Good or bad ecologically, they're not desperately attractive. Some are toxic and others reduce oxygen levels and hence water quality if they run amok. And they might.   

Good and Bad Algae

For starters, let's make sure we're talking about the same thing. Algae aren't a type of pondweed and they're not duckweed.

There are good, bad and ugly algae. The green algae which seem to upset some people are actually beneficial. So too are Diatom algae, which annoy tropical fish enthusiasts. They may not be everyone's cup of tea visually, but they are oxygenators and typical of a balanced ecosystem. 

Blue-green algae are by contrast highly unpleasant / toxic. Not so bad are filamentous algae, or Spirogyra, blanketweed. They won't kill potentially harm you, but they are unattractive and excessive growth will do your pond's ecosystem damage.

Head over to the British Phycological Society to find out more... 

What Causes Excessive Algal Growth?

Algae are a fact of life for ponds. They'll arrive at some point; like Duckweed, on the feet of waterfowl, or via their wind born spores. They will get to multiply very quickly if conditions are right, however.

There are two factors responsible:

1. Pond algae respond to sunlight and warmth. Sunlight drives more rapid growth, and warm water accelerates their metabolism. As springs and summers become hotter this problem will only get worse.
2. Higher nutrient levels in water also promote growth - the phosphorus and nitrogen levels in tap water, for example. 

There are various ways you can mitigate both these issues.

Solutions 

There are a number of ways to mitigate algal problems, but no single solution.

• Bacterial controls, available commercially
• Remove fallen leaves etc., and/or net to prevent leaf fall
• Physically remove Blanketweed etc.
• UV Clarifiers
• Stop or divert nutrient rich run-off
• Use rainwater only to fill or top up the pond
• Plant aquatic plants - but don't use nutrient-rich soil 
• Plant surface covering plants (lilies, Broad-leafed pondweed etc.)
• Create deeper water sections to reduce pond temperature
• Introduce Ramshorn snails, to eat decaying matter
• Add Barley straw in a mesh bag
• Add a pond dye 
  

None of these methods are going to harm the wildlife in your pond - the opposite.* 

Learn to Love the Look

My last point is really about a state of mind. Like a wildlife garden, a wildlife pond is never going to look beautifully manicured. Its manifest attractions are rather different. If there's a little blanketweed about learn to love it - just see how many invertebrates you can find in it! 

*although take care if removing blanketweed and pond detritus...

British Pond Plants

Avoid Amazon

My Top 10 Pond Plants

Native Plants To Avoid

Good Blackthorn

Blackthorn is a lovely plant, good for biodiversity generally. As a native shrub/tree it’s only beaten into flower by the near as dammit native and close relation Prunus cerasifera, the Cherry plum, and plays an increasingly important role in providing pollinators early season nectar. Sloes are an autumn boon too, of course.

It’s a brilliant hedge plant, making an impenetrable spiny barrier. Much slower growing than hawthorn, it lays as well and suckers vigorously – helpful to thicken a hedge. Although it’s a tough old plant, Blackthorn only has a shallow root system, associated with this vigorous suckering tendency. Don’t plant it next to a lawn! This feature makes it vulnerable to periods of drought, I reckon, so it’s going to struggle over the next few years.

It seemed a bit harsh to hear it described on last week’s Gardener’s Question Time as “evil”. I might reserve evil for a small group of invasive non-native species like water fern, Azolla. Blackthorn? Not so much.

GQT’s Bunny Guinness doesn’t like the suckering (fair enough, but it can be a virtue) and worries that we’re going to get sepsis from it. This is a funny one. Blackthorn has longer spines than Hawthorn. They’re brittle and will break off. Like any plant, they will be covered in microbes, but the way they get embedded under the skin makes their wounds more likely to become infected. As a hedgelayer I know this only too well! The spines need removing and the puncture well cleaned. Horse owners are wary of Blackthorn wounds too; the thorns can penetrate some way. The bark contains prussic acid, but it’s not clear whether this is a factor too, so far as I can make out.

How many people get sepsis from Blackthorn? Who on earth knows? A fair number of Blackthorn wounds from the millions of Blackthorn plants around the country get infected, I’m sure. A few must lead to more serious complications. The interweb is full of largely apocryphal stories about sepsis and visits to A&E. Blackthorn sounds terrifying. We should all stay well away from it. Who on earth in their right mind would actually want to plant it?

This tells us something about our current relationship with the nature around us. Back in the day hedge work was all done manually and protection was more rudimentary. Blackthorn wounds must have been much more common and treatment of infections much less effective. Perhaps this contributed to its association with witches and dark magic. Who knows - and many plants have this kind of folklore associated with them. 

If you’re reading this and you have had a significant issue, I’m very sympathetic and it’s very bad luck. The lack of any analysis of the numbers of people who suffer like this suggests they are vanishingly small. I’ve had plenty of very minor infections from Blackthorn, but they’ve cleared up with careful cleaning. I would feel very hard done by if they had caused real problems, even though I’m one of a very tiny % of the population who work with it regularly.

Stories like this tend to get traction, for some reason. A few years ago everyone got very over-excited about Corncockle. This now rare plant does indeed have toxic seeds. Is there any record of anyone dying from eating them? No.  Eat some and you would be sick. As a result of the story, they were excluded from seed packets and specified seed mixes. What a pity; Corncockle was widely sown beforehand, which had been helping numbers recover.

Danger Danger... not so much

There’s danger lurking everywhere in your garden. Many plants are poisonous, not just the well-known ones like Foxglove, Monkshood and Yew. Daffodils can see you off if you eat them. The RHS website warns gardeners about sepsis, tetanus, Legionella, Weil’s disease and Bioaerosols (a new one for me). I don’t want to dismiss these risks as non-existent and it’s helpful to be aware of them of course, but let’s keep a sense of proportion. Nature in the U.K. is largely benign. Would I plant a Blackthorn hedge next to a children's playground? No. Would I include it in a field hedge mix? Absolutely, yes. 

How life changes. It doesn't seem so long ago I was arguing about rainfall with some swivel eyed loon on what was then Twitter - it must have been around 2016. I was bemoaning the weather. No, he said, the recent extreme rainfall was normal. It was the Environment Agency which was causing the flooding. When someone else chimed in and said actually there had been a lot of rain but it was because of cloud seeding I knew it was time to reach for a stiff drink.

I hope we have moved on from this. The link between the U.K.'s warmer and increasingly wet winters and climate change must now be clear to all but the most hardened conspiracists (and possibly Donald Trump). This year it has been apocalyptic down here - bad by even Somerset standards. We have had hitherto unsuspected springs bursting into life in our meadows, which are now sprouting Soft rush everywhere. 

Oddly though it is only now dawning on people what the cost of all this is going to be. I'm not talking about sorting out the craterlike potholes and the scoured gulleys running with water down all the lanes. The implications are of course much wider - ask any farmer hereabouts. The landscape is going to change very significantly over the next decade, even if it's not permanently underwater. People just aren't imagining this or thinking how to mitigate or adapt to it.

The horticultural world is pretty typical of that. People have been incredibly slow to think about plant resilience not to drought and hot summers, but to mild and wet winters. How much comment has there been about planning for this? It's relatively easy to find drought resistent plants and come up with helpful strategies to help them over the summer, but how will they fare in these warm winter quagmires?  I don't think we've directly lost anything here to dry weather; all our fatalities - and there have certainly been more than you would normally expect - have been caused by the wet. 

We have clay soil, which certainly doesn't help, and prolonged rain means compaction, which makes things worse. Waterlogged soil means plants are deprived of oxygen, which can be terminal. In its mildest form this means poor nutrient uptake and leaching, but it will lead to root rot and the spead of pathogens. We've had several semi-mature trees just give up the ghost, and noticed many more problems with canker on fruit trees too.  We've worked hard to use swales, ditches and other features to improve drainage, but they're overwhelmed. We have hitherto unsuspected springs bursting into life in our meadows, which now have running water tracking across them are sprouting Juncus. 

I'm not sure what the answer is. Obviously, ornamental wetland species are going to die in the summer. Mediterranean drought resistant plants will die in the winter. What to do? There's only going to be a relatively small number of plants which can cope with these conditions. It means more care, for sure; wood chip mulch is a terrific help, for example, and we need to think more about exact planting positions. Ironically, I wonder if it also means using more of our native species? 

There’s obviously no advertorial involved in this – who on earth would pay me for a mention? The selections are idiosyncratic and, of course, driven by my own needs.

We made a garden here in Somerset from largely waste ground, starting in 2012. We have short of 2 acres; formal garden and veg patch, small meadow areas, forest garden, pond, small orchard. We’ve also got a lot of hedgerow going on, which I manage by trimming and laying. I do most of the work around the garden myself, with sporadic help. 

Oh, and I should mention – we’ve spent some time in Japan, so there’s a bit of that vibe going on too.

The Good 

...in no particular order:

1.      Electric Chainsaw

I’ve always been lary of chainsaws. Living in a rural location you hear about people chopping off limbs or having narrow escapes with them. Maybe some of these are cider related issues, but they make me nervous. I’m not super technical either, so when my old petrol chainsaw wouldn’t fire up after a long layoff I tended to throw up my hands and use a saw instead.

