Amrit's blog...

July 2009

I've been spending quite a lot of time working in France this year and while down in the Jura region of the Franche Comte this June I couldn't help noticing the extraordinary rich flora of the hay meadows. Just a mass of wild alpine flowers and grasses that leaves a lot of our 'improved' meadows looking well, just a bit sad. One of the regions top products apart from the local Comte cheese is honey and there are so many different flavours that one begins to reflect on the dreadful state of our declining bee population here in the UK. Our bees have been declining rapidly since the 1990's and whilst there is a quite a lot of TV news reporting, I fear most people don't know quite how they can help so I've decided to devote my little space to bees this month.

jura meadow

Hay meadow in Jura

Apart from my travels, I received an email from the Soil Association prompting me to sign a petition to ban a particular pesticide whose use has a particularly devastating effect on foraging bees and which was co-incidentally introduced in the 90's. The Soil Association believe there is a strong link between its use here and our declining bees and also, worryingly, the UK is one of the few european countries which hasn't banned its use.

To add your voice to the campaign go to the Soil Association petition page.
To find our more background go to the Soil Association bees research page.

You may have watched the story about the Royal Lancaster Hotel in London installing bee hives on the roof to supply them with their own honey. We know our towns and cities are much richer in nectar-rich flowers than the surrounding countryside as our gardens are normally stocked full of them during the summer but it is worth listing a number of particularly good plants that you can grow to encourage foraging.

Honey bees and bumble bees have slightly different favourites when it comes to flower types because of the shorter length of the honey bees' tongue. I always leave a swathe of white clover when I cut my lawn ( I don't have an immaculately kept weed free lawn!) and doing so encourages all bees as the flower is particularly suited to short tongued bees

If you just sit for a short while on a dry day you'll notice how important white clover is in a garden.

Besides the clovers, pretty well all the Lamiaceae (Labiatae) are bee plants
Herbs such as Thyme, lemon or Bee balm, (Melissa officinalis), Bergamot (Monarda Didyma), Basil, Sage, Rosemary, Mint, Lavender, Oregano, Hyssop, the Nettles, the Ajugas, Catnip (Nepeta), the Lamiums and Lamiastrums, Russian sage (Perovskia), Stachys, Callicarpa are all great
A lot of our temperate fruit, vegetable and food plants are also good.
Onion, celery, the Beets, Mustard, Broccoli, Cucumber, Fennel, Cherries, Raspberries, Blackberries, Rowan berries (Sorbus) Apples, Pears, the Plum family (Prunus) and the Rose family(Roseacea).
For a fuller list go to this page on the RHS website.

Years ago my company installed the first residential turf roof project on an award winning development of houses in Brighton and came known as the 'Diggers' self build project

See the page on the Architype website.

That was way back in 1995-6 and since then many thousands of sq. metres of bio diverse green roofs have been implemented across the country.

The point is that historically, architects have designed buildings for people to the positive exclusion of wildlife whereas our vernacular building types encouraged bird and bat roosts as well as flora on or in roof spaces. This isn't always welcome with rodent infestation but details like overhanging eaves and stone roofs are superb habitats which have pretty well died out as architectural features.

Surely we should be trying to diversify our buildings where we can and where appropriate, outbuildings and flat roof garages can easily be converted to take planting with the new lightweight 'green roof' systems that are available today. If you've a roof on a building that could be diversified to help our struggling flora and fauna, including our bees, get in contact and I'll point you in the right direction!