Child-Friendly Gardens That Supports Bees and Pollinators

Child-friendly gardens are about creating a space where kids can explore, play, and learn about nature while staying safe too. It’s important to design gardens that are both safe for children and beneficial to pollinators like bees and butterflies, and it’s easy to do when you know how!

Creating a garden full of pollinator-friendly plants can enhance your garden’s educational value and help to teach kids about the vital role of bees in our ecosystem. Getting kids involved in gardening is a great hands-on way for them to learn about nature, why we needs bees and how to grow food too.

Why Pollinators and Bees Are Important for Kids to Learn About

• Educational Value: Creating a garden that supports bees and pollinators can be an interactive learning environment, allowing children to observe and take part in creating a bee-friendly space, which helps them understand the lifecycle of bees and butterflies, the process of pollination, and their role in food production.
• Encouraging Responsibility: Children can learn the importance of protecting pollinators and the environment by caring for plants that attract bees and other insects. Learning about caring for the environment from a young age fosters an interest and love of nature they will carry through life.
• Building Awareness: A garden focused on helping pollinators fosters a sense of connection with nature and helps raise awareness of the challenges pollinators face, and building bee-friendly gardens are an excellent and interactive learning tool.

Designing a Safe and Fun Child-Friendly Garden

• Safety First: It’s important to create a garden that is safe for children, with soft surfaces like grass, non-toxic plants, and clear boundaries to keep them away from potentially harmful areas like water or garden tool storage.

• Accessible Garden Beds: Get kids involved in planting by using raised garden beds, pots or low-growing plants that children can easily reach to plant, water, and harvest. This creates a more hands-on experience so they can do more planting or harvesting of fruits and veg.
• Playful Features: Gardens should be fun and interactive spaces for kids to learn and play. You can add elements like a greenhouse or kids vegetable garden for them to dig and grow in, or help them to make a butterfly or bee water station or bee hotel where children can interact with nature.
• Incorporate Sensory Plants: Let the kids explore by using plants with different textures, colors, and scents (such as lavender, mint, or buddleia) that engage children’s senses, making the garden more appealing and enjoyable for them. Selecting interesting and non-toxic plants lets children interact more with your garden.
• Avoid Pesticides: Children like to touch everything, so choosing organic gardening practices that avoid harmful pesticides, ensures that the garden is safe for both children and pollinators.

Choosing Plants That Are Both Child-Friendly and Bee-Friendly

• Pollinator-Friendly Plants: Highlight several bee-friendly plants that are also safe for children. Include examples with vibrant flowers, appealing scents, and easy-to-care-for varieties.
  • Sunflowers: Large, cheerful flowers that attract bees and are easy for kids to grow from seed, and can be a fun project for kids to see how tall they can grow!
  • Lavender: A fragrant herb that appeals to bees and can be used in sensory play activities and children can harvest some themselves.
  • Wildflowers: Create a wildflower patch with native plants that support pollinators and are visually stimulating for children, it can be fun for kids to help plant wildflowers and watch grow in a variety of bright colours.

• Edible Plants: Include child-friendly, edible plants like strawberries, cherry tomatoes, and herbs like mint to engage kids in growing their own food and observing how pollination benefits crops. This will teach them about growing their own food as well as letting them enjoy eating the healthy food they grow.
• Non-toxic Plants: It’s important to select non-toxic plants for safety reasons, especially if children are prone to putting things in their mouths. Check advice and labelling to ensure your plants are non-toxic, and when in doubt stick to herbs and edible plants.

See our bee-friendly flower guide for more info on choosing your plants.

Creating Pollinator Habitats for Bees and Other Insects

• Bee Hotels: Build a simple bee-hotel with the kids and place in the garden to create a safe space for solitary bees to nest. This can also serve as an educational tool for children to learn about bee habitats. Read our bee-hotel guide here for step by step help.
• Puddling Areas: Add shallow, accessible puddling areas where bees can drink and gather minerals. This can be a fun science experiment for kids to observe how bees and butterflies behave around water. Read our guide here about adding safe water sources to your garden.
• Wildlife-Friendly Spaces: Encourage the creation of natural areas like a wild-flower area, pile of leaves, or a log for insects to shelter. These spaces can be used by children for exploration and learning about garden ecosystems.
• Butterfly-Friendly Zones: Create a butterfly garden with plants like buddleia, which attracts bees and butterflies, and add puddling stations for butterflies to drink, providing a multi-sensory experience for children to observe nature in their garden.

