Rewilding Begins at Hum

Hi, I’m back.  I’m sorry that I haven’t been writing for nearly three months, but I’ve been going through a crisis of confidence.  When I’m depressed, I can’t write anything worth reading.  Conversely, I worried that anything I wrote when not too depressed which was intended to be sane, cheerful and encouraging just ended up sounding saccharine and hypocritical and resembling the villainous character Media in American Gods - and, of course, this thought made me depressed again.

When I asked PDB11 if I did sound like Media, he said, ‘Only a little bit’, which didn’t exactly reassure me.  After considering for a while, he added that if I did, it was only because my blog offered an edited view of my life, discussing the good bits without the lows.  So, while I don’t want to expose everyone to my paranoid ranting, possibly the answer is to write fairly regularly about whatever is going on in my life, and I’ll try to make most of it not too preachy.

However, this column is definitely going to be preachy, as it is inspired by a recent article by Graham Lawton in New Scientist about why trying to conserve pollinators by keeping bees is counter-productive.  Domesticated honeybees aren’t an endangered species, particularly in cities, but if too many people keep them, they can over-graze the nectar needed by many other species of wild insects.

So far, so good.  But while Lawton explains why keeping honeybees isn’t necessarily as eco-friendly as people assume, he dismisses other activities, such as building bee hotels - nesting-boxes for solitary species of bees as opposed to hives for social honeybees – and planting pollinator-friendly flowers, simply because they ‘haven’t been proven’ to help wild pollinators.  But if they haven’t been proven not to help, and certainly haven’t been proven to be harmful, what is wrong with providing bee hotels and suitable flowers?

Different people have different approaches to gardening, and wildlife.  My neighbour Doom Metal Singer encourages the growth of a wonderful profusion of wild flowers in the lane around her caravan.  She even has a pond behind the caravan where generations of tadpoles have grown up,

left, and come back to visit as adults. 

At the moment, this pond has suffered disaster, as the pond lining (a plastic sheet) has been burrowed into by some creature, causing most of the water to drain out and the tadpoles to have to be hastily evacuated to buckets.

However, Doom Metal Singer currently has newts who enjoy making love in the remaining water in the pond, so she isn’t going to disturb them for the time being.

Another neighbour, Essex Granny, has a pretty flowering cherry tree in her front garden – good news for butterflies – and lots of bird-feeders in her back garden.  

However, apart from this the front garden mainly consists of a sheet of plastic grass, covered in kitsch ornaments ranging from cute cartoon sheep to eerie bat-winged kittens.  As she explains, she and her husband aren’t in the first flush of youth and don’t have the strength for regular lawn-mowing, so covering the ground with fake grass is the easiest way to keep it looking neat.

When I told my brother about Essex Granny’s garden, he said indignantly that anyone who would cover their garden in plastic grass doesn’t deserve to have a garden.  Perhaps if she lived in a city, my brother might have a point.  But, when she lives in a village surrounded by spinneys of woodland, farms with plenty of rough pasture, and a church with a biodiverse churchyard and a community orchard, I don’t think she poses much of a threat to biodiversity, and passers-by, especially children, love looking at her bizarre assortment of statuettes.

Personally, if I had a lawn and was too elderly to mow it, I would let it run wild and call it my contribution to biodiversity.  However, PDB11 and I don’t have a lawn.  What we have is a couple of flowerbeds which are too overshadowed by the house to suit most flowers, a patio with tubs and pots on it, and assorted wildflowers growing in cracks in the patio.

And we also have bees.  Not because we installed hives for honeybees or bee hotels (which PDB11 refers to as ‘woodpecker-feeders’) for solitary bees, but because we share our house with at least two colonies of belligerent bees who live in the roof.  A few years ago when we had solar panels installed and the bees attacked anyone who tried to mess around with their roof, a pest-controller tried to capture the bees so that they could be rehomed. 

When they had repeatedly attacked him whenever he tried to tranquillise them, he resorted to putting down poison at the entrances to their nest.  This made us feel very guilty, and horrified our animal-loving friends (even though these are honeybees, who, as discussed above, aren’t exactly an endangered species).  We told ourselves that, in environmental terms, it would just have to be worth it to be able to heat our bathwater and generate electricity without burning fossil fuels.

As it turned out, however, by the time the poison was laid down, it was nearly winter and the bees weren’t going out much, therefore weren’t walking on their poisoned thresholds, and the solar-panel installers could work unmolested.  Come spring, the bees were still around, getting lost in the house and having to be shown the way out, stinging us if we were rash enough to lay careless hands on our own bedside tables – and wandering around the garden looking for something to eat.

So, without wanting to encourage honeybees at the expense of other wildlife, I do want to provide nectar for whatever pollinators – including honeybees, bumblebees, solitary bees, butterflies and other insects – happen to be around.  Lots of plants are sold in garden centres as ‘Perfect for pollinators’ – but if you can’t actually see any insects nosing around the plants for sale, how do you know whether this is true?

My answer is to take a fairly hands-off approach.  If there’s something growing and it isn’t choking out all other plants or preventing me from getting down the garden path, and preferably has flowers on it, I mostly leave it alone.  When I arrived here, I tried rooting out what I considered the extraneous lungwort (nice wildflower, but there’s plenty of it around, after all) from the shady beds behind the house, to make room to plant an assortment of bulbs to flower at different times of year: snowdrops, crocuses, daffodils, tulips, and anemones.  Five years later, the bulbs haven’t made an appearance, but the surviving lungwort has thankfully managed to retake most of the ground it lost, and the bees love it.

From time to time, every couple of years or so, I fill some of my patio pots that don’t seem to have much life in them with fresh compost, and scatter a few packets of assorted wildflower seeds into them.  Then I leave them alone apart from watering them from time to time – no weeding, and definitely no pesticides or herbicides.  Whichever plants the pollinators actually do like the taste of are the ones that get pollinated, meaning that these are the ones that set seeds which come up the following year.

In my experience, the insects in my garden mainly seem to vote for dandelions, lungwort, garlic mustard, herb Robert, and ivy-leafed toadflax.  These may not be the obvious candidates on the cover photo of ‘Cottage Garden mixed wildflower seeds’ – but if dandelions are what my bees want, who am I to argue?  After all, to me, flowers are pretty things that add a touch of colour.  To the bees and butterflies, they’re a matter of life and death.

Scientist column is definitely going to be preachy, as it is inspired by a recent article by Graham Lawton in