I am now the proud owner of a Husqvarna 225i electric chainsaw. What a game changer. For an occasional user – and particularly for hedgelaying – it’s a fantastic piece of kit. Rather than leaving it growling on the ground when I’m not using it, unless I squeeze the trigger it’s off. That must be safer when I’m tripping over roots or getting caught in branches in a hedgeline. I’ve got an electric Husqvarna hedge cutter too, with its own battery, so I charge one battery when I’m using the other. They last plenty long enough anyway. The 225i will cheerfully barrel through anything I’m likely to want to drop, in a hedge or just generally.  

2.      Nata

When I need something to cut smaller stems I was originally told on my hedgelaying course I needed a billhook. I never really got on with them. It’s probably my technique or care, but I’ve never found they had the heft I needed. I used to split pleachers with a hand axe but a while ago migrated to a Japanese nata. I’m such a fan we sell them on our website. We used to call a nata a machete, but the Google thought police reckoned we might be facilitating mass murder so now they are “hatchets”. Altogether less threatening. Use a nata for making firewood too, or other jobs like coppicing. 

3.      Pruning Saw

I seem to do a lot of pruning, mostly roses – which we have a lot of - and fruit trees. It’s super satisfying. A decent pruning saw is a must. There are a number of good saw makers and, generally, you get what you pay for. It’s worth paying up as a)you can’t sharpen a pruning saw and b)a poor one will mean extra work and poor cutting. I’m not sure there’s very much point buying a particularly long one, but if you do, don’t get a folding version as the folding locking mechanism can be iffy for heavy use. I use a small folding saw and replace the blade when I need to.

4.      Secateurs

Everyone seems to have a view, but I have settled on a couple of pairs of aesthetically pleasing Japanese jobs and – for heavier work – I have my much used Felcos. You very much get what you pay for here as well, although some makes seem over-priced. And just because they are made in Japan doesn’t mean they’re any good, of course. I wouldn’t personally buy secateurs online – I think you need to physically check them out. Technically I don’t like an anvil action, which tends to be cheaper but will tend to crush the stem you’re cutting. Anvil loppers for me and bypass secateurs. Whichever, do keep them in decent nick.

5.      Wheeled Strimmer

Ok, a slightly weird machine, but super helpful. Let me explain. We have several nooks and crannies and undulating areas in our wildflower meadows and around the forest garden. Shamefully I no longer scythe the whole thing, and any of the larger machines I might use can’t cope with this sort of tricky environment. I’ve always avoided normal strimmers in the past; they’ve seemed to be unreliable, heavy, potentially dangerous and not great for producing an even cut of thick grass. Enter the Weibang wheeled strimmer, which seems to deal with pretty serious undergrowth too, including some annoying sedge we have which seems bent on taking over the whole garden.

6.      Heated Incubator

No-one ever explained to me how essential this simple piece of kit was, particularly if you have a greenhouse and you’re keen on veg growing. Get a big one and something smaller if you can.

7.      Water Mister

This is not very me, but my brother and sister-in-law, a brilliant present buyer, bought a dinky old fashioned copper water mister for my orchids. I think it’s this one. I love it. It would be brilliants to have something like it but bigger for the greenhouse too (Sarah, are you reading this?).

8.      Dividing Spade

This seems like a pretty niche tool, but it’s one we somehow end up using a lot. It’s a small spade with sharp edges, particularly designed for dividing perennials in autumn. It’s helpful for any kind of work kneeling down too. Burgon & Ball, from good stockists etc. 

9.      Golden Spade

This is just a stupidly simple idea. I tolerated years of breaking spades with wooden shafts; why? It’s nuts – why are they even made? I have had my all steel spade – again, Japanese – for years now, and it’s brilliant. 

10.   Large Plastic Tubs

Silly but needs saying… you can’t have too many, and they won’t start rotting when you leave them outside. I have trashed too many beautiful expensive trugs over the years. Plastic trugs don’t have tyres which are constantly deflating either. Travis Perkins etc.    

The Bad

1.      Mini electric chainsaw

This is just a silly idea. I bought one which threw its chain constantly when confronted with any stem bigger than one easily lopped. The battery didn’t last long and took ages to charge. What’s the point of them?

2.      Snips

Mrs Mann loves a cool pair of snips, but I just don’t get it. Wandering through the garden of an evening delicately cutting blooms with a gin and tonic in one hand and a flat bottomed flower basket in the other just isn’t my thing. What’s wrong with secateurs?

3.      Tool Belt

Another area of domestic disagreement. I do get that putting sharp things in my pockets means they get holes. Apart from that, why am I more likely to remember tools if they are in a belt, and why are they more convenient to access? I do have a tool belt somewhere, but can never be bothered to put it on.

4.      Dibbers

Surely fingers are dibbers in disguise?

5.      Domestic Chippers

Little domestic electric wood chippers are hopeless. They’ll only deal with twigs, pretty much. Unless you chop down trees constantly, just ask your local tree surgeon to drop by when you need to and they’ll smash through a couple of tonnes of wood chip in no time.

6.      Garden Pocket Multi-tools

Potentially do lots of things, none of them well.

7.      Kneelers

Expensive cushions designed to make you feel old.

8.      String Holders

Why?

9.      Metal Birds

Please don’t buy a metal robin to stick into a tree. It’s just too depressing.

10.   Patio Heaters

If you’re looking for great ways to increase your carbon footprint, patio heaters are a fantastic place to start. A new jumper is going to work out a fair bit cheaper too.

The Non-existent

Cut and Collect Machine

This is a serious bugbear. I was just about to import something which might have done the job from an obscure town in Guangdong as COVID hit. On reflection I don’t think it would have worked anyway, sadly.

It’s an increasingly essential part of meadow maintenance to cut and collect the hay in late summer, as well as cut in the autumn and winter if you have no stock to nibble the sward. It’s pretty easy to find a cutting machine for smaller meadow areas – an automatic scythe or ideally a traditional scythe – but collecting up all the arisings is a massive pain. This must be done; leaving them on the ground to rot will not only fertilise the soil (bad) but also form a thick mulch which many wildflowers won’t grow through. Farmers and contractors won’t bale smaller areas, so what to do?

There are cut and collect machines commercially available and widely used, by councils and contractors, but they’re hellish expensive. For the time being all you can do is just give the children a rake and £20.

I'm in a Blade Runner frame of mind this morning, having a lovely few days in Greece. I couldn't sleep, so read on the terrace and watched the sun rise. 

Before it did, the night sky was extraordinary. There were so many stars you could barely see a small square of dark sky... Attack ships on fire off the shoulder of Orion. Then, very gradually, just the Morning Star before daybreak and Odysseus's wine dark sea... 

For most of us, imagination is a poor thing. We need experience to understand things. Ask any chemistry teacher. And this is a real problem for environmentalists. 

We tend to shut down our imaginative function when starting to think about a distopian future framed by biodiversity loss and climate change. It's understandable - ironically, a survival tool, I guess. 

Second off, our imagination isn't powerful enough. I've spent a lot of time wandering around some beautiful wildflower meadows over the years, but I was stunned to listen to an imagined soundscape of a hundred years ago. The birds! I never stopped to think about the noise that would have surrounded you.

This is not ancient history; we lose this kind of understanding very quickly. My parents would have walked through clouds of butterflies as children on a country walk, something I've never experienced. 

This all has a major impact on shifting baseline effect. We constantly forget what "nature normal" should look like.* Each new generation accepts a more degraded environment as normal. This effect is worsening as technology increasingly confuses the boundaries between real and fantasy worlds. We're in a doom spiral about this. Modern life means we're increasingly remote from the natural world, and as it washes away from us we understand it (and miss it) less and less.  

People's nature normal reality looks like an increasingly fantastical AI generated Disney spectacular. And invariably it's just an incidental backdrop to a game or a TikTok video. At best there's no emotive interaction with this kind of artificial world, at worst it comes to replace the real one. 

The extinction of experience; "all those moments will be lost in time, like tears in rain." 

*This isn't a problem specific to our understanding of the natural world, incidentally. We would do well at the moment to remind ourselves of what political normal looks like.

Before I get onto that, let's be clear. We're talking about traditional wildflower meadows here. What my Ag Lab forebears would know as hay meadows. Not "pictorial meadows", or "meadows" with lots of annual wildflowers. Traditional meadows, or "unimproved grassland", consist of grasses and wildflowers, which are almost all perennial.

And we're talking about wildflower seed - not (much) cheaper agricultural cultivars of wildflower species. 

Constructed Mixes

There's a range of off the shelf wildflower and grass mixes available to create meadows from scratch. They're  constructed from predetermined %s of wildflowers and grasses, and are still available today. Usually 20% wildflowers - sometimes less - and 80% grasses, they're put together to provide a good starting point for a new meadow, and usually relate to different soil types.

The only people who offer wild grasses in mixes like this are Emorsgate Seeds. For everyone else they're "certified" - i.e. cultivars. There isn't the money in it to grow grasses just for their seed - yet - so we must make do. The cultivars used might be selected more or less randomly, so that can potentially be a problem. 

The wildflower element of these mixes is usually harvested from a plot given over to one particular species. The seed originally used to establish those plants would - hopefully - have been taken from a wild population. Yellow Rattle is a notable exception; it has to be harvested from existing grassland.

Harvested Mixes

Supply of constructed mixes has been outstripped by demand recently, not least because the drought reduced this year's harvest. That's highlighted a rapidly growing segment of the wildflower meadow seed market - mixes harvested from donor meadows by brush harvester or combine.

Photo: Heritage Seeds

These mixes have always been around, and widely used for local projects. Only recently though have they become more widely available. Why have they been slow to catch on?

