We need… your weeds?
The definition of a weed is a plant in the wrong place. What if we moved them to the right place?
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| Red Dead-nettle (Lamium purpureum) volunteering on my allotment |
Over the past couple of months bumblebees are coming out of their long winter dormancy and when they do that, like most of us after a long sleep, they’re hungry. At this time of year, hedgerows are really good sites for bumblebees. Part of this is the hedge plants themselves, which often have a lot of early-opening flowers (Cherry-plum Prunus cerasifera and Blackthorn Prunus spinosa are particularly important), but the hedgerow-bottom flora - Ground-ivy (Glechoma hederacea), various Dead-nettles (Lamium spp.) are also great nectar sources for bees. Even better, hedgerows provide shelter from the wind, cover from the rain, and are often sun-traps (for the brief periods when it’s not raining!).
Around me, there’s a small patch of White Dead-nettle (Lamium album) where I always see the first Garden bumblebee (Bombus hortorum) of the year, and just last week I saw my first Brown-banded carder (Bombus humilis) of the year on Red Dead-nettle (Lamium purpureum).
That Brown-banded carder sighting was actually on my allotment - hopefully they’ll nest there again (it was definitely looking very interested in my compost heap!). That got me thinking. The excellent Colwall Orchard Group have recently laid the hedge that runs up one side of my plot and, walking this in preparation for a guided walk, I was struck by a couple of things. Firstly, how empty of flowers the ground around the new-laid hedge was - bare earth, a bit of Dog’s Mercury (Mercurialis perennis), and not much else. Secondly, how much Red Dead-nettle there was on the allotments themselves, and how much of this essential early forage resource was likely to be lost in the near future, dug up by allotmenteers raised from their own winter dormancy by glimpses of sunshine and the remorseless ticking over of the planting calendar.
A few days later I ran the guided walk for the orchard volunteers, seeking out bumblebees and solitary bees across the site and talking about the management. I broached the idea of a transfer arrangement. Dead-nettles (and other volunteer wildflowers such as Dandelions) weren’t wanted on the allotments, but the orchard - and hedges - could do with them, and they weren’t species that you could buy. Perhaps we could provide a staging area where allotmenteers could deposit their unwanted weeds, and the orchard volunteers could collect their new wildflowers for planting out?
The ever-excellent COG volunteers swung into action. We found a giant tub to act as a staging post for collected plants, emailed the allotment-holders, and by the end of the week there were plants in the bare ground by the hedges, with more piling up in the collection pot. Most were Red Dead-nettle, but there was Ground-ivy as well, some Dandelions, even one or two White Dead-nettle.
A month on, I checked them again today. Not only are they planted, well-watered, and growing, but that Brown-banded Carder was back - nectaring on a transplanted Red Dead-nettle.
Ideal.
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| Newly-transplanted volunteer wildflowers |
