🌼 Native Plant Gardens & Restoration Calendar

About this simulation

A single-species lawn or a bed of a few showy exotics can leave pollinators without food for most of the year. Habitat restoration for pollinators is really a scheduling problem: you need overlapping native species whose bloom windows chain together so that something is always flowering from late winter to autumn. This bed plants ten UK native species in a ring and lets you scrub through the calendar to see which ones are open for business each month.

How it works

• Each species has a real bloom window (e.g. primrose in March–April, knapweed in June–September). Flower heads open, colour up and grow taller inside that window and close back to a green bud outside it.
• Climate zone shifts every species' calendar by about a month — cooler northern/upland sites bloom later, milder southern/coastal sites bloom earlier — the same logic used to adjust planting calendars regionally.
• Bloom coverage is the share of the ten species currently flowering; low coverage months are exactly where a restoration plan needs another species added.
• When pollinator traffic is on, bees and butterflies spawn in proportion to bloom coverage and fly between whichever flowers are currently open.

Controls

• Calendar month — scrub January to December to see the succession of blooms.
• Climate zone — shift the whole calendar earlier or later.
• Pollinator traffic — toggle visiting bees and butterflies.
• Highlight coverage gaps — dims the whole bed and tints the ground red when fewer than two species are in bloom, flagging a "hungry gap" month.
• ▶ Play year — auto-advance the month. Drag to rotate the camera, scroll to zoom.

Did you know?

UK conservation charities recommend planting so that at least two to three native species are flowering in any given month — single-species "pollinator mixes" that all bloom in June can look spectacular for three weeks and then leave a hungry gap for the rest of the season.