with Butterfly Conservation
I joined in a Zoom last night with Helen Hutchings Cox and Butterfly Conservation for a webinar all about wildlife gardening. I thought it would be interesting to hear specifically about lepidopterans as with the exception of Hawk Moths, I rather let this group of insects pass me by.
Of course, there were the usual recommendations about being less tidy, not using pesticides and herbicides, and providing different areas of habitat, however small the space. The area allocated to nature reserves in the UK is apparently smaller than the combined area of all the gardens, so our little pockets of green, brown, or even grey space on our properties can be really significant if used for the benefit of wildlife.
I think one thing I found surprising among the attendees were all the comments asking about how to get rid of aphids, slugs, and snails – the traditional garden “pests”. Realistically, it’s not particularly nature-oriented to cherry-pick what wildlife we do and don’t want, and personally I find it more interesting to just watch and see what happens. Take last year when there were so many caterpillars (from ‘cabbage whites’) on the rocket and nasturtiums and kale, I found them feasting on the tiniest stumps of plant and wondered if they would end up starving. I then noticed them flicking around, and when I looked more closely, I saw tiny wasps trying to jab them with their ovipositors. I’m not sure what eats flea beetles but they would certainly need a good appetite given the hordes I had on the brassicas!
I plant loads of nasturtiums, as well as any other seeds I have lying around as I’d rather they went in the ground and created some food and structure instead of going mouldy in a box in the shed. If I plant enough then some are bound to make it to a harvestable stage, and if it’s the kind of year which is more advantageous for snails than kale, well, so be it.
If your plants are getting decimated then maybe just choose another variety which is less desirable to the wildlife. For instance, all molluscs are valuable detritivores, and eat decaying plant matter as well as being juicy morsels for creatures higher up the food chain. And remember, the massive slugs are not the ones which do the damage – it’s the little grey ones, and they are eaten by corvids, thrushes, and other ground-feeding birds such as Robins and Dunnocks. Frogs eat a lot of slugs too, and as making a frog-friendly pond is simple enough and creates all sorts of other benefits for the garden.
Aphids also seem to be on the hit list: soap solution, washing up liquid, and squishing them seemed to be the favoured options on the chat…but why? This is a wildlife garden so surely if plants suffer because of aphids (or slugs, or snails, or mildew or rust or…or…or) surely that’s all just part of the process? One argument was: but plants are expensive. In that case, use plants which aren’t expensive or precious, like those from a local plant sale, seed swap, or divisions from a green-fingered neighbour.
Another criticism was that wildlife gardening is “messy”. Says who? Who defines mess in nature? Does the sea look messy when there are big waves crashing ashore? Does the sky look messy when there are clouds flitting across the horizon? Messy is plastic pots, degraded weed membrane, broken trellis, tatty horticultural fleece, rusty barbed wire, outgrown tree guards etc etc and all of those are thanks to humans.
So it was a really interesting session, and my takeaways were:
- light-coloured plants attract moths at night as the moonshine will illuminate them
- moths and butterflies need shelter all year round, not just for overwintering
- slow down, watch, and listen
Here are my notes:
