Two summers ago, I visited a family run garden centre in Darlington to buy plants for the developing pollinator garden. Long ago I was taught that the best way to buy plants that were good for insects was to go to a garden centre and see which plants the insects were visiting, so that’s what I was doing. I came across a climbing plant with hordes of bees and flies all over it, but no label. I decided I didn’t care what it was, I was buying it. I took it to the checkout hut, still covered in bees and flies, where I was told that they didn’t know what the plant was. They made a series of phone calls and still no idea. I paid for it anyway, and then came the battle between the insects and I, as I pathetically tried to remove the bees from the plant so I could get it in the car. The insects won. I went home with a car full of bees and flies.
The plant was sited on the fence of the pollinator garden, although the flowers are coming on a few at a time, so the numbers of bees are not so dramatic. Not knowing what the plant was, we recently put a label on it saying “we don’t know what this is ?”. We then ran a sweepstake to see how long it would take a visitor to identify it. It took longer than we thought, but eventually Patricia Balfour from Guisborough came along, took some details and got in touch to tell me that the mysterious plant is Pileostegia viburnoides, or climbing hydrangea.
Well done to Patricia who gets our most useful visitor award.
It is normally planted on walls where it can slowly climb up to 8 metres, so now I have the task of trying to encourage it to grow along the fence instead. If you want to attracts bees to your garden, and have a wall going spare (sun or shade), then this is the plant to get. But I would order it on line, otherwise the car journey home require will extreme concentration.