Making the Garden Fun for Kids While Supporting Pollinators

• Nature Play Stations: Set up stations for children to engage in nature play, like a “pollinator observation station,” where they can watch bees in action with magnifying glasses or small journals for note-taking and recording how many bees visit their bee-hotel.
• Garden Crafts: Do some nature themed garden crafts with the kids, from plant pot painting to building bee hotels, check out five kids garden craft ideas here.
• Interactive Learning: Create learning opportunities for children to identify different types of pollinators, observe the growth of plants, and perhaps even track which pollinators visit their garden.
• Garden Activities: Have seasonal activities like a “planting day” or “harvest day,” where kids can take part in planting flowers that attract bees or harvest produce that bees helped pollinate to help them understand the full life cycle of the garden.

Time to get started!

Getting kids stuck into the garden is a great way for them to learn and have fun, and it’s definitely possible to create a bee-friendly garden that’s also a safe place for kids to play and explore.

Including some simple, safe, and educational garden elements suggested above will help to create a space where children can learn about nature, pollination, and environmental stewardship while having fun playing outside.

You can start small and gradually build a garden that supports both your children’s growth and the vital pollinators that help our ecosystems thrive, and over time cultivate a child-friendly natural garden that supports bees and pollinators too.

A Simple Guide for Supporting Pollinators in Small Spaces

You don’t need to have acres of space to create a beautiful outdoor area that supports bees and other pollinators. In today’s modern world, many of us are living in cities with limited outdoor space, but even these small spaces can have a huge impact when it comes to supporting bees, wildlife and the environment, as well as improving our mental health by creating calming natural spaces. Making your space work with nature, rather than against it, is rewarding both for you and for the environment, so this handy guide will show you which plants will be the most beneficial, and how to make them look beautiful all year round!

Survey your space

The first step to creating a beautiful bee friendly balcony is to survey your space. Think about how much sunlight your balcony gets every day – is it in full sun, part sun, shade or a mixture of sun and shade depending on the time of day. If you have a balcony above yours or tall buildings surrounding you, you may find your balcony will get direct sun in the morning, but not in the afternoon, or part of your balcony may be in the sun all day, while half remains in the shade.

Understanding how much sun your space gets is important for helping us choose which plants to pick, if you find the right plants for your space and sun levels, you can create a picture perfect balcony that supports bees for many months.

Picking Your Balcony Plants

As we’re working with balconies or terraces, we need to find plants that will thrive in plant pots. Not all plants will take to pots, and some varieties do better than others so keep an eye out for varieties that work well on containers and particularly those that like to have free draining soil, as these grow well in pots. We’re also looking for plants that don’t grow too large or too tall, as they’ll take up too much room or be easily broken in the wind on an exposed balcony. Make sure when buying your plant pots that they have drainage holes in the bottom to let any excess water out, otherwise the plant will get root rot.

Best Container Plants for Small Spaces

– Lavender – hardy and low maintenance with a lovely scent
– Campanula – will cascade over the sides of pots, creating a pretty cottage feel
– Lobelia – cascades, good for windowboxes, hanging baskets and pots
– Begonias – will grow in sun or part shade, petit pink flowers
– Hydrangeas – pick compact varieties like ‘Early Blue’ or ‘Miss Saori’ that won’t grow too large
– Dahlias – look for compact varieties like ‘Gallery Renoir’

If your dahlias or hydrangeas grow too large, not to worry! They make great cut flowers for bouquets, so you can pop any you need to prune into vases.

Full or Part Sun Balcony plants

– Lavender likes the sun but is hardy enough to live in part shade too.
– Campanula – will grow in full or part sun
– lobelia

Full Sun

– Dahlias – need full sun and a sheltered spot ideally
– Geranium

Shade Balcony Plants

– Hydrangeas
– begonias

Picking your pots

Find pots that work with your space and suit your style. Low level pots are great for windier spots, or baskets can work well for sheltered spaces. Don’t be afraid you use the height vertically too – when dealing with small spaces, you don’t want to take up all the floor space with pots, so think about tall standing shelf-like troughs that can utilise the vertical space and plant upwards. Add cascading flowers like campanula to vertical planters is a wonderful idea for adding colour and making full use of the raised planting space.

Bringing nature to your balcony is a great way to get back to nature, create a unique and relaxing space, as well as providing vital pollen and nectar to bees and butterflies. Many cities have large areas of buildings with green spaces being few and far between, so adding some bee friendly flowers into your balcony design will provide a vital haven for tired bees who are searching for green spaces. It’s extremely rewarding to cultivate a small space that not only looks beautiful, but is good for the environment too. So get stuck in and welcome nature onto your balcony, you won’t regret it!

