I was putting together a new website to promote our advisory services and found some lovely close-up images of wildflowers to use. The beauty of our own everyday species amazes me every time I’m reminded of it. I’ve used photos of plantain, wild carrot, daisy and dandelion (as here), among others, and they all look wildly exotic. I sometimes wonder whether why we’ve lost the knack of appreciating the commonplace. I guess over time we’ve been seduced by the exotica peddled by the commercial world – and that’s not necessarily just a horticultural observation. Without wanting to sound pretentious, perhaps it’s also a symptom of a more godless world. I’m a dyed in the wool agnostic (if that’s not a contradiction in terms!) so perhaps I’m not qualified to know, but folk have lost their sense of wonder in the natural world. Not the astonishing David Attenborough gorgeous BBC natural world, but the stuff going on outside their back door. A hundred years ago it would have been appreciated as part of God’s creation, whereas now it’s just – well – there. Until it’s not, I suppose.

I’m beginning to wonder whether we shouldn’t recommend people only sow in autumn and plant their bare root trees before Christmas. Because of these dry springs we’ve been having, spring sowing has been problemmatic over the last few years, and in any case there are species in the mixes we sell – notably Yellow Rattle – which need to “stratify” (chill to germinate). The trees we planted here in February have all needed regular watering, and I know customers will have lost plants which aren’t as accessible.
At least the weather will be good for our groundwork – by the time I write the next newsletter we should have broken ground for our new house. “Exciting” doesn’t begin to decribe it; I feel like I’m standing on the high board. Eek!

Seed Packets
Our wildflower seed packet ventures have catapulted to an entirely new level with recent projects for Friends of the Earth and, this weekend, a massive give-away for the Co-op in Mirror Group Newspapers as part of their Plan Bee. This is very exciting stuff, not only for us but also for our suppliers. These are really significant projects, and just the sort of thing which Habitat Aid was created to help facilitate.

Courses
A quick reminder that we’re hosting two courses over the summer; meadow making for beginners, and wildlife ponds. You’ll be able to find details on our website.

Competition Winner
We had gazillions of folk stop by at our stand at Ecobuild and sign up for this newsletter, but the winner of a pair of Pentax Papilio binoculars is Sara from Ecofirst Consult. Sara, let me know where you’d like us to send them!
Our next show is Gardener’s World at the NEC, where we’ll have a bumblarium featuring a wildflower meadow area as well as bees.

New Videos
Thanks to those nice chaps at Cambridge Filmworks we have unleashed some more videos on an unsuspecting world, including “how to” guides to making wildflower areas and planting trees. Check out our channel on You Tube. Despite the fact I look like a cross between Nick Robinson and a Sontaran don’t feel shy about “liking” any of them! I also added a podcast about the difference between using turf, plugs and seed.

I gave some seed to a really nice bunch of folk at a Primary School in Essex last year. They were a HUGE success planted in a flowerbed, but unfortunately they didn’t let them reseed. My heart sank when I saw this recent entry and photo on their Facebook page:

“Today the children started to prepare the wildflower meadow.
They dug and raked the soil and found lots of interesting insects such as ladybirds ants and worms in the process!
I cant believe just how hard they worked as a team and we soon had the whole area cleared, well done to year 6. To their parents, sorry about their shoes, bit muddy ooppps.
We have two boxes of wildflower seeds so sow, which was another great find in the pound shop, and another packet of seeds are being delivered next week. These should be sown in the next couple of weeks as the weather warms up.
As you know we cannot post the photos of the children on facebook, so you will have to make do with pictures of the boxes of seeds!”

People like me obviously aren’t getting the message across. Sowing these seeds will no more give you a “wildflower meadow” than planting petunias will, I’m afraid. They’re not British species, they’re not meadow species, they won’t be British seeds and they probably won’t germinate anyway. I don’t know what the butterflies are on the packets, but they’re not British either, which is a bit of a clue. This kind of thing is a widespread issue; I went to Wisley last summer and popped into the shop there, only to find the RHS was selling lovely French wildflower seed.

