VAL BOURNE’S ORGANIC WILDLIFE
Bountiful wildlife on London’s royal doorstep!
WHEN I do gardening talks about being green and organic there are always people who rush up afterwards and say: “oh it’s alright for you, you live in the countryside and you’ll get plenty of wildlife.” If only it were true! You might imagine that The Cotswolds is a rural idyll, but we are short of bees, we have very few wildflowers in the parish and we don’t get that much bird life at our end of the village.
The reason is that land nearby is intensively farmed. This not only requires nitrogen-rich feeds, metaldehyde slug pellets, pesticides and herbicides, it also claims every bit of space. Often there are no hedgerows and headlands so wildlife has nowhere to go. Sadly, most farmers concentrate on productivity at the expense of the environment.
However, it’s not all bad here. In the last few years grants have encouraged farmers to cultivate wildflower strips and beetle banks and they’ve worked. The number of birds, beetles and pollinators has risen. The stubble fields, not far from home, have been visited by quail and short-eared owls in recent days so I’m making regular visits with binoculars.
Cities can be much better than you’d think and when I was researching my new book, The Living Jigsaw, I read the very commendable Nature in Towns and Cities by David Goode (2014). I was surprised to learn about a survey carried out in Buckingham Palace’s garden in 1996 and 1997. Experts from the Natural History Museum and the Royal Botanic Gardens at Kew recorded 322 species of wildflower in this relatively undisturbed garden. They included marsh pennywort (Hydrocotyle vulgaris), which wasn’t thought to occur in the middle of London.
Mycologists found 700 species of fungi, with two species new to science. There were 39 lichens, two more than in the 1960s when the air was less clean. They also recorded 2,160 species of insect and 207 other invertebrates, of which 112 were spiders, 227 beetles, 287 flies, 22 butterflies and over 600 moths. A quarter of the total species-list of UK butterflies and moths visited Buckingham Palace’s garden along with 30 species of bird breed – a similar number to those recorded in large city squares and royal parks. In short this city garden teemed with life.
“It has 600 moths and 22 butterflies”