Gardens for all - Not everyone thinks that the Grange Park Tree felling was necessarily a bad thing

Back in the late summer I was dozing on the good old W9 bus service as we passed through Grange Park, and suddenly shot up in my seat.

The railway embankment, scene of the recent battle with Network Rail over tree felling, was alive with colour.  Wild-flowers!  Wonderful!  It’s not that they were a substitute for much needed urban trees, but hugely welcome nevertheless because, the joy of flowers apart, London and the country as a whole needs flowers to support its dwindling population of pollinating insects.

Pollinating insects are essential to food production, especially fruit and vegetables, and they are in decline everywhere, not least in the British countryside with its sterile swathes of cereal monocultures.  And worldwide too as my story below shows – which I tell to illustrate how silly and dangerous the situation can become.
 
In the almond orchards of the USA they are demonstrating human frailty, and just how close we are coming towards serious food crises. 

In spring there is mile after mile of beautiful flowers on the trees but not a bee in sight. 

Amid all that nectar and pollen, not a bee.  Which is both tragic and frightening because to set fruit and produce nuts flowers have to be pollinated. 

This is a problem which had to be solved so the Americans solved it. 

They set up Rent–a-Bee; huge lorries bringing in hundreds of hives to be distributed throughout the orchards for the duration of the flowering period. 

Then off go the hives to pollinate another, later flowering, crop, often hundreds of kilometres away. 

Capital investment and scarce fuel consumption on a grand scale to solve a problem which, treated a little less ruthlessly,  nature would have solved by being there.  Quite simply the local, and cost free, bee population was starved to death by a vast almond monoculture which only provided food for a couple of weeks a year.

The almond orchards are an extreme case to illustrate a point, but in British fields populations of pollinating insects, including bees, are also in steep decline as a result of cereal monocultures and the removal of hedges and the like. 

In fact some bumble bee species are even becoming extinct for reasons similar to those found in the almond orchards. 

We are not there yet, but this tendency could become a catastrophe which will result in lower or no crop yields, especially of fruit and vegetables.  And this at a time when human populations everywhere are rising with all that means by way of increased need for food.

Very recently a study found that in Britain urban areas provide a better habitat for pollinating insects than farmland because of its more varied planting in parks and gardens, and, as my visual jolt in Grange Park shows, its uncultivated ground. 

That’s a worrying enough finding in its own terms, but from my experience in London insects are not doing well here either. 

Butterflies are as snowflakes in summer, moths no better, bumble bees much the same, and I have seen just the one honey-bee in 2011.  Only a class of smaller bees called solitary bees are doing reasonably well.  Even that is only qualified good news because a wide range of different types of pollinators is necessary to provide for the many types of flowers grown in Britain.

If current farming methods are to blame for the problem in the countryside, we Londoners also have a lot to answer for. 

We have paved our front gardens with concrete, we are devoted to double flowers which are useless to insects because their nectar and pollen producing parts have been replaced with petals, many of our old apple and pear trees have gone, lawns – which are about as useful to insects as a desert - are ‘de rigueur’, few winter-flowering shrubs are planted, and the surface of the soil in most gardens is far too well-manicured.  

Loosen up please, and remember just how important the creepy-crawlies we share our city with are to our and the country’s wellbeing.

Finally consider your street. 

There are all sorts of small areas where flowers or shrubs could be planted: around the trunks of street trees, in pots on the pavement, and in some streets (this will send the Council’s hair grey) along the road edges of pavements.

Which is not such a radical idea as you might think, because in N13 and N14 at least there are whole estates with pavement planting, all the more desirable because unusual streetscapes tend to slow drivers down. 

by Root Streetwise

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