• They're typically only produced in small volumes by small producers. 
• They're usually not reliably available year after year, as sites are only harvested sustainably.
• The make up of the mixes varies over time, as you can imagine.
• Processing quality can vary between the super professional and super basic. There can be very little chaff in the mix or half a forest, for example. Viability will suffer if seed is allowed to overheat or humidity levels aren't carefully controlled. 
• The quality of the mixes also varies according to the quality of the donor site and how well it's harvested.   

All this makes them unattractive to larger seed merchants and retailers and difficult for landscape architects etc to specify. 

By way of contrast we've promoted them from the get go, for a number of reasons:

• They're incredibly floral, as they're harvested from really good quality meadow sites. Forget 15 species of 20% wildflowers - you can get over 40 species in a mix which is 70% wildflowers! Nitrogen deposition and warmer winters - encouraging coarse grasses - mean we now look for higher %s of wildflowers in a mix. 
• The grasses are wild, of course, and - again - much more varied.
• Arguably, they are more suited to local conditions. At any rate, they are more genetically diverse than seed produced commercially.
• How lovely too to support landowners and farmers establishing wildflower meadows.  It's a very pleasant surprise for them to discover they have a really nice cash crop at the end of the process. 
• And here's the biggie - cost to the customer. In the current market, if I were to try to replicate a good quality harvested meadow mix a) I couldn't and b) Even an approximation with certified grasses would be something north of £300/kg ex VAT. We sell these mixes typically for between £60 and £130/kg - they tend to be more expensive for smaller producers. There hasn't been much change to these prices for 10 years. 

We have more and more of these mixes available - have a look at our retail seed website: www.BritishWildflowerMeadowSeeds.co.uk

Hay meadows by definition have to be mown; a meadow is a mown mead. Like a traditional hedge, a hay meadow is a landscape feature which is hugely beneficial to biodiversity, soil health and carbon capture - while also being man made. Mowing is particularly important these days, when we are faced with "improved" soils with higher fertility and drainage.  

We mowed ours a couple of weeks ago this year - in the first week of August. Mowing in later summer like this stops vegetative succession - scrub and then bigger woodland species taking over. Grasses don't have the chance to fall over and form a dense impenetrable thatch.

Cutting should be done early rather than late. The window for it starts in late July and runs through August. People often leave it late as some late species, notably knapweed, are still flowering at this point. It's really important to steel yourself and do it, notwithstanding. If you leave it too late all is lost; the grass will get long and rank, then go over when it gets wet, at which point cutting it is impossible.  

Try to change the date of mowing, or - even better - mow your meadow area in sections over a few weeks. This will encourage both early flowering species and the later flowers. An obvious symptom of a meadow cut too late is the sea of knapweed which will confront you, and the disappearance of plants like cowslip.

It's important that you pick up the arisings whenever you cut the meadow. Why? Firstly, to reduce the fertility of the site. Wildflowers don't respond to higher nutrient levels like grasses do, and this is a good way to help. Secondly, hay lying on the ground will act as a mulch and stop shyer wildflowers growing through it. 

If you can, leave some margins around the meadow to develop into tussocky grassland. These will provide over-wintering sites for invertebrates and nesting opportunities for voles and bumblebees. 

Once you've cut and removed the hay, either run stock into the aftermath or cut it closer. It's not as important to collect these cuttings, but helpful if you can. Keep the meadow occasionally cut or grazed over the autumn and winter, stopping in early March before the Rattle seedlings germinate. Don't worry about cutting it too short.

Small Meadows

The theory is pretty clear, but what does it mean in practical terms for managing a small meadow? If your meadow is above something like 20 acres it's pretty simple. Chances are you'll be able to find a local contractor who will cut, bale and even remove the hay for you. You may even be able to sell someone the seed from it. Happy days.

Councils and contractors are increasingly investing in specialist cut and collect machinery, which is fantastic if you have multiple smaller sites to cut, but super expensive. 

For us smaller landowners it's trickier. Contractors aren't interested in our two acres of meadows - why on earth should they be? And the last thing I want on my land is an enthusiastic teenager in a massive tractor manoeuvering around ponds and fruit trees!

Originally I used to scythe our meadows, which I recommend before you become old and knackered. I love my Austrian scythe, and it's definitely the best option for smaller meadow areas like ours. It's extraordinary to think that even lawns like those at Versailles were once cut this way. Richard Brown, ex Emorsgate Seeds, is the doyenne of the scythe world - look him up.

More recently though, I have had to hire kit. Sorry Richard, I've let you down. A power scythe (or sickle-bar mower) is a good shout; these are contemporary versions of the old Allen Scythe. They're relatively light and maneouverable, but they don't cope with rough ground very well, so plant hire business have stopped offering them in favour of flail mowers. 

I find these difficult. They're awkward, clunky and hard work to handle, difficult to control and imprecise. They're poorly designed and prone to breaking down. Hmm.

Just this year I have started using a wheeled strimmer. So far I'm very happy with it. To start with, having your own kit is a significant advantage to hiring stuff. It means you can stagger your cut across a month of work, which is pretty optimal in terms of floral diversity. 

Second off, unless you have larger areas, the cutting deck is big enough but the cut is precise and the machine easy to use. Thirdly, the payback on a machine like this is around 7 years if the alternative is hiring. Not bad.

After cutting you MUST collect. This means you can't use a mulching mower, incidentally. For smaller sites this generally means raking arisings by hand. This is a bore, but helps spread seed. Don't feel you have to leave the hay lying around for days for the seed to drop from it; just raking it will do the trick. 

What do you do with all this hay? Even if you have a lot of Yellow Rattle you'll have a good volume. Farmers generally won't touch hay from sites like yours. They don't know what's in there, the hay is too stalky, the volumes too small. We compost some of it and rake it into our surrounding hedges, where it acts as a mulch to suppress weeds and grass. It's a great feedstock for biodigestors, so I know of some urban projects which dispose of hay this way. Green hay is also a rich - and free! - seed source, of course - you can use it to strew over neighbouring sites. 

Butterfly Bonanza

There are a lot of butterflies in the garden at the moment. It's a delight; Peacocks, Red Admirals, Tortoiseshells, Meadow Browns, Commas, Gatekeepers, Large Whites, Small Coppers, Woods... It's nice to think we've encouraged them, and I'm sure we have. Our planting and management is super on point. Earlier this summer we had Brimstones for the first time, for example, brought here by all the Buckthorn I've planted.

Simple Explanations

Much more important though has - very evidently - been the weather. People started commenting on social media about the bugs on their windscreens from around early May. A warm dry spring is great for butterflies and a host of other insects, and as the summer has gone on a predictable sequence emerges. Like 1976 we now have gazillions of ladybirds, which have scoffed all the aphids.

I guess the other factor has been a positive base effect. Recent years - particularly last year - have been so bad that 2025 seems doubly fantastic for people up and down the country. The 2024 Butterfly and Bee surveys were the gloomiest I can remember, following a wet cold Spring. This year it has been great to see how resilient nature is, and lovely to see it bounce back. It's just a year though, and not a new trend.

Let's be clear eyed about this. Our efforts to improve things do absolutely help. This has been one of Habitat Aid's key messages over the years. But we need to see them in context, and - well - as usual, it's complicated.If only it was all as simple as plant Buckthorn see Brimstone.

Fake News

Social media is of course fantastic at reducing issues like this to incredibly simplistic and usually downright wrong interpretation. My feeds have also featured people trying to politicise what's been going on. Pretty typical too.

The argument seems to be that it's not a coincidence that this fab butterfly summer follows the (Labour) government finally ending the last permitted agricultural use of Cruiser SB, a neonicotinoid based product, for treating potato peach aphid on sugar beet. So we can thank Labour for rescuing our butterfly populations from oblivion. And of course you can see the consequences of the Tories' failure to ban it when you go to Europe. Last summer we went on a driving holiday to France and I couldn't believe the number of insects on the windscreen. Etc. etc..

Neonicotinoids Again

I have talked about and actively lobbied against the use of neonicotinoids for many years. I found a blog from 2011 about them. The EU banned them in 2018, and not before time. They are STILL used here in flea treatments, which is having consequences in the broader environment. I'm beginning to suspect this application will prove to be much more damaging than Cruiser SB.

Neonics are doubtlessly very bad news and have had serious impacts. To  connect banning their use this spring with national butterfly numbers is nuts, though. Their recent agricultural use has not been widespread across the UK. We don't have sugar beet within a hundred miles of here; there are apparently four processing factories in the UK, in East Anglia and the East Midlands, which is where it's grown. There's no-one growing beet in the London suburbs or the Highlands.

There's also the timing issue, in any case. You wouldn't expect any impact from stopping using them this Spring; it's too early. Anyway, it's going to take a while for any affected local ecosystems to recover.

No Agendas Please

So we get this kind of post:

"So many butterflies. And all because Labour finally stopped granting temporary 'emergency use' of neonicotinoids, which the tories had granted, every year, since we left the EU."

This is a) flat wrong but also b) let's not try to politicise this kind of issue. It's really unhelpful. Let's stick with the science. People need to understand the complexity and difficulty of what we're faced with. And it's nothing to do with Party politics.

I was a bit surprised though to find the wildflower meadow areas they had were pretty limited and - to be honest - rather disappointing. They were more knapweed fields than wildflower meadows! 

I'm a fan of Knapweed generally - it's a pretty plant and invaluable later summer nectar source - but not to this degree! Part of the knack of meadow management is to continually improve diversity, and it's pretty simple to see what's gone wrong here and how to put it right.

