You find me somewhat gloomy. The builders who were due to do our soffits and fascias today turned up while I was at work yesterday and erected the scaffolding - all over my butterfly border. Plants trashed and trampled all over the place.
So I'm cheering myself up by dipping into the glorious book I've splashed out on - Jennifer Owen's 'Wildlife of a Garden'. It is a brand new title published by the RHS which sets out the results of a 30-year study by Jennifer in her suburban Leicester garden.
Now Jennifer has just a normal garden, a corner plot on a busy road. Ok, so it's about 60m (196 feet) long, which is enough to get me envious. But there's nothing unusual about it - borders, lawn, small pond, some bushes and small trees.
But using her skills as an ecologist and hoverfly expert, and calling on friends who are specialists in all sorts of different creatures, Jennifer trapped and collected and netted and recorded anything and everything she could find in her garden.
Guess how many different species of wildlife she identified in that time? Go on, guess! The answer is at the foot of the blog.
The book lists all the species she has found, and the totals of each year by year, with some commentary on the results. So, for example, throughout the 30 years Jennifer recorded seven species of mammal. She saw 54 species of bird. Between 1972 and 1979, she hand-netted (and made records of) 16,606 butterflies of 17 species.
But it is when you move onto those kind of creepy-crawlies that we might normally not even notice that it begins to get impressive. For example, between 1975-2001, Jennifer caught 6686 solitary bees of 45 species. The commonest was Andrena fulva, the Tawny Mining Bee, with 1338 captured. The next was Colletes daviesanus, a mining bee that you might get coming to Tansy or Anthemis.
It all adds up to the most impressive picture we have of the wildlife of a British garden. Suddenly you realise how accurate the 'diversity' bit is in 'biodiversity'. And all those riches are out there in all of our gardens.
And that all important total number of species? 2673!
Thanks, Goldcrest.
You'll be pleased to know that some local authorities are beginning to see the light with regards to leaving areas grass to grow long. They tend to be nervous because of the fear of people objecting who have grown used to manicured turf and complaining what it looks to their eyes 'unkempt'. But that's where we can all play our part, encouraging our local councils to do the right thing, and congratulating them with an nice letter in the local paper when they get it right. The good folk in the Royal Parks in London, for example, have made great strides in leaving areas of meadow in the Parks.
That sounds an amazing book, it's my birthday soon so may put in an early request! It just shows how important our gardens can be. It also got me thinking, I have a book (somewhere) showing photographs of parks and other public spaces in several other countries, coverered in wild flowers and areas where long grass is allowed to grow. It would be great if we could do the same in our parks. It would be a big improvement on the acres of short grass everywhere.
I am sorry about your butterfly garden.
Sorry I have somehow managed to attach the above post to the wrong the wrong 'blog' - I meant it to go on todays one about your peat free composts!
In the link you gave a few weeks back to the 'peat free document' they mentioned there may be a problem with plastic contamination.
I have a problem with this in my 'homemade' compost - eg: a sweet wrapper in a bucketful of kitchen waste = a sweet wrapper in every handful of the resultant compost = a large handful of sweet wrappers surrounding every Rose mulched with said compost!
In an article last year the newspapers reported that plastic grains were forming an increasing proportion of sand grains on beaches. In all the convenience of plastic as disposable wrapping is turning out to have many inconvenient drawbacks!