RHS Relaunches Plants for Pollinators List

The Royal Horticultural Society (RHS) has relaunched its Plants for Pollinators lists, with nearly 10,000 plants now qualifying for the logo.

In 2019, a team of RHS entomologists, wildlife specialists, botanists and horticulturists, led by Dr Andrew Salisbury, began an extensive review of the Plants for Pollinators lists. Some 354 plant taxa were interrogated via a flow chart decision tree, ensuring that every plant on the lists met the strict criteria. In July 2025, the lists were updated and relaunched following an extensive review that began in 2022. After a thorough evaluation of relevant research, changes were made to the lists. Some plants were removed, while other plant groups received a boost, resulting in many more plants being included than ever before.

What criteria does a plant need to meet to be included? 

The decision tree applied to RHS Plants for Pollinators has added an extra layer of robustness to lists, ensuring that every plant had evidence of being visited by pollinators, and readily available and suitable for growing in UK gardens. To be included, a plant must meet all of the following criteria:

1) widely available to buy in the UK, to grow outdoors in the climate, and to not be officially listed as invasive

2) associated with good, published evidence that it is regularly visited by UK pollinators

3) if only occasionally visited, approved plants must be important to pollinators for another verified reason, such as being very high in nectar, flowering between September and April when less forage is available to pollinators, or benefitting a particularly wide variety of insects. 

The decision tree criteria and methodology are explained in the scientific paper which is published on the BioScience journal website.

What does the new list include?

While 90% of plants included on the original lists have strong evidence of being beneficial to pollinators, 4% (totalling 14 plants) lacked substantiated evidence and have been removed from the lists, and 5% require further data.

For some plants, enough evidence was found to expand their representation on the list to include the whole genus. This means that the number of individual plants on the lists is actually much higher than before. In fact, 19 plant groups have been boosted to whole-genus level on the lists, meaning any species, variety or cultivar (bar a handful of exceptions, such as double-flowered cherries) within the following genera is now a Plant for Pollinators: Anchusa, Campanula, Centaurea, Doronicum, Elaeagnus, Erica, Eryngium, Euphorbia, Gypsophila, Hedera, Helianthus, Lavandula, Lavatera, Malus, Origanum, Pieris, Prunus, Salix, and Sarcococca.

Plants for Pollinators Counts project

Ongoing RHS research includes the Flower-Insect-Timed Count (FIT) surveys being led by Helen Bostock and Stephanie Bird of RHS Plant Health team as part of the UKCEH UK Pollinator Monitoring Scheme.

The RHS Plants for Pollinator Counts project is collecting data using the standardised pollinator monitoring method called Flower Insect Timed (FIT) Counts, a repeatable 10-minute survey developed by the UK Pollinator Monitoring Scheme. This provides information on the number and type of pollinating insect (to pollinator group) visiting a flower of interest.

Over 40 RHS volunteers from all five RHS gardens have been fully trained to carry out the surveys throughout 2025.

To see the full list, visit www.rhs.org.uk/science/research/plants-for-pollinators