Three very good books for wildlife gardeners

 In my previous blog-post I referred to "who knows what invertebrates". One person who did know what was Jennifer Owen. Her book "Wildlife of a garden: a thirty year study" is highly recommended. 

She had the knowledge and the skill do make a detailed study of all the animal life in her garden, in a suburb of Leicester. There are various detailed tables in the book, full of fascinating information. Do get hold of a copy and read them. Suffice it to say that she found numerous varieties of invertebrates: butterflies - 23; moths - 375 (over 100 of these recorded once only); hoverflies - 94; bees and wasps - 121; sawflies, psocids, bugs and lacewings - 305; beetles - 421; other insects - 625; other invertebrates - 138. These numbers astonished me when I first read them. She also tells us the annual fluctuations. The book is also beautiful to look at, with many fine colour photos on every page. The two final chapters, "The Garden Habitat" and "Gardens as Conservation" are richly rewarding to every would-be wildlife gardener. One most interesting point is that the garden studied is, like all cultivated gardens, in a constant state of development. Digging, pruning, harvesting, and the control of aggressive weeds means that there is a great variety of plants, and of sizes of plants at different stages of growth. "The creation of a state of permanent succession is thus a source of further enrichment of the fauna." The garden is a "neat, productive suburban garden". The key sentence for us humble gardeners with no pretensions to being ecologists is "Above all, and of paramount importance in a wildlife garden, no pesticides or other noxious chemicals are used, other than the occasional application of slug pellets". Personally I manage without the slug pellets, though I do not attempt much vegetable growing. 

A more recent book, published in 2019, is "The Garden Jungle or Gardening to Save the Planet" by Dave Goulson. Professor Goulson is Professor of Biological Sciences at the University of Sussex. 

Dave Goulson is not only a distinguished academic, he is also a witty, fluent writer whose style is easy to read and whose books are deservedly popular. He is also a hard-hitting advocate against all sorts of aspects of horticulture and of farming that are damaging our planet and the life that inhabits it. Do read the whole book. Here is one set of extracts.

 

"If, like me, you've ever succumbed to the temptation to buy these plants [sometimes using the Royal Horticultural Society's 'Perfect for Pollinators' logo] you may be concerned by the results of research performed in my lab...The results were depressing. Most of the plants contained a cocktail of pesticides...Only two out of twenty-nine plants that we tested contained no pesticides...Seventy percent of the plants contained neonicotinoids (insecticides that are notorious for their harmful effects on bees and long persistence in the environment)... Our results were published in the spring of 2017 and caused quite a stir... Luckily the Friends of the Earth campaign gained real traction and very soon most of the big-name chains had all agreed to withdraw neonics."

I thought this passage was worth quoting at length. But there are other chapters about meadows, ponds, moths, ants and so on. At the end of the book find "My sixteen favourite garden plants for pollinators" and "My top twelve berry plants for birds". 

The final book in this post is very special to me, because it was Chris Baines who got me started on wildlife gardening. In the 1980s he presented a series of television programmes on how to make a wildlife garden, which I previously knew nothing about. His "Companion to Wildlife Gardening" derives directly from those programmes.

I bought the book-of-the-series in 1985. But I was given this new edition as a present more recently. It came out in 2016. It is another easy read, packed with encouraging and useful advice. It is also full of beautiful photographs. In the cold and dark of a sleet-filled Edinburgh (right now) what better to relax with it in a comfy chair and dream of all the things you are going to do next to make your garden even more attractive to wildlife?