Does it matter that any old wildflower mixes are being sold to consumers who think they are buying the right kit to establish a “wildflower meadow”? I think it does. I’m not qualified to make the ecological arguments about appropriateness, but I think it’s important that people get what they expect. There’s also the argument for supporting British suppliers. Quite apart from questions of provenance, I think most shoppers would be appalled to know where many of the seeds in packets sold in garden centres came from. We come across the same issues in other areas too; if I bought a mix of “native hedge plants” I think I might reasonably expect the plants to be British. The chances are, of course, that they’re not. It’s one of the things we make a song and dance about, and as a reseller we only sell British seed (and plants!) from British suppliers. There aren’t many about, but we try to provide geographic choice of origin within the UK as much as we can. We’re always on the hunt for new sources to add to our network of harvesters and growers, so if you know anyone local to you who produces seed please let us know.

Despite the alluring packaging, wildflower seed has had a bad press in recent times, which is one of the reasons why wildflower turf and plug plants are such attractive alternatives. I’ve often asked myself what the problems are that people have with seed, and I think they fall into three categories; preparation and management, appropriateness, and seed quality. How we can shorten the odds on making seed work for people and getting them to buy the “right” mixes?

Getting preparation and management right is just a question of persuading folk to do some research and have some patience. Carrying basic information on the website is one thing, but if I were tackling a reasonable sized project from scratch I would at least buy a couple of books, and probably get an expert in to give me a management plan. The cost of that sort of investment is tiny relative to the whole project. We’ve started to offer just that kind of service, particularly aimed at designers and landscape architects.

Making sure the seed mix is right is as much about making different options available as it is asking consumers the right questions about their site and what they want from it. A generic mix bought off the shelf may be completely inappropriate for your soil type, which means it will disappoint; it could also fail because the seed is old or has been badly stored. The good quality end of the market hasn’t done enough to let consumers know that their seed has demonstrably better germination rates than cheaper mixes, which consequently represent a false economy. We’ve started randomly testing our mixes through an external laboratory to give extra peace of mind, and offer a testing service as an option for larger orders too. It’s relatively inexpensive and I can’t imagine why more suppliers don’t do it.

There is a kind of trade body for wildflower seed – Flora Locale – who do a great job, but it’s specifically not an organization able to issue some kind of a kitemark. Perhaps Kew, who have started to get involved, might be interested in setting up some kind of a scheme and raising broader awareness of these issues. In the meantime we’ll carry on doing our best to try to, and perhaps most importantly raise appreciation of the aesthetic of what an ecologist would call “unimproved grassland”. At the very least it would be good to see more (British!) native plants in gardens in some form or other.

This blog also appeared as a guest blog for the The Grasslands Trust

A poisoned well

Some folk have even gone so far as to suggest that neonicotinoids are the single “smoking gun” behind bee losses*, and a huge amount of heat and light has been generated by the debate. Organizations like the Soil Association and invertebrate charity Buglife have repeatedly and unsuccessfully campaigned for them to be banned in the UK, but these chemicals are still the active ingredient in some commonly used household as well as agricultural pesticides.

This is really bad news as gardens are generally great places for insects to be. If you use pyrethroid insecticides in your garden you can kill the “pests” while mitigating the effects on some “good” insects like bees by spraying plants while not in flower, on still evenings. The problem with neonicotinoid insecticides is that even if you follow that advice IT WON’T HELP. The bees are affected by the contaminated pollen and nectar from the plants being sprayed, so whether you spray them directly or not they’re going to cop it, just more slowly.

While the government continues to drag its feet and some gardeners feel they have to use pesticides the least we can do is to make these chemicals harder for them to buy inadvertently. The Soil Association has provided a good list of household products which include neonicotinoids on its website. Bayer have a range of pesticides called Provado, for example, which includes a neonicotinoid called thiacloprid. How would any consumer wandering into an online or local gardening centre know the problems it will cause? Google Provado and you won’t find any mention of its unwelcome effects for several pages. The reviews on Amazon are all glowing (other than the one I’ve just added!).