I'd think the annual hay cut has been done too late, probably for several years. Regularly cutting in late August allows the Knapweed to set seed, which has led to this. It's not a terribly long lived perennial, so needs to regularly regenerate.

We recommend cutting if not in sections over time, then at slightly different times each year, starting in late July.  This encourages both early and late flowering species. Oh - and, of course, always remove cuttings. 

You can target specific flowers too. One of our meadow areas has lovely cowslips, which we encourage by taking an earlier cut than elsewhere. It's a good example of how wildflower meadows are actually artificial constructs, and how active management can dramatically change the look of them. 

Anyway, back back to Knapweed central. Oversowing with Yellow Rattle once cut is going to help too. Rhinanthus minor will reduce the vigour of the grass, which will help floral diversity, but will also act on Centaurea nigra. 

This kind of management tweak will have a rapid impact. Keeping the sward nice and open allows plants like this Pyramidal orchid - a first in our meadow - a chance to appear. A while ago we sowed one of our harvested mixes in this area; several of them include orchid seed but we don't advertise it as orchid germination is rather hit and miss! 

I certainly can't find anything which wasn't abundantly obvious 20 years ago. And the rest. If anyone could be bothered to listen to the folk who knew. George Peterken's work on Lady Park Wood was pretty unambiguous, for example. 

This story is typical of two issues which continue to dog UK conservation work, which completely do my head in.

The Disneyfication of nature in popular culture has been disastrous. Deer and Grey squirrels - beneficiaries of this kind of anthropomorphic nonsense - have decimated woodland old and new. Their numbers are madly out of control. I know landowners who cull thousands of Greys every year, without apparently making a blind bit of difference to their numbers. Deer populations are historically very high, most likely unprecedented. Between them they destroy new planting and natural regen, as well as seeing off older trees. There's complete agreement among anyone who knows about the need to tackle both animals, but nothing happens. 

The second issue is how dangerous the current enthusiasm for greenwash is. Tree planting is great! Not necessarily ecologically, but in terms of PR and engagement. How much easier to get people to turn on to new woodland planting than to look after the old stuff, or establishing wetland or species rich grassland. Or even just looking after the trees they planted last year. You can count the trees you plant too for eye catching headlines too - hurrah! It's actual value can be... well... debatable. 

There's a - perhaps surprising - consensus among experts about a lot of what we need to do to roll back biodiversity loss here. Their messages might not be popular or new, but that doesn't make them wrong.

We stayed on the Island last week, and what a time we had. The weather was stunning, and - unbeknown to the surfers - the wildlife as spectacular as the scenery. Was there a seabird that wasn't on the island? Our birder friend returned breathlessly from his latest outing, reeling off his latest sightings. Alas, we didn't actually see the elusive Corncrake, but we certainly heard their guttural Crex Crex. As for the bees... oh my days.

Beautiful Bombus 

Tiree is awash with a very rare bee, Bombus muscorum, the Moss carder bee. There were also more Red shanked carder (Bombus ruderarius) queens than you could shake a stick at - nationally scarce, needless to say in steep decline, and another bee for my bucket list. 

It was slightly early to see any emerging Great Yellow queens, alas. The Great Yellow, seventy years ago one of our most common bumblebees, is now pretty much a gonner in the UK, clinging on in northern Scotland. Very typically, they seem to be victims of climate change and habitat loss.

We also stumbled across a rare Marsh fritillary on one of our walks - what a beautiful butterfly! Populations are - guess what - also falling fast...

Why is a place like Tiree such a biodiversity hotspot? Its position next to the Gulf Stream helps. It's well situated for migrating birds, its winters are relatively warm (albeit windy!) and, increasingly importantly, summers are mild. Most of all though, are the complicated ecosystems on the island. 

Acidic peat bog and wetland meet areas of light, calcareous and low fertility soil, which owes its origins to the sand blown inland from the beaches. This is home to the machair, extraordinary and unique wildflower rich grassland.  There are extensive sand dunes, heathland, areas of dry grassland, lochs... all this on an island of only 30 square miles. About the only thing you won't find are trees.

Fantastic Flora 

This all means the botany is extraordinary, of course. You'll find acid soil loving plants like Lousewort nestling next to carpets of Kidney vetch and Milkwort (as below!), so typical of chalk downland. We were early to see the machair in full bloom, but it was obvious how spectacular it was going to be. The Birdsfoot trefoil and Marsh marigold were in full flower though - masses of yellow...

The traditional crofting farming methods still used on the island help enormously too. There is carefully managed low density grazing, for example. Where grassland isn't grazed over the summer there's a hay cut at the end of the season. There's very little in common with the kind of farming I see around us here in Somerset! 

Misanthropy

Although we had a fabulous time, I left with a sense of melancholy. This tiny jewel has been preserved by its inaccessibility and lack of commercial resources (other than the kelp so enthusiastically collected in the early 19th Century). There are under 800 permanent residents on the island, less than 20% of the peak population. I felt a great sense of community on the island, and a strong sense of the Tiree diaspora. In the summer there are maybe 1100 or so people there, maximum. Thank goodness, visitors are generally well behaved. Even so, the destruction they can cause is painfully obvious. Gates left open and dogs off leads are bad news for ground nesting birds, for example. There's  more detritus on the beaches as well, of course, despite everyone's efforts to clear it up.

On The Edge

Climate change is a more major threat. The usual operation of the Gulf Stream is essential for the biodiversity on Tiree.  The island is remarkably flat, and very exposed. More extreme winter gales and rising sea levels are going to be increasingly problematic. The species like the rare bumblebees there are likely to be wiped out as temperatures increase.

Megalithic settlers looking out across the Atlantic must have thought they were living at the edge of the world. Tiree is on a different kind of brink now. How fragile places like this are, and how careless we are with them.

It's misleading, and an annoying illustration of the rather haphazard nature of vernacular nomenclature. It's also fairly typical of how facts can be established by the force of repetition - and how prevalent that is in the age of the internet. Was Greater stitchwort ever known as Star of Bethlehem? It certainly is now! 

A similar thing has been going on with bee boxes (or "bee hotels"), it turns out. Although we're mostly about plants, bee boxes struck me as being a good thing quite early on in Habitat Aid history, and we've dabbled in them ever since. I've made a few and we've sold a few (not the same ones!). To be clear, by the way, these are solitary bee boxes, not beehives for honeybees or boxes of bumblebees meant for commercial pollination of tomoatoes etc.

They seemed like a good way to help solitary bees, particularly the Red mason bees which are the most common users of them. We've had Blue mason bees and Leafcutter bees in ours too - great fun - and other species are recorded to use them too. 

There was a quickly established consensus on where to site the boxes - facing south or southeast, between 1m and 2m off the ground. Then much debate about how deep they should be, and what materials were best. Again, a standard rapidly emerged, with no actual evidence, it turned out. 

Although our boxes seemed to be a great success, with sometimes pretty much 100% occupancy, I was always a little wary of them. Surely, if you had a lot of bees in a single site you would also attract a lot of parasites? I loved watching the beautiful but sinister Ruby-tailed wasps around our boxes, but wasn't that a problem? There seemed to be pollen mites in some cells of the nesting tubes, as well as fungal growth. Advice was to reduce the parasite and disease issue by cleaning the tubes and keeping the bee cocoons in a release box. Hmm... things were getting complicated! 

I wasn't sure if this all added up to a good idea. People are always keen to sell stuff rather than plants to help wildlife, and it's stuff which often either doesn't work or has unforeseen consequences. My suspicions seemed to be confirmed when a study found that a new product, "bee bricks", didn't really work at all - which, incidentally, was our experience with them.  We stopped selling these and also the boxes that did work completely - without any evidence, I wasn't sure about the issues associated with having lots of bees together. The discretionary principle ruled the day.

This was the background to a fascinating webinar about this this a few days ago, hosted by the Indiana Jones of the bee world, Dave Goulson.  Dave has formed a thing called the Buzz Club (do join), a citizen science project set up to investigate exactly things like "do bee hotels work?"

The short answer is yes - they do*. Hurrah! And even better, they don't seem to need cleaning out. There's more work needed, but on the face of it some other accepted wisdom seems not to be relevant either. 

Solitary bees will nest at almost any height up to 2m, it turns out. I've promptly fixed a box at grandchildren eye level. Box depth over a sensible point doesn't seem to matter, although if necessary it's sensible to stop tubes being pulled out by e.g. woodpeckers by using wire.  

I'm pleased. Bee hotels are engaging and educational for humans, so it's nice they actually work too! An unexpected bonus. We're now looking for a new supplier, so if you know anyone please let me know. I won't be advertising for one on Facebook.

*that's the boxes, not the bricks!

Botanically it's also confusing. Let's just say that crab apples are distinct from Malus domestica, which includes our cooking and eating apple varieties with their much larger fruit. The smaller crab apples, while sour, have higher pectin levels - handy for making jelly.

Like so many plants, Malus domestica originated in central Asia. There are crabs from elsewhere, like the Chineses Malus Hupuhensis, but Malus sylvestris is the Crab native to the UK. It was a tree of mixed woodland - the clue is in the name. It's quite rare now, and not to be confused with the Wilding apples which grow from discarded apple cores. Hereabouts you can find the odd tree in old hedgerows. Its blossom is lovely at this time of year and it can fruit prolifically (see below), but it's not usually planted in domestic or orchard situations and can look pretty untidy. Historically the fruit would have been eaten; there's evidence of their culinary use going back to the neolithic. 

