Attracting bees and lacewings to orchard flowers

Why orchard flowers earn their keep

An orchard is never just trees. The strip beneath them, the sunny margin along the hedge, the rough corner by the gate — all of it is habitat, and what you grow there decides how much help you get with pollination and pest control. Apples, pears, plums and cherries set better fruit when bees and hoverflies are working the blossom, and the same insects, in their larval stages, spend the rest of the summer eating aphids, mites and moth eggs.

The trick is to have flowers in the orchard from April right through to the first frosts, not just for the two weeks of blossom. Two plant groups do most of the heavy lifting: phacelia, which you sow, and the umbellifers, which you simply allow to flower.

Sowing phacelia in succession

Phacelia tanacetifolia is the finest bee plant most gardeners have never grown. Its blue-violet flowers are open and shallow, so short-tongued bees, hoverflies and tiny parasitic wasps can all feed from them, and it goes on flowering for weeks if you keep the water to it.

Sow from mid-April onwards, once the soil has warmed, and make two or three sowings about three weeks apart so the nectar doesn't all arrive at once. Broadcast the seed at roughly half a gram per square metre — a little goes a long way — then rake it in lightly and firm the soil. It germinates in ten days to a fortnight and starts flowering six to eight weeks later.

• Where: the sunny strip along the orchard edge and the alleyways between tree rows, where it won't compete with young roots.
• How: scratch the surface with a rake, scatter, rake again, and water if the weather turns dry.
• After flowering: let a patch go to seed and it will often self-sow the following spring.

Phacelia is not fussy about soil, though it sulks in deep shade. If your orchard floor is rough grass, strim a strip in early spring and sow into the thatch — the bare ground does the rest.

Let the umbellifers stand

Hoverflies are the unsung heroes of the fruit garden. Their grub-like larvae are voracious aphid predators, and the adults need flat, open flowers they can land on easily. That means the carrot family — the umbellifers — with their wide, shallow heads of tiny florets.

If you already have cow parsley along the lane, wild carrot in the meadow or fennel by the shed, resist the urge to tidy it away before it flowers. Better still, sow a few deliberately:

• Dill and fennel — quick from seed, tall enough to stand above the grass, and superb for hoverflies.
• Coriander and chervil — let a row bolt rather than pulling it.
• Parsley and lovage — second-year parsley flowers are worth more to insects than any leaf you'd cut.
• Wild carrot and cow parsley — native, early, and completely at home in a hedge margin.

A note of caution: don't confuse these with their toxic relatives. Leave wild plants where they grow and keep cultivated umbellifers in the kitchen garden or a marked bed, and there is nothing to worry about.

Housing lacewings and hoverflies

Adult lacewings feed on nectar and pollen, but their larvae are among the best aphid predators you can encourage — one larva can account for hundreds of greenfly in its short life. To keep them on site through winter, they need somewhere to shelter.

Leave a rough corner: a pile of logs, a bundle of straw tied into a bundle and hung in a sheltered spot, corrugated cardboard rolled into a tube, or simply deep leaf litter under an evergreen hedge. Lacewings overwinter in exactly that sort of dry, cool crevice. Hoverflies, meanwhile, will happily spend the winter as larvae or pupae in the soil beneath your flowering strips, so don't dig those areas over.

And please, keep the sprays in the shed. Even a single broad-spectrum insecticide in June will undo a season's worth of careful planting.

A season of nectar and pest control

Think of the orchard year as a relay race, with something in flower at every handover:

• March to April: willow, blackthorn and early dandelions feed the first bees before the fruit blossom opens.
• May: the trees themselves — apple, pear, plum, cherry — plus comfrey and borage nearby.
• June to July: the first phacelia sowing, cow parsley, wild carrot, coriander left to bolt.
• August to September: later phacelia, fennel, dill, and marigolds or yarrow at the margins.
• October: asters, ivy and the last of the phacelia carry beneficials into autumn.

Mow in rotation rather than all at once. Cut the alleyways, leave the margins; cut the margins a fortnight later. That way there is always a flowering strip somewhere in the orchard for insects to move onto.

Small orchard, gentle management

You don't need acres. A dozen fruit trees and a strip of phacelia sown along the fence will bring in more bees than you'd believe, and the hoverflies will follow the aphids. Sow a little, leave a little, and cut a little less — and let the orchard do some of the work for you.