Planting for pollinators
Monty chooses plants according to flowering time, light requirements and flower shapes, to ensure Longmeadow provides pollinators with rich and diverse habitats
Iwas brought up in the deep shadow of World War Two. Like so many veterans, my father, who fought every day of the six years of war, being blown up at Dunkirk, joining the new Commandos and finishing up in the Burmese jungle, never spoke about it. But he was prone to deep depressions and violent rages and the only time he ever seemed to be truly at ease with the world was when he was with other veterans.
By the time I came along – 10 years after he came out of the jungle – I was fed a diet of comic-book heroes and films and the enduring myth of this plucky, sceptred isle holding out against the dastardly Hun. But certain songs would come on the radio and fill the room with a sadness so deep that even I, a small child, could sense my parents forcibly holding back their emotions. The voice of Kathleen Ferrier was always a trigger but I particularly recall Marlene Dietrich singing Where Have All The Flowers Gone?, opening a window onto a profound, inconsolable grief.
Well, my parents have themselves gone to the graveyard, long time ago. There is hardly anyone left alive now to remember the war and my garden is filled with flowers. Wounds have healed. My generation has known unprecedented peace and prosperity although it seems, for all our good fortune, we have not learned very much. But where have all the pollinators gone? We gardeners have been exhorted to “plant for pollinators” and many of us have done so, thinking that we were both doing our bit for ecology as well as making beauty, in the process. But the alarm bells are ringing among those that monitor these things and should be sounding loud and clear for all of us, because pollinator numbers are dangerously low and falling.
Going, going, gone...
Like the song, this is a circular effect. Flowers go, so pollinators have no food source, so pollinator numbers decline – so flowers do not get pollinated and thus decline. And so it remorselessly can go, unless we intervene. Intervention, of course, can be both proactive and passive and it is equally important not to destroy the habitat for wildflowers as it is for gardeners to actively grow plants that pollinators like best. But either way, the situation is not good, not good at all.
A few figures. The 2021 Big Butterfly Count revealed the lowest number of butterflies, across all species, since the count began 12 years ago. The average person recorded just nine butterflies or moths in 2021 against 11 in 2020 and 16 in 2019. Worst hit were peacocks, common blues and holly blues, but most species were down. Some of this decline can be attributed to climate change, with warmer early springs stimulating activity and wetter later springs hampering both feeding and breeding. But the decline is long term.
Since the long hot summer of 1976 butterflies have declined in number by over 75 per cent. We should not need any justification to nurture and protect any living thing, but it happens that butterflies, and especially moths, are important pollinators. Buddleia, lilac, lavender, valerian, Verbena bonariensis, sedum and many varieties of scabious and centaurea are heavily dependent on butterflies.
But, although butterflies get the best press, they make up less than five per cent of the Lepidoptera family, the rest being moths. There are over 2,600 species of British moths and, among other plants, they will be especially attracted to campions, pinks, sweet Williams, evening primroses, honeysuckles, tobacco plants and knapweeds. Butterflies are beautiful and precious, but moths are essential.