Hardy and Long Flowering

I'm a huge fan of Crabs. We're on heavy clay, so suffer from poor drainage combined with high rainfall in winter, and concrete like soil in the summer. Apples generally are amazingly forgiving of these kind of conditions, and there are some stunning Crabs to choose from. They have an unusually long flowering period in spring, so they're often recommended as pollination partners for eating and cooking apples. 

Easily Trained

Typically they have pink buds, opening to produce heavily scented white blossom (some have pink). Gorgeous, and super-attractive to pollinators. Ours are mobbed by all sorts of bees - honey bees, bumbles and solitaries. We have two lovely runs of espaliered  'Evereste' in the garden, which are positively buzzing at this time of year. Like other apple trees, Crabs are easily trained and look great as espaliers, cordons, stepovers, or fans.

Use in The Kitchen

There are some Crab apples specifically grown for their blossom rather than their fruit. The Victorians used to grow varieties of Malus domestica like 'Annie Elizabeth' as ornamental trees, rather than for their apples.

Crabs are the same. Evereste's apples are pretty teeny, and although we now have visits from Fieldfares who seem to love them, I don't think you could use them in the kitchen. 

This seems to me to be missing a trick. All the cultivars we sell are great for cooking, and the apples are an attractive extra ornamentation in the autumn / winter. Some are yellow, others red. Like cooking and eating apples, many of the best were bred by Victorian nurseryment, but there are some more recent introductions too.

I think my favourite is 'Dartmouth', which we also have several of here; stunning blossom and beautiful red Disneyesque apples (see below). Older varieties include 'Veitch's Scarlet'  and 'John Downie' have very pretty apples too, all relatively large for crabs.  

'Dartmouth' makes a great jelly too, with good flavour and colour, and like many Crab apples has a nice tidy habit.

It's not news that most of them are having a terrible time. Small farmers are suffering real and increasing hardship, and environmentalists are up in arms too. It wasn't hard to predict the current shambles, but it has been heartbreaking.

I'm baffled though that it is the inheritance tax row which has so dominated the headlines recently. Do many people think that there should be no inheritance tax on farmland? Sure, most would understand the case for some kind of exemption to help family farms. They would also agree that in current circumstances the government has set that figure too low. But wouldn't the NFU be better off campaigning for a higher tax free threshold rather than objecting to it on principle? Is IHT the single biggest issue facing the industry? 

Unintended Consequences

Farmland does seem to be an attractive asset from a tax perspective. In addition to the IHT exemption, farmland up to £1million also attracts a CGT rate of only 10%. It can be gifted free of CGT, which is handy too. There's "rollover relief" as well, which allows you to delay paying tax on land disposals if the proceeds are reinvested into business assets.

I can understand why all this was introduced, but it has had unintended consequences. It means that farmland in the UK is much more expensive than it should be, and is increasingly owned by investors using it at least partly as a tax shelter. Generous subsidies for tree planting etc (i.e. not farming) have made it even more attractive to them. There's a large new landowner close to us who is buying up family dairy farms left right and centre at inflated prices. You can bet it's not for their milk production.

For farmers this is a massive problem. They can't afford to buy land to farm and those that already own it are incentivised to sell it, rather than pass it on to the next generation.

A Proper Price For Food

As Guy Singh-Watson (The Riverford founder) points out, this would be less of an issue if consumers paid properly for their food. Food prices in the UK are nearly a quarter cheaper than those in France, for example (Source: Numbeo Survey, 2023), while agricultural land is considerably more expensive. If farmers were paid properly for their produce there would be less need for unreliable, unfathomable and unaffordable public subsidy. Farmers would be more inclined to pay some inheritance tax if they were actually making some profits to pay it from!

We're not anywhere close to that at the moment. 

"World Leading"

Instead, we've witnessed the slow motion car crash of the farm subsidy system originally dreamt up by Michael Gove and actioned by the last administration. Deeply ironic now that I remember him describing them as "world leading". The latest disaster seems to me to be much more significant than the IHT debate, but the NFU have been strangely silent about it. 

The Sustainable Farming Incentive (SFI) scheme is what it says on the tin. It's part of the post Brexit Environment Land Management (ELM) schemes. You could sign up to various elements to benefit biodiversity, soil health, water quality and resilience against climate change - i.e. promoting sustainable food production. 

It came in for a lot of criticism (not least from me!). The National Audit Office said it was too slow, too unpredictable, and too complicated, with uncertain outcomes. It criticised the process for being "iterative" - i.e. DEFRA were making it up as they went along. It became evident that it was being played by some larger landowners, who benefited from the lack of a cap on the scheme (doh!). ELMS shouldn't be an end in itself - it should be complimentary to actual farming. 

It made no sense for tax payers to be paying for it at the same time as we were signing trade deals to import food produced to lower standards overseas. And many felt we should be prioritising food security rather than meeting environmental goals. 

The government abruptly "paused" the scheme for new applications last week as they said this year's available pot (over £1 billion) had been spent. You can imagine the chaos that has ensued. SFI is now effectively dead in the water. No-one trusts it any more, and what happens now is anyone's guess.

A Sense of Perspective

The whole episode has been illustrative of how difficult it is to get this sort of thing right, particularly when it's under-resourced and under-thought. I don't think the biggest problem in farming at the moment is whether agricultural assets attract an inheritance tax exemption figure of £1 million rather than say £3 million. The NFU should be focusing on the bigger systemic issues farmers have to worry about.

I feel old. As for many, the certainties of life seemed to start to ebb away in COVID, and - if anything - the tide is going out faster than ever. 

I was less surprised than I might be by the recent findings of the Gen Z poll  here the Press got so excited about. Sad too. Some things seem silly - the South London I remember in the late seventies/early eighties was... er... quite a lot more racist than it is now. I saw terrible misogyny then too. But no wonder Gen Z are frustrated and unhappy.

Nothing seems to change. Democracy can work incredibly slowly, and we've endured some pretty cr@p politicians over the last decade or so. Gen Z are stressed, threatened by developments like AI, and poorer than we were.

As a generation we've failed politically. We've failed to tackle the big issues that matter. We've also failed to fix the small issues that don't, which too often have paralysed action and public debate. The "European model" looks financially knackered, and our situation, still dealing with post imperialism, feels worst than most.

In old fashioned coinage, I feel further to the left than most of our friends, but the kids still think I'm a political dinosaur. I just don't understand some of the issues so important to them. Twas ever thus, I suppose. The problem now is that this dislocation between generations is so acute it threatens societal cohesion. Old people are conservative (small c), increasingly expensive, and they vote. Guess what, governments pander to them.

Anyone But Hilary

I've heard that the new U.S. administration is to be welcomed. After all, the Dems should be avoided at all costs, not least because they're mostly women (at least the UK smashed this misogynistic nonsense half a century ago). The moderate GOP politicians and the tech bros now seem to think Trump isn't such a bad thing - power is a seductive drug. There's a Wall Street Trumpy fan club which welcomed the impending bonfire of red tape*. Don't worry, they said - his worst excesses will be kept under control by the grown ups in the room. 

How's that all going, chaps? 

One Planet

I'm no fan of the current incarnation of the Democratic Party. Sure, we're getting things wrong here too. We've got huge problems, as Gen Zers know. But living in the weird parallel universe that Musk, Vance et al inhabit can't be anything other than disastrous. I'm more worried about Russians blowing people's heads off than what J.D. Vance calls "the threat within".  Call me old fashioned, Jim, but I'd be more concerned about Vladimir Putin than Greta Thunberg if I were you. It's a huge regret that our collective back-sliding on defence has meant that we have to put up with your offensive nonsense.

Why am I writing about this in a blog about the environment? Because the only chance we have to sort out climate change and biodiversity loss is by acting together. Across generations and across social, political and national boundaries. The forest fires in California didn't distinguish between them, and nor will the problems ahead. Forget America or anyone else First; nature doesn't discriminate. The only chance we have to win this very real battle is if we fight it together.

*Copyright Liz Truss etc etc

In the past I might have written a cheery horticultural "how to" blog to keep things ticking over, but this kind of thing is suddenly irrelevant. AI does a great job of telling you how to do 99% of gardening jobs, neatly presented on Google. 

This is problem for a small business, as it closes down a helpful marketing tool. It's consistent with a bigger picture. Ethical SMEs have increasingly limited room for manouevre in terms of online marketing. Meta didn't give a toss about larger advertisers boycotting it, because it's SMEs who have to use it. I gave up on Twitter when it got stupid - actually quite early on. I restarted our corporate account, but jacked it in again last year. I don't see how a business with ethical values can be associated with a social media channel like X. 

The alternatives aren't great, and - surprise surprise - they're getting more toxic. Even LinkedIn, which used to be a relative oasis of calm, is increasingly political and unpleasant. There are so many now too it's difficult for a small business to keep up - particularly one run by an old bloke. We're on Facebook and have Bluesky and Threads accounts too, which I'm not wildly excited about. There's our YouTube channel and Instagram as well, when I remember to post!

Some Good News

As for legacy media, it continues to be thin on the environment. I guess because resources become increasingly inadequate and it's a relatively apolitical area, so editors can't be bothered. I suppose indifference is better than criminality and incitement to riot!

One story which did make it into my paper this morning gives me cause for cheer, though. Neonicotinoids were outlawed in the EU in 2018. Yesterday the government here finally agreed to ban the last one in use here, Cruiser SB, a neonic based insecticide. 