Wherever you find neonicotinoid based pesticides like Provado please ask the retailer to stop selling them.

*which scientific opinion generally says not; they are one of several problems, but at least one that can be easily fixed.

I spent a knackering three days at Ecobuild last week. Ecobuild is a mega trade fair, now at the ExCel centre in London. It took me three hours just to walk round it last year as a punter, and this year as an exhibitor I was so busy I couldn’t even leave my stand to get a coffee. We were part of the Biodiversity Pavilion, where I was mentored by the lovely Blanche Cameron of Reset and neighbours with nice folk like Wildflower Turf, one of our suppliers. British Wildflower Plants, another supplier, grew the gorgeous native wildflowers for us. Thanks chaps.
There was a lot of chat about whether the show was still true to its core values, which arguably it isn’t, but the thing that struck me was that it still had room for enthusiasts and they weren’t marginalised. Sure, these events are all about shifting product, but this was a much more honest and catholic church than the major horticultural shows. You can’t have an arbiter of appropriate trade stands; it’s the paying punter who dictates what’s on display and, by and large, in the wake of the solar bubble it made for interesting viewing. It felt contemporary and buzzy too, which the horticultural shows certainly don’t; I met interesting people and saw some interesting things, and even got to give a couple of talks. I’ll be back next year please Blanche.

March Newsletter
Time tears on. Suddenly we’re at the end of the bare root season – we are taking our last orders for trees tomorrow (Friday).

Thanks to Sarah Raven we have been awash with enquiries about wildflower seed and soon – hopefully! – our meadow course, which is very exciting.

Less obviously we are also starting to sell decent numbers of preplanted coir rolls and mats for ponds, which I’m really pleased about. It’s always nice when something clicks and suddenly one of our best products starts flying off the shelves. If you don’t know about these chaps have a look at them on the website – they’re gorgeous!

I’m at Ecobuild next week on our stand and speaking too – do pop by if you’re at the show.

New Products
We’re now selling everything you need to make your own wildflower roof under – er – the same roof. We’re now offering plants and seeds, substrate, geotextiles and, through the Green Roof Consultancy, advice. We’re putting a wildflower roof on our new house, but on an altogether more modest scale I spent what seemed like hundreds of hours last month researching and building a beautiful orange shed with green roof. This pretty minor project confirmed in my own mind how fab groofs can be, but also how difficult it is knowing where to start and where to go to find the right kit.

Seed Testing
One of the reasons why people can find growing wildflowers from seed difficult is because the seed they have isn’t viable. It could be old or badly stored, for example. We’ve just become the first retailer in the UK to introduce random testing of our mixes to give peace of mind. We’re also offering commercial buyers the option of having their orders pretested as well.

Homes for Wildlife
As we await builders’ quotes for our new house I have been busy putting up houses for everyone else around our site. Most of the birdboxes seem occupied already, although we’re waiting for barn owls and, on a more modest scale, solitary bees.

Grasses
One of the odder features of the world’s current enthusiasm for wildflowers is that it doesn’t extend to grasses. Which is rather peculiar. Some of our prettiest native plants are grasses, and they stay pretty all summer long. They’re also very helpful from an ecological point of view. What’s not to like about them? I suppose folk are nervous about grasses taking over their wildflowers, but it’s easy to select suitably retiring species and to regulate them.