Cottage style gardens

Cottage style gardens are an increasingly popular garden design style, thanks to their timeless charm, picturesque views and colourful displays. The soft pastel colour pallet of pinks, blues, purple and whites mix together in a haze of floral perfection, making your back garden like a scene from a Monet painting, and evoke calmness and nostalgia.

These delicate flower packed garden styles are not only beautiful, but they also provide an ideal environment for bees and other pollinators. The floral cottage style garden incorporates dozens of flower types that bees and butterflies adore, and the volume of flowers provides vital nectar for pollinators through large parts of the year.

Given the decline of bee species and other pollinators, it’s increasingly important that our own gardens are pollinator-friendly and support local wildlife too.

What Is a Cottage-Style Garden?

So what do we mean when we say a ‘cottage-style garden’? Cottage style gardens are a traditional but informal garden aesthetic. They incorporate a mixture of flowers and plants that blend together in an almost wild and natural way, and bring the aesthetic of a natural flower meadow in their abundance and colour.

Cottage-style gardens are often characterised by their abundant flower beds, with little visible space between the plants so that they flow together. Winding paths around almost overflowing flower beds are typical of cottage style gardens, and they often include climbing plants and flowers as well as cascading flowers to make an immersive and brimming garden.

Why Cottage-Style Gardens Are Ideal for Pollinators

The natural meadow style of planting of a cottage garden mimics natural growing patterns, which encourages more biodiversity and offers a haven for wildlife and pollinators with their abundant food supply and environments to live in. The natural style of the garden as provides more habitats for nesting birds, hedgehogs as well as providing resting points pollinators or nests for hibernating solo bees.

The variety of plants and flowers that cottage style gardens offer, including perennials, annuals, herbs, and shrubs, provides a diverse and year-round food source for bees and other pollinators.

A well designed cottage garden can bloom from early spring to late autumn, and even over the winter period too, which ensures pollinators have a constant supply of nectar, even at cooler times of year.

Cottage style gardens also typically focus on utilising native plant species, as these offer the most benefit to local pollinators and wildlife.

Top Bee-Friendly Plants for Cottage-Style Gardens

These bee-friendly plants thrive in cottage-style gardens, and add to the natural floral cottage style:

• Lavender: A classic cottage garden plant known for attracting bees with its fragrant blooms.
• Foxgloves – tubular shaped native flowers that are ideal nectar sources for bees.
• Alliums – bundles of purple pompom shaped flowers that bees and butterflies love
• Forget-me-nots – delicate and pretty, they cascade wonderfully out of pots or over low walls
• Sunflowers: Large, open flowers that offer plenty of pollen for bees.
• Thyme and Rosemary: Herbs that double as culinary plants and excellent nectar sources.

Include a mix of colors, shapes, and blooming times to ensure pollinators have year-round food.

Design Tips for Creating a Bee-Friendly Cottage Garden

Layered Planting: Use plants of different heights and forms to create a natural, layered look. Tall plants like buddleia or foxgloves provide shelter and height, while low-growing herbs and flowers offer nectar at ground level. The key is to use plants of different heights so there are no gaps in your borders.

Water Sources: Include a shallow birdbath, small pond, or other small water source to provide bees and other wildlife with a place to drink. Ensure the water is easy to access and has a safe landing area at its edge and isn’t too deep.

Avoid Chemicals: Pesticides are harmful to bees and other pollinators and are the number one cause of the decline in pollinators. Try to find natural alternatives pesticides or use a simple mesh netting to protect a plant that is being targeted by pests.

Provide Shelter and Nesting Sites: The densely packed bordered of a flower garden provide wonderful hiding spots and nests for solo bees, keeping the soil undisturbed and not overly manicured by using mulch and leaves creates natural safe nesting spots. You can even add in a bee hotel for solitary bees to hibernate in.

All in all, cottage style gardens can be among the most beneficial garden designs for bees and pollinators, as well as being extremely beautiful and calming spaces to enjoy. You can transform your whole garden into a bee haven, or try out some of the principles mentioned above in just one area of you garden and see if you notice a difference in the amount of pollinators you spot in your garden.

Cottage style gardens are gardens that give back to the environment and give the local bees and butterflies a real boost at a time when we’re seeing many species struggle.

If you would like to know more about caring for the plants in your cottage style garden, check out our plant care guides, or see our garden craft ideas for ways to create your own bee hotel.