Bees, butterflies and blooms

[martin]

BBC2 8pm Weds 8th February.......

"Our houses have become prisms through which we reveal what sort of person we are. And as our homes have bent to our will, so have our gardens and public spaces, manicured to within an inch of their lives. Telegraph gardening columnist Sarah Raven begins this series hoping to persuade us to be messier. It’s all in a good cause.

Our bees and butterflies – essential pollinators – are in trouble, dying off species by species. So Raven is off to a Northamptonshire village to get the inhabitants to change their ways. Perhaps once she has finished saving the bees, we could have someone to do the same for our interiors.

ABOUT THIS PROGRAMME
1/3. New series. Writer and gardener Sarah Raven tries to encourage the creation of crucial habitats for bees, butterflies and other pollinating insects. She begins in Northamptonshire by urging a village to choose wildflowers over neat grass lawns, and meets farmer Duncan Farrington, who is considering growing the plants at the edges of his crops. She also demonstrates how flowers helpful to insects can be cultivated at home"

[martin]

I was out yesterday evening, and missed it live, so have just watched it on Iplayer - http://www.bbc.co.uk/iplayer/episode/b0152fty/Bees_Butterflies_and_Blooms_Villages_Farms_and_Countryside/

- and would suggest to anyone who missed it that it's well worth a viewing - quiet and low key, it makes some very valid points, not least that we can all help make a difference.
I live in the sticks about 5 miles from Sarah Raven's garden, and like her have noticed how different the countryside is from how it was when we were kids - a simple dogwalk hereabouts will underline the differences - on one hand there are blocks of "green concrete", blasted with every "icide" in christendom that are effectively stone dead - you'll not hear the buzz of insects or birdsong, and when they're ploughed, rather than the plume of birds following the plough there's not one to be seen..........
On the other hand, there are meadows and hedgerows that haven't been cultivated for years and mixed deciduous woodlands - all of it literally teeming with life - somehow we need to find a saner balance, and found the piece about the research at Lancaster particularly striking - the birdsong in the background was very notable - the other thing that impressed me particularly was a young mum's enthusiasm for the scheme, and how her efforts were blooming - inspiring stuff!

[stannn]

Sarah Raven seems to have chosen a village 99% full of stiffs to convert to her ideas. Their fixed idea of the huge village green and the churchyard was that there should be only manicured grass. However, hope lies in one young mother who has great determination to change things.
We've seen similar attitudes in this village, although things are changing. You could hardly imagine that people would object to a riot of wildflowers amongst the gravestones and yet the mowing had to be done on too regular a basis, everywhere. Well, the church now has few customers, no spare cash and the mowing is once a year. Guess what, there are now swathes of wild flowers, everywhere.
As Sarah pointed out, the greatest enemy of a new meadow is the grass, which dominates. It seems that yellow rattle is the answer as it feeds on grass roots.
Stan