Hyssop - small useful shrub for bees and gardeners
Hyssop is a very well-behaved and useful small shrub that deserves more attention. It only grows to a maximum of 50cm high and about 60cm wide and forms tidy mounds. It flowers from the end of June onwards with short spires of deep blue flowers that keep going for about 10 weeks.
It can be used in the way many people use lavenders ie as a border edging. But it has several advantages over lavenders:
it flowers for much longer than most lavenders so provides both colour and bee-food for longer
it can be cut right back to keep it tidy and will happily shoot again from the old wood, where lavenders would not., meaning that hyssops will have a longer life. I have some that are now 8 years old and still doing fine.
I find it attracts a range of bumblebees, honey bees as well as butterflies and the occassional solitary bees.
Technically its meant to be a culinary herb similar to thyme but I am unconvinced about these properties. Garden centres tend to sell it under ‘herbs’ if they sell it at all, which I think is why most gardeners are unaware of it.
We sell hyssop in our normal trays of 6 small plants here. These will grow to about 30cm in thier first year.