DO YOUR GARDEN (and the planet) A FAVOUR ... GO WILD!
ONE of the great heroines of wildlife gardening, says Dave Goulson, was a Mrs Jennifer Owen of Leicester. Despite battling worsening multiple sclerosis, and later being wheelchair-bound, she assiduously recorded all the wildlife in her small suburban garden from the Seventies through to 2010.
It’s a study ‘ that has been done only once in the whole world, so far as I know’, and the results were quite extraordinary.
Mrs Owen discovered that she shared her garden with 2,673 different species, including 1,997 types of insect.
What is so encouraging about this study is how it shows that by doing very little — and often by avoiding doing certain things at all — you can turn your garden into a mini-Amazon jungle of biodiversity.
Mrs Owen in many ways kept a perfectly ordinary garden — but, above all, she didn’t spray around poisons.
Professor Goulson is the kind of humorous, knowledgeable and bubblingly enthusiastic teacher anyone would want (he lectures at the University of Sussex).
He brilliantly communicates his delight at the biological miracles right under our noses in our own back gardens.
He recalls naturalist Chris Packham once saying that ‘ he would rather spend ten minutes lying on his tummy watching a woodlouse than an hour watching a glossy TV programme about lions in the Serengeti’.
Goulson shares Packham’s approach and, yes, the woodlouse is a fascinating and harmless little creature to watch up close. An old country name for it was God’s Little Pig.
HIS greatest love is bees, but there are also marvellous chapters on ants (the only creatures, besides us, that wage organised, ferocious wars against neighbouring tribes) and earthworms, creatures it’s impossible not to like when you learn that their top running speed is two-hundredths of one mile per hour.
Britain, the land of eccentrics, is home to the World Worm Charming Championships, which involves coaxing worms out of the ground by stamping, tapping and other subtle means.
‘The current world record-holding charmer is Sophie Smith, who, aged ten at the time in 2009, coaxed no fewer than 567 worms to pop out of her three-by-three-metre plot.’
Along with all the insects, there are some handy home recipes for the fruit and veg you might find growing in or near your garden.
Making blackberry jam always seemed such a faff, but Goulson says you can make it in a microwave in 20 minutes, and it’s delicious.
I’m not so sure about his recipe for squirrel pie. But at least it’s organic and doesn’t come wrapped in plastic. It’s impossible now to write about nature, farming or gardening without addressing how monumentally we are buggering up our once-lovely environment, and Goulson doesn’t hold back in naming and shaming.
He and his fellow scientists have found horrendous evidence of how some big garden centres are complicit in absolute ecovandalism, from ripping 2.9 million tons of carbon- storing peat out of Britain and Europe every year, to selling ‘ bee- friendly’ plants already soaked in pesticides.
One type of flowering heather labelled ‘bee-friendly’ came already drenched in five different insecticides and five fungicides.
If you read this book, and care about the kind of world we leave to our children and grandchildren, I doubt that you’ll ever shop at a garden centre again. Spraying is a classic short-term, short-sighted solution for nitwits. Take earwigs. In apple orchards, they eat as many aphids each year as are killed ‘by three rounds of spraying with insecticides’.
Still, growers spray like mad, killing all the aphids and all the earwigs. Then they have to keep on spraying, for ever. Why not let the earwigs do it for you? A report by the Department for Environment, Food & Rural Affairs (Defra) on commercial orchards in the UK found that the average orchard gets 13 annual fungicide sprays, five insecticide sprays and two herbicide sprays.
The main weapons are organophosphates, ‘nerve agents . . . known to damage nerves irreversibly and impair brain development in foetuses’.
Why not grow your own apples? The Prof turns most of his into cider, which ‘has the unusual sideeffect of making my scalp sweat’.
He’s far from a gloomy companion and is full of positive advice. Ecofriendly gardening is much healthier and often easier and cheaper.
Why buy compost from garden centres, packaged in heavy- duty plastic, when you can make your own at home for nothing, out of raked-up leaves, grass cuttings, cardboard and old banana skins?
He also dryly points out that you can remove all the weeds from your garden in a heartbeat, simply by rebranding them as wild flowers.
The EU’s insane agricultural policy means the British taxpayer currently pays ‘ Saudi Prince Khalid Abdullah al Saud £400,000 per year in farm subsidies to run his estate near Newmarket where he breeds racehorses’. (Sort that one out, Boris Johnson — and fast!) Why don’t we instead spend the money on creating more allotments? People are desperate to grow their own fresh vegetables for next to nothing and with zero food miles — yet there are some 90,000 on the waiting list nationwide.
Goulson thinks councils should have the power to compulsorily purchase intensive farmland and turn it over to allotments — which are an amazing 11 times more productive per square metre than farmland anyway.
The Garden Jungle is funny, combative and full of such ideas. Defra should hire the author as a special adviser straight away.