Governments have granted an annual "emergency derogation" for the use of Cruiser SB on sugar beet for several years. It's used to kill aphids, which are the vector for virus yellows. This has been a really significant problem for growers as winters are warmer, meaning larger aphids populations.

I've written regularly about neonics since early 2011. There has been a steadily growing body of evidence that they're doing no good not just to pollinators, but also to wider ecosystems. Their continuing use has been a classic and damaging example of our failure to stick with the precautionary principle which is supposed to underpin environmental policy. While finally banning Cruiser SB is a victory for the environmental lobby, it's been a stupidly long time coming. 

Farmers and sugar producers don't like it, which explains why previous administrations have ducked the issue. I was accosted by a furious farmer at Chelsea Garden Show last year, when volunteering with the mighty Bumblebee Conservation Trust. "Why are you so keen to ruin farmers? What do you suggest I do if I can't protect my crop?". I'm sympathetic. Alternative methods are being developed, but there's apparently nothing which currently does the trick like thiamethoxam.*

And yet. The environmental cost is far, far too high. Easy for me to say, I know, but until we work out how to control virus yellows some other way, sugarbeet growing in the UK looks to me like another casualty of climate change. Perhaps - controversial content alert - we could do with less sugar anyway.

It's a divisive subject. As usual. I hope people will be reasonable about it on social media.

*Necessity, I suspect, will be the mother of invention.

The first time I watched a hedge being laid was way back in the day. I vividly remember the enormous bonfire that followed, as the contractors burnt all the brash - with a little help from a can of diesel and some pallets. I saw it from Castle Cary, a good three miles away, and I thought the house had gone up. Yikes.

Times have changed.

I finished my annual hedge laying project around Christmas. This year I laid around 30m of very unhappy and unmanaged hedge, mostly Hazel and Blackthorn. I was taught our local style, which is more North Dorset than anything else, according to the text books. As you can see, there's not much hedge left when you finish! Other styles, like the more widespread (and prettier!) Midland, leave a good deal more as they're designed to be proof against wandering cattle. The lazy well fed sheep of Dorset are more likely to go under a hedge though, rather than push it over or jump over it.

Feeling Naked

It doesn't leave much of a screen. I still see hedge laying criticised on social media for this, as well as for the temporary loss of habitat. I'd say a few things in its defence. It's good practice to only lay a section of a hedge at a time, for starters. I'm not going to list all the manifest benefits of hedgelaying, but also bear in mind:

1. You only need to lay a hedge every 10 years or so. Gentle irregular trimming in the meantime is all it needs. Good for the health of the hedge and the blossom and fruit/nuts it supplies, incidentally.  
2. A laid hedge recovers super-quickly. Within a couple of years this section will be something over 1.5m tall, and much denser.
   
3. Even a newly laid hedge provides a safer corridor for wildlife than what was there before.
   

This is all well and good, but it has left us rather exposed to folk peering in at us from the lane in the meantime. It's a common experience; domestic hedges are usually there as a screen. I've got around this by making a dead hedge next door to the laid section, using the brash I cut out.  

Dead Hedges

This is a wizzard wheeze. When you're laying a big hedge like this you end up with a huge pile of offcuts. Making a dead hedge out of some of them makes perfect sense. You're not only creating a screen to make up for the temporary lack of hedge, but you're also creating valuable habitat for wildlife. The dead hedge I've made here will harbour nesting birds and small mammals. To be honest I haven't made a great job of it.  It should be thicker, but I had limited space and I was working with Blackthorn (yuk!). The dead hedges I've made before have rotted down beautifully, returning nutrients to the soil and improving the soil microbiome.

Chips

That still left a lot of left over brash though. The simple solution here was Jody the local tree surgeon and his chipper. I'd always been slightly sceptical about using woodchip before meeting Tom Adams, one of our fruit tree growers. Tom swears by willow woodchip in particular, and we always now make sure there's some in the mix. 

We converted the paths in our veg patch to wood chip a couple of years ago and I'm now much more assiduous in keeping newly planted trees mulched with it too. It's great stuff, and it demonstrably improves soil quality and structure, as well as retaining moisture. In the veg patch it's also improved drainage, rather unexpectedly. Another super-power.

The ramial wood from my hedge laying - smaller branches and twigs - is ideal. I coppiced an ornamental salix to add to the mix and voila - perfect wood chip. Since then I've been running around with the wheelbarrow mulching newly planted trees and hedge plants. I've added some to my compost too. Veg garden next up, with the remaining pile you can see here. I've worked to a depth around 5cm-10cm. 

Whatever your project - pruning, felling etc. - have a think about woodchip and dead hedges before you reach for the diesel! 

Darragh left us pretty unscathed though, which is pretty remarkable. Some annoying bits and pieces, but nothing problematic or expensive. No solar panels blown into Dorset, and the greenhouse is still here and not in Kansas.

I'd feared the worst; we were on the fringe of the area covered by a red warning and we're pretty exposed here, sitting on the top of a hill in Somerset with almost a clear view to the coast. The ground is very wet and the strongest winds were northwesterly gusts well over 60 mph, which potentially made for a lot of trouble. 

But over the last few years I've planted to try to mitigate the effects of heavy rain and severe wind. Windbreaks are an obvious win, but people ignore a more obvious one too - hedges. Our traditional hedges have several superpowers and this is one of them, which will come as no surprise to anyone who has seen livestock sheltering from a storm in the lee of a hedge. 

Combining well managed hedges - i.e. not too short and not too leggy - and trees of different heights, as we've done, makes for a super effective windbreak. I picked up a second hand copy of Martin Crawford's excellent Creating a Forest Garden recently, and he's very good on this. Have a read and get planting now! 

We also have a green roof here over most of the house, or more accurately a meadow roof. It's just not possible to lose bits of it in bad weather, which is very comforting. Green roofs have lots of pluses, but people don't often mention their resilience in storms as one of them. 

A less selfish consolation after a storm like Darragh is a lesson from 1987. These apparently cataclysmic weather events can have a positive outcome, particularly if nature is left to its own devices. It's much more clever than we are, and much more resilient. Thank goodness. 

I wanted to put together a quick guide to the initial management regime for a recently planted mixed native hedge, although to be honest there's not much to it.

You planted your new hedge plants as 60-90cm tall whips a year or so ago. You popped some guards on them and mulched with wood chip. Your new hedge should be looking pretty good, although growth will have been influenced by things like available sunlight - this one is in part shade next to an oak. Some species establish much quicker than others; roses race away, but plants like Blackthorn are much slower. Don't worry - they'll catch up.

The first thing to do is to weed the hedgeline, removing grasses in particular which have appeared through the mulch. Here the weed of choice is snowberry, which will take a determined campaign to get rid of! Most likely it's an idea to top up the mulch when you've finished, which I'll be doing here. 

Guards

Then check the guards. If they're fully biodegradable there's no need to remove them as they should just disintegrate. If they're not - and historically they won't be - even after just a year some plants will be big enough that they won't need them. Here the major enemy is voles rather than rabbits or hares, so I'm more relaxed about removing them. Ballpark, take them off after a couple of years. The plastic ones can be recycled or re-used.

Why do they need removing? For two reasons. First off, the plants won't be able to grow lateral branches close to the ground. I've shamelessly nicked this photo from PTES  (thoroughly recommend for this stuff) to illustrate the problem:

The guards left on this stretch of hawthorn hedge have meant there's a bare patch at its base. This might not look disastrous, but it has BIG consequences for mice, voles, hedgehogs etc trying to toddle down it in safety.

The other issue with not removing guards is that you end up with weirdly mangled plants, with limbs tightly clutched around their main stems. Not great. You might have noticed the same kind of thing in planted woodland when guards haven't been removed quickly enough. In a hedge, this is going to mean the individual plants don't spread out naturally.

To Prune Or Not to Prune?

The main question people seem to have relates to pruning. By and large they seem very keen to. I'm not sure it matters much, to be honest. If some of the quicker growing hedge plants are looking tall but leggy then yes, why not. Some nurseries even recommend pruning your hedge plants when you plant them. Whenever you take out a plant's leader you're going to encourage it to bush out. En masse this is going to mean a thicker hedge.  

I guess the main reason I'm not too fussed about this is that I know that I'm going to lay the hedge anyway, so it doesn't matter. It's going to be super dense whatever I do to the plants at this stage. 

If you're working in a small space, then obvs prune your hedge to suit. Important to mention, these are tough plants - you physically can't do them terminal harm, whatever you do (almost whatever!). 

If a plant is struggling it's worth cutting the leader to see if it's still green - i.e. viable. Hedge plants are unlikely to fail completely and often you'll see regrowth from their base. In a way this is a good thing as you're effectively coppicing it - you'll end with something that's multi-stemmed! 

More recently we had another unhappy experience with Populus nigra, featuring a large and I thought reliable nursery. We queried the provenance of the trees they were offering and - to cut a very long story short - we were right to. Curiously the Forestry Commission, who we went to for help in sorting this out, were spectacularly uninterested. Double grrr...

I see plants offered online which are - definitely - not native Black poplars. Poplars hybridise like crazy, so I guess it's an easy area of confusion. It's fertile ground for plant geneticists, and there's been some good DNA analysis on the non-hybrid clones there are out there, identifying 87. There's a register of these true clones. 

Our native Black poplars are now extremely rare, and hybridisation isn't the only  reason for their decline. They used to be much more common, particularly in places like our part of the world - Somerset - where they loved the heavy wet soils. Many of these sites have been drained and are now too dry for them to thrive. They're big trees too, with invasive root systems. Once highly valued, they grow too slowly for contemporary wood production and the female plants have fluffy white seeds which some find offensive. So they haven't been planted much, either as amenity trees or for forestry, and the female trees are rarer than hens' teeth. Until not so long ago they were actually agressively removed.

