We all know that pollinators are a great help in landrace projects.
It would be interesting to share the names of the best plants useful for pollinators in your gardens. What types of pollinating insects are attracted…
this list will allow us all to increase the plantations in our gardens to please the buzzzzer insectors!
So I start
Here in central france there are many very useful plants in my garden for this
the most effective is by far are :
Achillea millefolium (local plant) : bees, butterflies, syrphe, bumblebees in July/August/September/
Arbutus undeo (mediterranean): bees, bumblebees in November/December
Buddleja x weyeriana (horticultural): bees, butterflies, syrphe, bumblebees in July/August/September/October
Elaeagnus x ebbingei (horticultural): bees, bumblebees in October /November
Lonicera fragantissima (asia): bees in February/March
Origanum vulgare (local plant): butterflies, syrphe in May/June
Perovskia x atriplicifolia (horticultural): bees in July/August/September
Vitex agnus castus (Mediterranean): bees, bumblebees, butterflies in July/August
I am in North Texas zone 8a, I have a large planting of diverse native wildflowers and weeds which support many pollinators year round.
I would say my top three pollinator plants would be Sunflowers, Blue Mistflower (Conoclinium coelestinum), and Flame Acanthus (Anisacanthus quadrifidus)
They all attract a wide range of pollinators. Bees, butterflies, wasps, and lots of others.
The Flame Acanthus is my favorite because it actually makes hummingbird feeders obsolete.
I say these three because they survive the heat/drought and other harsh weather while many others are more temporary.
For winter I would say henbit and dandelions.
I’ve only seen hummingbirds twice in my garden, and both times, they were hovering next to my brussels sprouts plants in full bloom.
I clearly need to grow more brassicas. 
We also have a large variety of flowering plants and many types of pollinators. Hummingbirds like the runner beans, wild trumpet vine, coral bells and other stuff and once in a while poke at Lima beans but I’ve never seen them interested in brassicas.
I also noticed that if the plants are too attractive, the pollinators are no longer on the vegetables. That’s why I especially favor ornamental plants that bloom in dead seasons for local flora or vegetables.
So I don’t know if these flowers are very attractive or if it’s because no wild flower is available at this season. 
Another anecdote, on some plants like Aesculus californica, attracts many pollinators here but scientists say it can kill the bees of europe because they find dead ones below. It seems to me that because it attracts thousands of bees, statistically we find dead bees under the tree. It seems strange to me that bees come to feed during a period when there are flowers everywhere on a plant that would be toxic for them. 
They definitely have they’re favorites. Bumblebees are a primary pollinator of my sweet potatoes. One year when I had a big row of dahlias nearby, they largely ignored the sweet potatoes.
They also take what they can get. One of the last flowers to bloom here and just about my favorite flower is wild asters but even they are done flowering now, but it hasn’t frozen here yet and the bees are still active. Annual marigolds and tomatoes are still blooming, and the bumblebees are acting like those are they’re favorite things when ordinarily they aren’t all that interested in them.
I’ve also wondered if bees know what is good for them. Bread seed poppies are wild weeds here and honeybees love them. I’ve counted more than twenty bees per flower, and they act a little weird and lethargic, a big pile of bees slowly struggling with each other to get to whatever is at the bottom of the flower. I don’t know if it is something really good for them or if it’s something they just can’t get enough of. I’ve never seen a dead bee, but I’ve started reducing the poppy population some because whatever it is the bees ignore everything else while they are blooming.
Anise hyssop and comfrey are both pollinator magnets, but they can also take over the whole garden if you’re not careful.
The bees in my yard were obsessed with my lavender and catmint plants. New York zone 6b.
I consider the most important plants for pollinators in my garden to be those that flower in very early spring (willows), and very late fall (asters). A year ago, I evaluated my garden (thanks @WilliamGrowsTomatoes ) and realized that it needed more flowers for the extreme ends of the growing season. I planted willow and aster, and modified my cultural practices to encourage growth of the native asters.
This fall, a parsnip flowered, months later than the rest. The pollinators loved it, but I don’t know how to reliably grow parsnips to flower in late fall. During my summer months, brassicas, alliums, and umbelifers attract lots of different types of pollinators. I also allow weeds to grow, specifically because they feed different types of pollinators than my vegetable crops.
I also planted things that flower in very early spring (daffodil, hyacinth, tulip, crocus, viola, etc). I intend to plant violets.
Here in the Northern Rockies of the USA scientists found a 9 species list of native plants that supports some 80% of the native bee species in forested lands. Now there are 600+ bee species in Montana so that is a lot. They used a berry called snowberry in the honeysuckle family. Three flowers in the aster family. One woody groundcover in the blueberry family. A willow. A wild rose. Oregon grape in the barberry family and one lupine. So, seven plant families including both woody and herbaceous plants! However, I went to a native bee workshop in 2009 and the instructors had just completed an epic study of native bees in California in urban areas and they found that the gardens with lots of diversity attracted the most native bees. Do include natives because they also provide larval host plants for butterflies. However, the key take away those researchers found is that the shift away from serious gardening towards landscapes that are easy to maintain or maintained for people is a shift away from biodiversity which protects native bees. If you are here, and you are gardening seriously, than you may already be on the right path towards helping to protect pollinator diversity. Essentially: plant lots of plants, in many plant families, and don’t exclude native plants from your gardens. Long season of bloom definitely helps as well and you may naturally trend towards that just so you have flowers all season. Keep some bare ground around for ground nesters and leave some areas a bit messy. Rodents and brush piles may provide important nesting habitat to bumblebees. By gardening organically without even much “organic” products I avoid expense and avoid harming insect communities. That same article with the nine species mix mentioned a couple plants in the mint family that I thought of as bee magnets before the article came out- it recommended them especially in areas grazed by both native and domestic herbivores- grazing tolerant native bee plants. Though they weren’t as important as I casually imagined them to be based on my own observations.
