The easiest flowers to grow in your garden to attract bees and butterflies

Teach your children to value the environment and the role its tiniest critters play by enticing bees and butterflies into your garden.

Watch your child’s eyes light up in wonder as they spot a tiny bee buzzing around your flowers or a beautiful butterfly spread its wings. Bees and butterflies play a vital role as pollinators, spreading pollen as they feed on nectar, helping flowers, herbs, fruits and vegetables to produce new seeds. It’s pretty amazing. As the weather warms up, head outside with your children to teach them about how nature works by planting shrubs and flowers that will bring bees and butterflies into your backyard.

Daisies

Australian paper daisies are super easy to grow and come in a range of colours, from white, yellow, orange and every shade of pink. Sow seeds directly into the garden and keep them moist until they germinate. Prune the main stem so it will branch off and produce more flowers – some for the bees and some for the kids to put in a vase on the kitchen table. Paper daisies last well as a cut flower and you can dry them to use in craft projects too.

Zinnias

Choose zinnia varieties with big, bright yellow centres. That’s the part of the flower bees and butterflies are attracted to. The best time to plant zinnias is in spring or summer, so pick up a packet of seeds and get sowing!

Cosmos

Cosmos are a beautiful flower that bees and butterflies love. They’re easy to grow from seed and will produce an abundance of seeds for you to collect and plant again next year. They come in a range of pinks, as well as red, orange, yellow and white.

Lavender

Lavender smells amazing and the tiny purple flowers are particularly attractive to the Blue Banded Bee. There are a range of varieties, boasting flowers in all shades of purple, as well as shades of pink and even white. Choose a spot in full sun and wait for the bees and butterflies to come.

Guinea Flower

Grow the native Guinea Flower as a groundcover or a climbing vine. Its soft, yellow flowers will bloom in late spring and summer, attracting both bees and butterflies. It’s a low-maintenance, hardy plant that flowers best in sunshine.

Grevillea

If you have room to grow a shrub, you can’t go past the Grevillea for attracting butterflies and bees. These evergreen plants grow to two metres and produce flowers throughout the year which are a rich source of nectar for native bees and butterflies.