OK, so with the benefit of hindsight the “honey brown” wood preservative I bought for my new shed was more honey orange. Or just orange. It wasn’t the first mistake I made while building the new shed, and it certainly wasn’t the last. Anyway, it’s up and it seems to be staying up, at least for the time being.
I’ll be honest, it has taken me days of labour. I had to make the base – twice, because the first time it wasn’t level. I had to paint it orange and then assemble it. Despite the frustration and time spent all this has given me a blokey sort of thrill, but the real excitement was yet to come. My shed has a green roof – or, to be more accurate, at the moment it’s more grey with green bits in – and I made it. AND it’s not sitting on the shed floor. Yet.
I’ve wanted to make my own green roof ever since I started learning about them a couple of years ago. We’re putting one on our new house designed by Gary Grant, but I wanted to see how difficult it was to make a small scale DIY one and whether, if it was practical, whether we should start to sell the substrate and liners for them as well as seed and plug plants. The news is that it is – well – pretty straight forward.
I followed Gary’s partner Dusty Gedge’s ebook on how to build a domestic green roof, which was very clear. I only had to go off piste on the downpipes, which I’m still thinking about as a consequence of the shed’s slightly odd design. I’ve put lots of timber reinforcement inside the original structure, load bearing and bracing, which I didn’t initially think would be necessary but once I’d finished can now well understand. Even the ultralite substrate I used – and which we’re now selling – will get up to around 80kg per square metre when fully saturated.
Dusty and Gary champion using native wildflowers on roofs rather than the sedum matting people often use, which is of limited interest to me too. As much as anything else I want the diversity and colour green roofs can bring, which leads me straightto native plants. I planted it with wildflower plugs rather than seed as it’s a relatively small area. 10 plugs per square metre is what’s recommended, and although it looks a bit like a lunar landscape at the moment they will soon get going. The species mix is specifically for roofs, and it also means we can grow some plants which wouldn’t do on our heavy clay.
I’m now ludicrously proud of the whole thing and can’t wait for the roof to develop. We’ll be chronicling it as it does and posting more pictures. I’ve hung a bee box on the side of the shed, but I’m hoping we’ll get miner bees digging into the substrate. It should be brilliant for butterflies too; the bare areas will warm up in the summer, encouraging them to bask there. It will provide a quite different micro-habitat to everything else going on arround in the garden. Brilliant.
All I’ve got to do now is to repaint it in something pastel. Sigh.

The current enthusiasm for planting wildflowers is undeniably a good thing. I’m puzzled by one aspect of it, though. There’s much song and dance about extending the flowering season of any seed mix to make it more attractive to gardeners, so folk often include non-native species in their mixes. Fair play, if properly selected, and it’s a path that is now well worn. There’s also a lot of chat about the benefits of wildflowers for pollinators, which enjoy a cornucopia of easily accessible nectar and pollen.
Why, particularly in these contexts, are people ignoring our native grasses? I’m not talking about Perennial Rye Grass or a traditional lawn mix, but something altogether more interesting. Some of our grasses are really beautiful if allowed to flower, and carry on being beautiful for ages. Grasses like Quaking Grass (Briza media) and Crested Dogstail (Cynosurus cristatus) look stunning. They’re not aggressive and involve minimal maintenance. Not only that but grasses have significant benefits for biodiversity; butterfly and moth larvae use them as food plants, for example. Most of the seed mixes we sell include a significant element of grasses, for which I’m unapologetic.

We’re starting a programme of random germination testing of the seeds in our wildflower mixes. So far as I can make out we’ll be the only reseller in the UK doing this. We’re also offering a testing service for our commercial customers buying bespoke mixes. Native Seed Technology in Scotland are doing the scientific stuff for us at their lab in Scotia Seeds.
It’s odd no-one else does it – the service is reasonably priced and freely available. We’re keen to show our seed is top quality as well as coming from the UK; when people buy wildflower seed they should know it’s viable as well as British. Wouldn’t it be great if there was a kitemark assuring them it was? Seed needs to be fresh and properly harvested and stored. It should be easy to grow wildflowers, but poor quality of seed from dodgy suppliers seems to be a recurring problem people have when they try. We want to do everything we can to improve their chances of success and to promote our suppliers.
It might also help consumers to understand that provenance is an issue, which most people don’t get. Last year I was startled to find the RHS cheerfully selling wildflower seeds from France at Wisley, for example – and not just because they weren’t supporting British growers.
You might want a lovely “pictorial meadow” effect in your garden, including all sorts of colourful non-natives. You might not though – in which case you don’t want anything odd cropping up in the mix, particularly if it’s a bully. There are also subtle genetic variations in our own flora which are worth trying to hold on to; a Bulgarian cornflower will be different to one from Berkshire.
If you think you are buying British wildflowers to grow you should be buying British wildflowers which will grow.