I didn’t have a ball to throw over my shoulder to select my random square metre for last month’s survey but since then a fox has deposited this cricket practice ball in our back garden. I must return it to Rogue, the springer spaniel two doors along from us. The flowerheads of ribwort plantain and catsear fell just outside my square metre.
It’s the last day to take part in Plantlife’s ‘Every Flower Counts’ follow-up survey, in my case to see how our front lawn has progressed since its last mowing at the end of ‘No-mow May’.
In my randomly chosen square metre there are just 9 white clover flowerheads, most of them already partially going to seed, so my nectar score is a little disappointing:
But it is a lot better than my ‘No Mow May’ score because a handful white clover flowerheads can produce more nectar than the 75 germander speedwell flowers that I counted last month so the lawn is producing 10 milligrams of nectar per square metre, an improvement on the 1.7 at the end of May, and the whole lawn can potentially support 13 bees, up from 2 in the last survey.
With ‘No Mow May’ drawing to a close, it’s time to count the flowers that have sprung up on our front lawn. I throw a small chunk of wood over my shoulder to randomly select my square metre sample.
Results: 8 daisies, 2 common mouse-ear and 75 germander speedwell flowers.
Plantlife calculate that, taking this as an average for my 14.4 square metre lawn, the flowers are producing 1.7 milligrams of nectar per square metre, enough to support 2 bees across the entire lawn.
Let’s hope that I can improve on that with next year’s ‘Every Flower Counts’ survey.
The daisies are hardly bothering to open up on such a cool dull morning but at least I don’t get a spot of rain until the end of my brief sketching session as Barbara and her brother John make their three-circuit – one mile – exercise walk around the park. A man, accompanied by his young son on a bike, has set himself the target of four miles: twelve times around Illingworth Park.
It rains properly in the afternoon, which our garden really needs after such a dry April. Hopefully we’ll now get a bit of warmth and things will burst into life.
Every Flower Counts . . .
Leave your lawn unmown for the month of May and let the flowers bloom on your lawn. Then, at the end of the month, find out how many bees your lawn can feed with our Every Flower Counts Survey.
Plantlife Every Flower Counts survey
Well that’s all the persuasion that I need, it’s got to be worth a try, although we might need a mown path across our back lawn to get to the veg beds and to hang out the washing.
I am of course a bit biased and I even think of garden weeds as wild flowers, however troublesome, so I’m not the one to judge when it comes to a dilemma between tidy management and wild & free.
Spray or Strim?
“What do you think of the change from strimming to using herbicides?” I ask a couple from the allotments alongside the park.
The man with the barrow isn’t convinced: “They’ve gone along the fence, but we’ve got bindweed down there, you think that was what needed doing.”
“We used to grow a blackberry along the fence,” adds the woman, “so people could pick the berries on the other side, but they said that we’d be liable if anyone was ill, so they’ve taken it out.”
Foothpath to the park and allotment sfence.
At first when I saw rings of dead grass around posts and litter bins, I blamed the local dogs, but it’s the result of the council making the change to spraying as an alternative to the expensive business of strimming around obstacles – which can be damaging to young trees.
I know how long it takes me to edge the lawn and to try and stop the chicory in our little meadow area taking over the paths and veg beds in the immediate vicinty, so I can imagine the scale of the problem of keeping things tidy over the whole Metropolitan District.
Plantlife is celebrating the way Wakefield and eight other councils are leading the way in better managing their road verges for wildlife, so I’m sure that the strimming versus herbicides dilemma has been carefully thought out, but however environmentally friendly the herbicide is that they’re using, there’s a lot of it being applied and inevitably there must be some impact on biodiversity.