All this - and the obvious attractions of such a charismatic tree - made me jump at the chance to meet someone who was growing them. 

Lindengate are based in one of the last surviving Black poplar strongholds, Aylesbury, which seemed a good start. Of the estimated 7,000 trees left in the UK, apparently over half are in the Vale of Aylesbury, so they had a reasonable supply of plant material to hand.

 And when I arrived I saw rows of little - and not so little! - potted Black poplars. They were immaculately labelled, grown from large cuttings ("truncheons"). There were male and female plants, from a good range of numbered clones.

Lindengate are not a commercial nursery. They're a ground breaking mental health charity, providing locals with a range of nature based activities. They grew plants as part of this work, and were interested in selling them more widely to raise some funds. I was so pleased they got in touch.

A few weeks later Lindengate had their plant passporting number and their packaging material, and we were good to go. I hope we'll be able to sell lots of plants for them; partly to raise them some money and partly to help restore the fortunes of these majestic trees in our landscape.        

As you'll see (below), the bees in both gardens were mostly two types of bumblebee - the common carder and garden bumblebee - and honeybees. Lots of beautiful new queen bumbles, some workers - Bombus pascuorum often has two generations a year. There was a smattering of hoverflies and butterflies too.

I guess in the Oudolf garden the planting is mostly aesthetically driven, but they have some banging bee plants. As for us here, it's as much about providing multiple nectar and pollen resources for as long as possible throughout the year. And what's good for bees is good for a whole range of other pollinating insects - butterflies and moths, hoverflies, flies, etc. etc. 

The only native plants flowering at Habitat Aid HQ at the moment are common fleabane and the last of the fabulous Purple loosestrife, Lythrum salicaria, as the meadows are long cut. In the hedgerows there are the final knockings of hops and honeysuckle, and our native clematis, Clematis vitalba. After that there will be ivy, the last major native species of the season. 

I'm a die hard fan of native plants (obvs. - Ed.), but even I recognise how important non-native species are at the end of summer in these days of climate change. They keep the last generation of the year fuelled, and let overwintering species fatten up ahead of hibernation. Worth mentioning the role too that fallen fruit plays in this, particularly for butterflies (some ahead of migration) and queen wasps.

The bumblebee queens you see at this time of year are building up reserves ahead of their long sleep. There's the odd solitary bee, and lots of honeybee workers stocking up for winter, rubbing along with hoverflies and butterflies.

Some of our pollinator friendly perennials and shrubs are only just starting to flower, like Viburnum tinus, while others, like the geranium 'Rozanne' and Erysimum 'Bowles's Mauve', have been blooming all summer. Some, like sedums or Verbena bonariensis will attract a wide range of insects. Other flowers with more demanding access appeal to pollinators with longer tongues.

I took some photos today to show some of my favourites. It's in no way an exhaustive list, but I hope it will give you some helpful ideas.

Agastache 'Heatwave'

 Anemone x hybrida 'Pamina'*

Aster 'Violetta'

Aster 'Little Carlew'

Aster macrophyllus 'Twilight'

Calamintha nepeta ssp.Nepeta

Erysimum 'Bowles's Mauve'

Eupatorium Maculatum 'Atropurpureum'

Geranium 'Rozanne'

Hylotelephium 'Herbstfreude'

Knautia 'Macedonia'

Origanum 'Hopleys'

Persicaria amplexicaulis 'Orange Field'

Salvia 'Amistad'

Stachys Byzantina

Teucrium x lucidrys 

Verbena bonariensis

 Viburnum tinus, 'Eve Price' I think! 

*Note her full pollen baskets. Several bumblebee species have two and B. terrestris now sometimes even three generations a year - most likely though this is pollen for new males and queens.

We love a trade show. It's a good time to reconnect with suppliers and competitors alike, as well as picking up some business. We've got a couple of fab ideas for new products too. I did a panel as well, so good for morale (less so the photos of it, featuring some fat old bloke in a flowery shirt). I can get a bit stuck behind a computer or marching around meadows so it's always good to be social, and sometimes, like all of us, I forget I do actually know a bit about interesting stuff.

It was my first show for while, and gave me pause for reflection.

We've come a long way from the zeitgeist of 2008 when we started the business. Back in the day our core messaging was considered at best eccentric. How things have changed! We're now very much mainstream, which was reflected in the other stands around us. Lots of meadow seed, peat free, green roofs, biodegradable tree guards, local grown plants, etc etc. A special shout out to fellow Somerset business Woodland Horticulture, who were opposite us and discovered the pasty van, and to next door neighbours British Wildflower Plants, long suffering growers for us since 2008. 

The punters were much better informed too. Fair play, they were professionals, but I didn't hear much odd over the two days. They all wanted - and were being asked - to do the right thing, and asked good questions about how to. Ponds and meadows were the top two topics.

Groundsfest is mostly about machinery, which is where the money is, of course.  There were machines of all shapes and sizes, for cutting, rolling, mowing, whacking, mangling, lugging, sawing, chipping, fencing, posting, titivating, scarifying, destumping, blowing, sucking... They had names like "terminator" and were much admired by crowds of huge blokes with beards, big boots, and even cooler padded trousers that tell people you use a chainsaw with a metre long cutting bar. 

I was surprised by the number of robots which are routinely used in ground management now, to do a range of things from mowing to painting lines on football pitches. Even more surprising was the number of electric options now available. I've got a great little Stihl electric hedge cutter and I knew they did chainsaws too, but there were other really big powerful electric bits of kit I wasn't expecting (see below). Why aren't we all using electric mowers now? It was so good to see, particularly in a business which attracts its fair share of petrolheads. 

 

The show itself was much less green. I do wish these venues would sort themselves out. Trade shows are horrendously wasteful, and we should work harder to make them less so. There were no recycling bins for example, just general waste. Carpets for stands are optional and cut to order, so presumably all tossed after two days. All the banners and event signage were one use. It was pretty typical that at such a major venue - NAEC Stoneleigh - there were only 3 EV chargers, two of which weren't working. And in such a big area with such enormous roof spaces, surely there's space for some proper solar panel arrays?

Anyway, we're off to Futurescape in London in October to compare and contrast.  It's going to be even more knackering, but hopefully with proper beer. 

*I'm surely not alone in disliking IPA?

A pond is such a beautiful and important part of a wildlife garden that it was one of the first things we put in when we moved here. It had a practical function too, holding some run off from the field next door which would have otherwise ended up in our cellar or shot down the lane. At times this winter there was a torrent heading down the road anyway. When it really rains - it being Somerset - there's a spring that pops into life too.   

Our first effort at making a pond was pretty rudimentary. We dug a decent sized hole and used a plastic liner. It never worked terribly well, and water kept getting under the liner as we hadn't built it properly. It got to be an embarrassing mess. 

Mark 2 was even more basic; we thought that as we're on solid clay we'd bin the liner and pack the clay down to seal it. This might have been simple and brilliant, were it not for the field drains we belatedly discovered under it. 

One of our local farming friends suggested waiting for it to seal. Looking at the cost of putting it right, this was alluring advice. For four years we waited, watching water seep from it down the lane. It filled, it emptied. It filled, it emptied. This seemed to suit the Reed Canary grass, which took over. Our embarrassment as purveyors of pond plants grew. As did our frustration.  

Anyway, in Spring we bit the bullet and decided - finally - to tackle it properly. Pond Mark 3 was going to be bigger and deeper and much, much better. We wanted proper access around it, and to expand the meadow area next to it - by regrading the slope which had become just scrub (which we've got enough of elsewhere!). 

We hired pond specialist Perry James, who made short work of it. Perry has created a spanking new pond, much deeper and bigger than before. Proper butyl liner, underliner drainage, etc etc.The sides are gently sloping to a maximum depth of 1.4m; shallow enough for wildlife, deep enough so it won't overheat. I can't wait for it to start filling up, as it presents so many planting opportunities. We'll be using our coir mats for at least some areas, with baskets in deeper sections. 

There's been a lot of earth moving involved, which we've taken advantage of to create areas of grotty low fertility subsoil to be sown with more wildflower meadow seed. We'll be building a couple of hibernacula too. All good.

I'll keep you posted.

Customers are now largely in the dark about where the seed they buy is from and how it has been produced. Worse than that, they can't even be sure whether the wildflower seed they buy is actually wildflower seed. We know who the good guys are, but from the outside it's impossible to tell. Our advice is to always ask. 

In fairness to our competitors, there's a lot of pressure from customers to supply something which will give quick and colourful results, rather than something which is ecologically appropriate and sustainable. It's not uncommon either to find sellers showing pictures of a bunch of weird annuals in flower supposedly illustrating a cheap grass heavy meadow mix.

Let's be clear; a "wildflower meadow" mix to us consists of appropriate perennial wildflower species with grasses. You can add a few cornfield annuals to give some colour in the first year if you like - feel free! 

I'd say there are four different types of "wildflower" and wildflower meadow mixes currently sold in the UK:

• Constructed
• Harvested from an existing meadow site
• Grasses and not really wildflowers
• Wildflowers? Grasses? You're having a laugh

What We Sell

...mixes which include only genuine native species, with seed often sourced in the UK. They come in two types.

