And neither does one cornflower make a wildflower meadow whatever the salespeople of wildflower seed mix may say. We saw a similar attempt by the local council to achieve pollinator paradise on the flood terraces in front of the old Avon Street car park – possibly the previous holder of the ugliest building ever allowed in Bath but an accolade now about to be seized – you couldn’t make this up – by the new police station. Anyway, someone thought it would be a good thing to cheer the riverside up with some pretty wildflowers and it did, for a single season, after which the original occupants reasserted their ancient rights and crowded out the pretty newcomers. I’ll come back to the original occupants
Let’s be clear, I love wildflowers and they do make excellent pollinator plants, but you can’t just chuck a few seeds on a patch of any old soil and expect them to thrive. Plants, like the rest of us, have their firm preferences about where they make a home for themselves, because they’ve all evolved to grow in their particular places. Any deviation from a plant’s usual preference regarding sunlight and shade, rich soil or poor, drought or frost, acid or alkaline soil and the right kind of neighbours, can prevent it from setting seed and reproducing itself because many plants and pollinators have extremely specific needs in the rumpy pumpy department. Some plants have found it so difficult that they pollinate themselves and to hell with the consequences (field botanists having breakdowns). Founding a pollinator paradise takes a lot of expertise and preparation not to mention a great deal of patience. As nature takes on the gardening work we move into a different and much slower timescale.
Ironically, now that Bath has developed the ambition to build a wildlife corridor across the city, following the river Avon, it’s become clear that earlier generations of councillors, architects and property developers have already demolished some important but ugly areas, like the old gasworks which – because it was so heavily polluted – was off limits until the means of remediating them was better understood. So after decades of standing derelict, during which all manner of wildlife and plants created a true nature reserve, the councillors and their mates demolished the lot to build highly profitable but unaffordable homes and then offered to build a wildlife corridor on a the only narrow strip of riverbank they hadn’t already destroyed and turn it into a promised land for wildlife, and dogs, and pedestrians and cyclists and sow it with a kind of modified birdseed so that we’d all be grateful for the chance to immerse ourselves in the countryside. All ten feet of it – until an otter makes a meal of a swimming dog when nature may well be declared dangerous and shut down.
The other thing we need to take into account is that in many circumstances the local weeds – in spite of being a bit, well, meh – are excellent pollinator plants already. Think of the common as muck buddleia tree and the creeping thistle. Making thriving communities of wildflowers needs more than a handful of imported debutants shivering in the frosty air. They need unusually high resilience and adaptability and a mountain of good luck before they make it into their second year. Cornflowers have been around in this country since the Iron Age and for most of that time they were a pestilential nuisance in arable fields. With the advent of farm industrialisation, almost overnight the means of controlling cornflowers – killing them actually – using herbicides, turned the renegades into rarities and the great wheel of fortune brought them into the sunlight again. Sadly I’d bet my pension that none of them will be around by next season, and we’ll be searching for the lovely white comfrey which has now been strimmed out just below our flat. There’s enough greater burdock growing now on the Avon Street part of the corridor to start brewing dandelion and burdock once again, like Bowlers did before the factory was demolished to build the car park. Fortunately you can still go and look at Bowler’s bottling machinery in the Museum of Work – which, to be fair, is a brilliant afternoon visit. I was lucky enough to see it all in situ when I helped photograph the old works after it closed – I was only the bag-man to be fair.
My preferred option would be for us all to fall back in love with what we’ve already got before we wallpaper the riverbank with William Morris imitations. I love the muscular weeds, the fistsized birdcages of the wild carrots in late summer, the bizarrely improbable wild lettuces down by the bus station, the willowherbs (how many kinds can you spot?) and the bafflingly similar dandelion lookalikes. Our neighbour spotted comma butterflies taking nectar from the buddleias down near Green Park today. How many bramble varieties can you spot? There are hundreds of them and goodness knows how many in Bath. Mallows, mulleins, gypsywort, soapwort and beggarticks are all there on the canal waiting for a hello and the waterlilies in the river would love a wave from you (clonking pun intended!) and with all these plants, the closer you look the more stunning they are; the simplest walk becomes a festival of beauty and what’s more, it’s constantly changing. Just noticing that the landscape is constantly evolving is exciting. The waterside flora is in constant flux throughout the year like a never-ending flower show. You’ve probably heard of the slow food movement and perhaps we should explore the wildlife corridor with a slow walking movement, (which will totally annoy the cyclists and runners but hey!). There are phone apps that will help you identify the plants you’ve photographed very accurately. Flora Incognita is very good as are Obsidentify and iNaturalist -all of them free – and if birds are your thing Merlin is very good and fun to use and bear in mind that many birds feed and rely on seeds to get through the winter.
As the much missed Whole Earth Catalogue said on its cover – “We can’t put it together – it is together” – and it will only stay together if we understand and treasure what we’ve already got!
