A diary of back garden botany, urban ecology, rural rambles and field trips to the middle of nowhere...
Tuesday, 12 June 2018
Two plants are particularly rampant in the garden at the moment (in a good way). In the back garden the Geranium shown above flowers in big clumps. I think it's one of the hybrid varieties of G. endressii and G. versicolor that are referred to as Geranium x oxonianum then get called names like 'Claridge Druce' and 'Wargrave Pink'. Actually I find it hard to discern much difference between them.
Anyway it flowers in such profusion that honey bees are all over it, by which I mean Appis mellifera, the beehive bee. The sheer quantity of flowers is important for honey bees. Bumble bees will forage across different flowering plants as they go about their business but honey bees allocate themselves to a particular source and work it- so they're looking for volume.
The other rampaging plant is the Trailing Bellflower (Campanula poscharskyana) which trails and scrambles all over the brick, stone and concrete in the front garden and back patio. It's a bit of a climber too and will mingle in and out of other plants as shown below. Like the Geranium this Campanula flowers so prolifically that the honey bees treat it as a crop to be harvested...