When I first built my house, I didn’t have any flowers, and I wasn’t about to buy them. For several years I just collected up things that grow wild here. It would be a task to try to list them all and I don’t even know the common name, let alone the actual species of many of them. They include Dame’s rocket, columbine, butterfly weed, asters, bluebells, violets, daises, coneflower, black eye Susan, bee balm and who knows what else. These I think, are true landraces by the Alan Kapuler definition, that is, collected from the wild, brought into cultivation and to some degree selected for specific traits.
There are a lot of very old abandoned homesites in my neighborhood. Old log homes, long since gone with nothing left but a rough stone foundation and in some cases a chimney. The dog and I explored and found almost a dozen of them within half a day’s hike where I collected daffodils, iris, peony, roses, garlic and several small spring flowers that I don’t know the name of that had survived on their own for close to two hundred years. Some of those may be wild, some planted by who ever lived there.
Then the state bought 4000 acres next door for a hunting preserve and commenced to bulldozing still more abandoned homesites, also old but not as old as the ones I had already scavenged from. I got permission to take what I wanted before the old yards were graveled for parking. I got a more iris, daffodils, peonies, roses, tulips, apples, pears, peaches, grapes, horseradish, asparagus, forsythia, mock orange, lilac, bridal veil and more garlic.
When my partner arrived, she commenced to planting purchased flowers, I won’t even try to list them.
Anyway, we have a lot of flowers, they bloom from before the last frost of spring until after the first one of fall and they attract lots of pollinators, most of which I don’t know the names of. Some of my favorites to see are the little bees that come in a range of brilliant, shiny colors.
I like all of the flowers and all of the critters but if I had to pick a favorite flower, it would be my asters. They were the first ones I started collecting and I’ve selected them for thirty years to increase the size of the flowers and range of colors. Usually, they are still blooming as frost arrives and the bumblebees and lots of other things have a last supper of the season, but this year there hasn’t been a hard frost, so the asters are done, and the bees have moved to the only things left, which is mostly just tomatoes and marigolds. Although, some of the lilacs which should bloom in spring are blooming now.
@Joseph_Lofthouse these are some of the plants the seeds I sent you came from. Did they grow at your place?
It’s great to have saved these old flowers from destruction.
Here I grow few wild plants in the garden because I am in the middle of a preserved nature with still wild flowers. But the repeated bad mowing practices of farmers are turning the meadows into green grass without flowers…
It is true that the Aster and Mentha are a good source of food for pollinators here too!
I have heard that the following types are very good in the USA:
Agastache
Amsonia
Asclepia
Pycnanthemum
Vernonia
What do you think?
I’m not good with proper identification of many plants so I had to look up what those are. The Amsonia doesn’t look very familiar, but the rest sort of do. We do have several kinds of mint and what I call ironweed and two or three kinds of milkweed. I have a good-sized patch of iron weed, milkweed, goldenrod and butterfly weed. Also, different varieties of thyme, sage, rosemary, winter savory and some other things. Also, some annual herbs, some of which reseed themselves.
There is also a carpeting plant with small pale blue flowers that I think might be a type of wild geranium, it blooms early and dies out in summer. In fall there are two or three other plants with small fuzzy looking flowers. That last one comes in blue and white. The pollinators like all of those too.
By rights I should have lots and lots of butterflies, but I don’t. People comment on how many there are in our yard, but sixty years ago there were clouds of them everywhere. It isn’t because the flowers they like aren’t here, there just aren’t nearly as many as there used to be. I rarely see the big ones with the swallowtail type wings anymore. I bet the nighttime bugs that used to swarm any light you turned on are not more that 20% of what they used to be.
the problem is affectively global!
you can turn your garden into an oasis of biodiversity in a desert… but insects need a larger territory, interaction with other areas and other populations.
Night lights, pesticides, water scarcity and climate change… are a problem
But the biggest problem here is poor agricultural or land maintenance practices that destroy habitats.
In fact many pollinators such as wild bees live in open environments (without large trees) and need disturbed soils (bare soil, sand, gravel, stone wall…) to lay eggs.
We can help them by creating Sandarium or xeric garden!
Mark: The plants that I’m calling wild, look just like the ones in your photo. Mine could be descendants of yours.
Do you have any white ones? I don’t have any idea of how the color is inherited but pure white ones are rare, probably overall not more than five percent are white. They come and go, some years there are none and some years a few. Seeds from a white plant were in those I sent you. The selection technique I’ve used is just to remove those I don’t like before the seeds mature. By then of course they have contributed pollen, but actual seeds of inferior ones don’t go on to the next generation.
I do the same thing to select against those with smaller flowers with more petals. They are white, but I don’t like the little flowers nearly as much. I’m not really sure if the two types are even the same species but the plants other than flower structure, look the same. I think they do cross at least a bit because a couple years ago I had a small flower type show up in purple.
I favor the best ones just by making sure their seeds get well distributed around the place, but I’ve never saved or planted seeds.
People say what’s your favorite this or that, but I tend not to have a single favorite of anything. My asters though are certainly special to me. When a big mass of them is bloomed, especially at dusk or in bright moon light they remind me of galaxies. There is something special about them boarding on the metaphysical. I have not shared them widely.
Mark: I don’t remember if I have the pure white or not. They definitely tend towards pale coloration here.
