garden to the studio
The bees in my garden have been quietly finding their way into my work for some time.
I love painting their soft, fuzzy bodies, the light catching their wings and the way they almost disappear into the flowers around them. They are small paintings of small moments, but that is exactly why they belong in The Quiet Wild.
This week, I have added two new prints, Dahlia Delight and Full Bloom, to my Bees and Botanicals Collection.
Both celebrate that lovely point in late summer when the dahlias are full of colour and the bees are making the most of every flower. They join Purple Haze, Honey Bee and Summer Evening, creating a collection filled with blossoms, warm light and the gentle busyness of the garden.
Perhaps that is what I love most about bees. They make us stop for a moment.
We notice the flower they have chosen, the colour around them and the quiet life carrying on in our gardens while we are busy doing something else.
And sometimes, if we are paying attention, even a neglected patch of nettles can become the beginning of a painting.
Explore the Bees and Botanicals Collection
