Before the introduction of intensive farming, the use of heavy machinery and herbicide, our farmland was a more diverse landscape with many summer flowering weeds, legumes and specialised local crops.
Sainfoin for example was only grown on the Cotswold Hills and Hampshire Downs providing a high protein feed for hard working horses. The flower of Sainfoin (pictured) attracted the Bumble bee ‘with great excitement’. Borage is another crop long gone from our working countryside and although white (and to a lesser extent red) clover has made a certain resurgence in use over recent years, it rarely has the opportunity to flower before being cut for silage or grazed by intensively farmed animals.
Again, cornfield annuals have all but disappeared from the sterile cereal crops cultivated for the ultimate yields of commercial production. So these bygone flowers are of our great grandfathers days, our mostly forgotten heritage and maybe the overlooked source of pollen and nectar our struggling bee and butterfly populations are really missing from their modern habitats.
Sow Bumble Bee Forage Seeds into open, sparce grassland in spring to late summer.