As part of my personal little campaign to get other gardeners to grow plants which attract pollinators, I must mention that strawberry flowers do just that. It's so easy to forget the small flowers that are not particularly showy but I've noticed that lots of the little flowers in my garden are just as attractive to hoverflies and bees as are the bigger ones like the
'Pooh' dahlia. Growing open flowers with their stamens exposed is the way forward although plenty of other, more complex flowers attract them too. The
fuchsia, for example, has stamens that jut out below the flower, as do the
honeysuckle,
runner bean flowers. Anyway, these are a couple of photos I took of hoverflies on my perpetual flowering strawberries.
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| Hoverfly on strawberry flower - macro photograph |
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| Hoverfly on strawberry flower |