The books / Planting for Bees / chapter 13 of 21
Lavender is for the bees, not the jar
All chapters
- A quarter hectare in a circle of 1,260
- Reading a bloom window
- Where the year sags
- The gap is worth more than the peak
- Nectar plants and pollen plants
- Willow, the first pollen
- Phacelia, six weeks from seed
- Borage
- Sowing for a date
- A strip sown too late
- White clover in the grass
- A meadow takes two years
- Lavender is for the bees, not the jar
- Heather, the gap's own honey
- Fruit trees and the years before blossom
- A lime tree for the next keeper
- Black locust
- Ivy on the fence
- Nothing to water, nothing dies
- What a planting can name on the jar
- Siting the hive matters more
Lavender in flower in July is loud with bees, and lavender honey is real: floral, perfumed, and sold at a high premium. It comes from Provence, where more than ten thousand hectares of lavender and lavandin flower at once and beekeepers truck their hives up to the fields for the bloom.
A garden bed is not that. Inside a circle of about 1,260 hectares, a bed is a speck, and the bees working it bring its nectar home mixed with everything else that is out. It feeds them well. It never fills a super with its own honey.
In this game a lavender bed flowers in July from two years after planting, gives its nectar and a little pollen, and that nectar goes into the jar as wildflower.