It has the bee's vote.

If you have been reading my blog for a while you may remember that last year I planted up our front garden bed with perennials.

If you are a fairly new visitor you can catch up with the story so far here.

At the moment this bed is at the transition stage as each plant starts to produce flowers - a bit like a floral dawn chorus.

Most of the plants have survived the winter with the exception of a couple of veronicas and salvia Amistad. Even the cuttings of Amistad kept in the cold greenhouse died!

At the moment the heucheras that I dotted along the edge of the bed are in full flower. Unless you get close up these tiny flowers look insignificant but the bees absolutely love them and whenever the weather conditions are favourable the flowers are alive with bee diners.

What heuchera flowers lack in size is made up for by the frothy effect of the hundreds of tiny flowers on each spike.

There are one or two gaps and so I've popped a few snapdragons in which will hopefully self seed in future years. We already have one or two that seem to have arrived out of nowhere. I've also added a few nemophila.

I bought a collection of ten coreopsis from Hayloft. I was attracted by the unusual colour range - one or two will find their way into this bed when they have grown a little and others are destined for other parts of the garden.

The geraniums have been flowering for quite a while and I was thinking of giving geranium Phaeum Raven the Chelsea chop as the main flush of flowers were fading. So what stopped me? Well those bees - they were making the most of the remaining flowers so the Chelsea chop is on hold!

Here's a sort of panorama of the bed - it's actually three photos 'sewn' together. can you see the joins?

And here are just some of the stars of the moment.

The honeysuckle, a rose, some winter jasmine and a flowering quince are growing in a sort of tangle in the corner at the far left