VAL BOURNE’S GARDEN WILDLIFE
Learn about conserving ‘ringlets’ and ‘gatekeepers’
IN the early 2000s the National Trust decided to cut down on their mowing around large country houses because it was labourintensive and costly. Instead they began to cut smart paths through grass, allowing the rest to grow until it was mowed in autumn. During an interview with NT butterfly expert Matthew Oates, he told me that this had led to an unexpected upsurge in butterfly numbers, particularly brown butterflies such as the ringlet, the meadow brown and the gatekeeper. Skipper numbers also rose.
As a result of that interview I decided to make a small meadow behind my neat area of lawn and I also made a conscious decision to leave the grass on the verge uncut, although I had to get permission from my parish council. Both paid off as I now have lots of brown butterflies in my garden because they lay their eggs on grasses. In fact 17 of the 59 species found in Britain lay their eggs on grasses so it’s well worth ‘liberating your lawn’, or part of your lawn, as Butterfly Conservation call it.( butterfly-conservation.org).
My first ‘brown’ is always the ringlet. When they hatch their wings have a velvety appearance that reminds me of slightly flat Guinness in colour. Neither fast flying or dynamic, they tend to loll over the grassy areas. The rings, that give this butterfly its name, are arranged on the underwing and the male is slightly darker than the female. She emerges two or three weeks after the male, a common trait in butterflies. I’ve never seen this butterfly feeding on anything in this garden, but apparently the ringlet likes brambles so it probably hops over the garden wall.
Meadow browns and gatekeepers soon join in and these both feed on flowers such as origanum, thyme, blue cornflowers and border phloxes among others. They can look similar, but the gatekeeper is brown and orange and the meadow brown is duller. On close inspection the gatekeeper has two small white dots on the upper wing and the meadow brown just one.
It’s worth gardening for butterflies as they are in decline. A good example is another brown – the wall butterfly – which used to bask on the walls of my old house in the early 1990s. At the time I found it rather ordinary but it’s now considered to be a rapidly declining priority species by Butterfly Conservation. Their caterpillars eat grass so I live in hope!
“I decided to make a small meadow”