Constructed mixes have a wildflower element typically harvested from blocks of the same plant, grown for the production of seed. If the mix includes grasses, to produce a traditional wildflower meadow mix, the grasses will be "certified". That is to say, they won't be native wild grasses, but true to type. There's very little commercial production of wild grasses in the UK.

A mix like this will typically - and rather randomly - be 80% grasses, 20% wildflowers. You can find them with as low as 5% wildflowers, which will mean they're cheap as chips, but a mix with a ratio like this are a false economy. It will almost certainly just produce lots of grass. For a while now we've been selling our versions of this kind of thing with 30% wildflowers, which is more likely to give a decent result.

These mixes should give you certainty over what you're getting. They're relatively limited, but do provide a starting point for establishing different plant communities, selected for different soil types and situations. Because they're predetermined, they're beloved of landscape architects and other specifiers. They're usually available in large volumes, as the wildflower element consists of relatively common species. I'm always slightly nervous about the supply chain that can be involved in this kind of mix though, which makes it difficult to reliably trace seed if something goes wrong.

There are also seed mixes which have been harvested from donor sites and cleaned up. We're big fans. In the past they're only really been used for local schemes, and haven't really been available commercially. They're generally only available in smaller quantities (up to say 250kg), and usually not harvested annually. This means you can be reasonably confident ahead of time as to their content, but it will vary over the years according to management, weather etc.. Even if they're relatively well cleaned, they will also include more chaff. 

Why bother with them? They include native grasses. You can be sure about their very local provenance and freshness. Assuming the harvester knows what they're doing there won't be any problems with contamination, which sometimes afflicts seed in constructed mixes. They have (sometimes amazingly!) high floral content and diversity, as they're usually harvested from complex and well established sites. Some have as much as 70% wildflowers to only 30% grasses. We sell mixes for under £100/kg inc. VAT and carriage which would cost three times as much if they were put together manually.   

By the way, because Biodiversity Net Gain schemes are measured on outputs rather than inputs, these mixes are perfect for them. There will be more becoming available too, as landowners harvest seed from new meadows. 

The Not Very Relevant

There are a lot of mixes available from larger seed merchants which are specifically aimed at agricultural schemes. These include legume heavy herbal leys, rather than wildflower meadow mixes. The "wildflowers" in these mixes are more often than not fast growing cultivars. Does this matter? It depends. Some don't last very long or grow to an improbable size, for example. Anyway, they're super cheap and will qualify for a lot of the schemes out there.

The other "meadow mixes" which don't fall into our purview are "pictorial meadows". These are just flowers - no grasses - and can include pretty much any kind of annual, biennial or perennial species.   

The Ugly

We're licenced by DEFRA to market seeds, but DEFRA's plant passporting scheme is a more meaningful check. One of our competitors says they "are registered with the Department for Environment, Food & Rural Affairs (DEFRA), so you can have confidence in both our products and advice". This is, frankly, utter b***s.  

Even so, you can guarantee most of the good folk on Amazon aren't authorised by anyone. The wildflower seeds sold on platforms like this could be Chinese, they could be triffids. The product images tell their own stories... yuk. They're often sold using the RHS's Plants For Pollinators logo, incidentally, in an effort to give them a figleaf of respectability. As for meadow mixes... 

When I got back I found my social media feeds full of woe about insect numbers here. Where have all the bees gone? There are no butterflies in my garden! etc etc. Richard Comont at the BBCT has written a good explainer about what's going on with bumblebees at the moment, but in broader terms, against the familiar picture of general decline, the wet winter and cold spring will have impacted on a range of species. 

It's not possible to put this down to normal weather patterns, of course. Like the horrendous floods we dodged in the Alps on the way home last weekend, it's a symptom of climate change.

I wonder if the General Election had been held in a heatwave whether the result would have been significantly different. I doubt it. As it is, the Green Party have the same number of seats (a massive 4) and fewer than half the votes of Reform, a party vehemently opposed to net zero and bizarrely promoting climate change denial. Populist parties across Europe are explicitly rejecting what David Cameron called "green crap". 

The grown ups in the room just aren't getting their point across. Pounds spent on green policies now aren't just excellent value for money, they're essential. Even with the sewage hoo-ha and the Restore Nature march, the environment generally just didn't register in the campaign. When it did - like the ULEZ issue - it just became another front in the culture wars. 

We don't even have a department for Energy and Climate Change any more. Credible voices like Chris Skidmore were sidelined.  As for DEFRA, it seems to have been completely rudderless since Michael Gove left in 2019. I was grateful to the good burghers of Suffolk for the spectacular kicking they gave Therese Coffey (sorry - Dame Therese Coffey), whose performance at DEFRA was typically abject. And, of course, a predecessor was Liz "pork markets" Truss - need I say more?     

Let's hope Labour take the environment far more seriously than their predecessors. Our leaders need to lead on this. Now.

It was seemingly aeons ago that a local customer complained his plant had been delivered as a bush rather than a tree. We took in the orphan. Over the years we've learnt not to be driven mad by its habit of bursting into leaf a month after everything else. Customers can't believe their mulberries aren't dead, until they coyly sprout leaves in unexpected places. Then there's vigorous twiggy growth which promptly dies back the following year, leaving a random muddle to remove. The limbs that do persist form an untidy puzzle.

I reckon our bush must be around 20 now, and every year I scan it for fruit at this time of year, with little sense of expectation. I can't even remember whether it's a Black or a White mulberry - Morus alba, I think - looking at the leaves.

Which - out of earshot of it - is slightly disappointing. I don't want silkworms but I do want mulberry jam, and white mulberries are usually pretty bland. I say "usually", as I have my hopes pinned our our having - quite by chance - an amazingly tasty cultivar.    

Mulberries are as notoriously shy to fruit as they are to come into leaf, but even so I was beginning to give up. There are, I discover, fruitless white mulberry varieties. But today, joy of joy, the first signs of fruit have appeared. I'm sure the birds will have them, or the bush will succumb to some terrible canker or be struck by lightning, but for the time being I dare to hope.  

The first thing to say is the problem won't be the seed itself. It's fresh and we randomly test batches to check on content and germination. If you've sown it according to instructions it's possible something has happened - the seed's been buried, washed away, rotted in standing water, or even eaten by a flock of pigeons. More often than not though, you just need to be patient.

Most of the mixes we sell consist entirely of native perennial species (with the exception of Yellow Rattle, which is a slightly different story). These take a while to germinate - up to several months. As wildflowers and native grasses, they are much slower than horticultural cultivars. Some species won't even appear until the following year, which is part of the fascination of making a wildflower meadow.   

A few of our mixes include a smattering of cornfield annuals, which are much - much - quicker. They will zoom away, flowering within three months of sowing. These are typically mixes without grasses, which, incidentally, also tend to germinate quicker than perennial wildflowers.

Even cornfield annuals have been slow this year though. Conditions for growing in spring were terrible; it was relentlessly cold and dark. Just ask the garden designers at Chelsea! We sowed a bed here with our bee mix in early April, and I'm entirely unsurprised that the only plants stirring so far are a few cornflowers and poppies.  

We're buzzzzzed to be sponsoring the Bumblebee Conservation Trust stand again at the Chelsea Flower Show. I can't wait for my volunteering day; it's so energising to talk to fellow bee enthusiasts! 

Like last year, the message is going to be about bumblebee friendly plants (here the gorgeous heritage apple variety 'Annie Elizabeth', btw). It's just the sort of thing we've been banging on about for years too. Growing the right plants the right way - without chemicals - is the best thing us gardeners can do for bees.

At the other end of the spectrum, the most useless is bumblebee "hives"*.

There's been a business supplying bumblebee colonies for commercial tomato growers for many years. Tomatoes rely on buzz pollination by bumblebees, and in greenhouses there aren't many around. Someone came up with the idea of importing and selling small colonies of bees in boxes to do the work, and so successful were they that other growers used them too - for strawberries, for example.

This isn't great news for bumblebees for a number of reasons, not least biosecurity. As a commercial grower you now need a licence to import non-native subspecies of Bombus terrestris, which among other things requires the bees to be disease free and killed at the end of the season. This led to suppliers switching to the native subspecies, B. terrestris audax. This still isn't great; these bees can carry parasites and diseases, which will infect local colonies. The Bumblebee Trust has a position paper on this. It may also be that extra competition for finite resources might threaten wild populations.  

Defenders of this trade say that as the bees are kept in enclosed spaces - i.e. greenhouses - it doesn't matter, but of course no greenhouse is completely bee proof, nor can growers be relied on to kill all the new generation of queens at the end of the season.

These bee colonies are now sold for gardeners. To what end are people buying them? I had a marketing email this week from one supplier selling teeny tiny boxes recommended for use for allotments. They are "suitable for hobby or garden use", apparently. 

This is bizarre. There's no practical reason to be buying this stuff unless you're a tomato grower with acres of glass. It's not going to improve the yield of your veg on the allotment, and if you bought a colony of bumblebees and trapped them in a domestic greenhouse to pollinate tomatoes they would die in short order. There are plenty of wild pollinators about, and the whole domestic trade is just more beewash. 

So why does it exist? The gardeners I talk to at Chelsea who buy them (repeatedly, and with a special wooden box, treatment for wax moth, etc. etc. - you get the picture) think they're doing it to "save the bees" in some way. We do love stuff  - or, rather, we're encouraged to believe in the power of stuff.

It's up to folk like the Trust to get the message across that it's plants that are going to save bees, not boxes of bees. 

*I know it's daft; only honeybees have hives.