v: Sage Advice
After spending a few years developing and improving the planting in my garden, I was certainly noticing an increase in the quantity and variety of visiting birds and insects, ichneumons and all. I couldn’t claim all the credit, however, as some of the influx was due to something that was happening beyond my plot…
Take a walk on the wild side Callum Halstead Last year, I discovered that my Edinburgh garden was home to an ichneumon (Ichneumonidae). While this does sound like a discovery I may have made while playing Pokémon GO™, my ichneumon was a real creature and one that belongs to a large but little-known family of parasitoid insects, common throughout the British Isles. Although I was unable to identify the exact species— there are just so many of them —I knew that my ichneumon was preying on other troublesome wee beasties hiding in the undergrowth, making it both a welcome visitor and exactly the sort of insect that I wanted to be encouraging into my garden. My discovery was one of a succession that I made in my small suburban back garden that spring, having decided to know more about its biodiversity and arming myself with a helpful mobile identification app. Any garden has the potential to provide a niche and refuge for local wildlife. Naturally, the wider the range of habitats you can create, the greater the diversity of life colonising your garden will likely be. But even if, like mine, your garden is very small, so long as what it contains is at least a bit more environmentally useful than a hot tub and some fake grass, you will surely be providing shelter and possibly a little sustenance for something out there.
My house at the time was bordered on three sides by scruffy patches of grass that the council would, in normal times, scalp on a semi-regular basis. The job would then be finished off, not with a nice sharp pair of edging shears, but with weedkiller— leaving a blitzed, yellowing halo around the perimeter of each patch. (Thankfully, the community organisation Pesticide Free Balerno have helped put an end to this destructive and unnecessary practice in the area). Then, during the pandemic— and particularly during the various periods of lockdown as limits were imposed on working hours and people’s ability to work in groups —councils across the country scaled back their grass cutting operations. The result was that nature returned to the suburban landscape. As these once shabby patches of ground were freed from their usual cycle of suppression, the plant communities they contained burst into life— and it was eye-opening just how species-rich and diverse they were, to see that so many different plants could hang on in a place like this, despite never normally being allowed to grow to their full height, or above even five centimetres for that matter. Firstly, there were the grasses themselves. Without going through with a fine-toothed comb, I was still able to count at least five species (and there were probably more that I missed). The standout plant among them was Yorkshire Fog Grass (Holcus lanatus). I’ve known of this plant for years— mostly as a weed —and had never before paused to appreciate its beauty. Yorkshire Fog is normally considered a bit coarse for the garden, something of an unwelcome intruder in an otherwise fine lawn. There is good reason for this, as it looks absolutely terrible 27
