Daily details from the garden to bring you inspiration throughout the year
A petition has been doing the rounds these past few weeks. Created by Professor Dave Goulson (author of several books including A Sting in the Tale, The Garden Jungle and Silent Earth), it aims to put an end to the indiscriminate spraying of noxious chemical pesticides in urban areas. Most of the gutters and pavements we traverse from day to day have been nuked with these toxic compounds, but every now and again, you’ll find a glorious patch of life where the spray nozzle missed or where some opportunistic ruderal plant has managed to get a foothold between applications. Today, nestling between kerb edge and double-yellows, I found a small patch of redshank (Persicaria maculosa) in flower, a wild relative of several of our popular cultivated bistorts and knotweeds. The faint dark splodge on the leaves has earned it some wonderful common names, among my favourite ‘Devil’s arsewipe’, though there are many more recorded here. I don’t think anyone’s arguing for forests to spring up in every gutter (apart from anything else, that would cause a problem with flash flooding), but there are methods infinitely less injurious to biodiversity by which to manage these areas than by drenching them with weedkiller. In the meantime, every stubborn flowering plant demands a celebration.
A year of garden coaching
To find out more about my my 12 month online garden coaching programme, please visit the website, where you can read more details and add your name to the waiting list to be the first to hear when enrolment opens up again for the spring.
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Hello! I’m Andrew, gardener, blogger, podcaster, and owner of a too-loud laugh, and I’m so pleased you’ve found your way to Gardens, weeds & words. You can read a more in-depth profile of me on the About page, or by clicking the image above.
