Section 2 – Missing The Garden Opportunity
“Where Have All The Insects Gone?” – 2024’s Silent Spring
An incidental demonstration of both the potential of nature ability and its present disconnect from political machinery, occurred in Spring this year, when people in the UK noticed a marked absence of insects, especially bees.
Populations of many insects are notoriously volatile and affected by weather at any timescale but by May 2024 it was clear there were far fewer butterflies and Bumble Bees than usual in our own Norfolk garden. Then we visited the Knepp rewilding project in Sussex and found much the same thing. We met a fellow Knepp visitor who turned out to be a botanical surveyor from North Wales. She told us she’d enjoyed hearing the nearby Nightingales but had “expected more abundance”. I remember saying vague, and to my regret, slightly dismissive things about availability of blossom and insect broods but as we walked on, I had to admit to myself that she was right. I too was disappointed that the UK’s most famous re-wilding site seemed short on insects (and Swifts).
On May 10 we walked round this orchard at Knepp and saw just one Bumble Bee, despite all the apple blossom.
In Hampshire on 22 May Melanie Oxley of PeCAN (see section on Nature Events) wrote in the Petersfield Climate Action Network blog:
‘A few days ago I led a small group of children armed with insect nets, into a meadow area in the countryside. It was a very warm spring day. In 45 minutes we had caught just two insects, a seven-spot ladybird and a small white butterfly. Just one pollinator! There was the nature emergency staring us in the face. The children were disappointed and I was heartbroken’.
“Just one pollinator! There was the nature emergency staring us in the face”.
Back in Norfolk on 25 May as I assembled a demonstration ‘Bug Hotel’ for the ‘Queen’s Garden’ at the Fairy Fair (26 -7 May) at Bradmoor Woods, it was obvious that there were almost no flying insects about. In previous years on the same dates, we’d been worried about wild bees moving in before we’d have to dismantle and take it away, at the end of the Fair. We had no such problem in 2024, though the display of wildflowers in pots had few visiting insects to show visiting families.
Also on 25 May, over in Bantry, County Cork in Ireland, Michele Hallahan posted “alarming absence of insects is starkly noticeable this year. Birds are starving as a result”.
On June 9 Lyn Lambert tweeted from Blashford Lakes in Hampshire: “insects were worryingly almost missing”, and on June 14 near Newcastle Upon Tyne, John McCarthy wrote: “My walk this afternoon … Bright and warm, slight breeze. But something was missing! INSECTS. There are no bees and hardly any insects … Rachel Carson #SilentSpring”.
On June 22, day of the Restore Nature Now march, @SophieAmandaH tweeted about an absence of larger Hawk Moths in her light trap.
It was Insect Week organised by the Royal Entomological Society from 23-29th June. Some people reported lots of insects, many more, very few. It varied a lot from place to place and across species groups. From Northern Ireland, meadow-restorer Donna Rainey, @donnarainey4 welcomed an uptick of insects after “a real absence of invertebrates locally for a few weeks”.
On June 30 this post from Natasha Walter in London produced a string of over 400 replies from all over the UK.
One thing that struck me was the number who had put their faith in wildlife gardening and local rewilding, seen it produce results, and were now in need of hope, reassurance and guidance. “What to do about it seems unanswerable” said one, and another: “I already have an established wildlife garden, usually buzzing with bees and grasshoppers but nothing this year. I’ve also rewilded other areas. What can we do now?!”
The following day, Sussex University scientist and naturalist Dave Goulson posted his thoughts in the shape of a video on Youtube, Where have all the insects gone? (58k views).
“Social media in the last few days has been going absolutely berserk aboutinsects having disappeared about the lack of bees in particular in people’s gardens a few a few people disagreeing saying they’ve got plenty but most people saying they’re they’re really worried because they’re they’re not seeing any bees, [and] some say they used to a week or two ago they had bees and they all disappeared … and it seems to be widespread panic that we’re suffering from a very sharp kind of insect apocalypse, so I thought you might be interested in in my take …”
Goulson delivered a “don’t panic” message about the near-term absence of insects related to a “mild really wet winter followed by a really cold and wet spring” affecting both insects and the plants they rely on, followed up with “it’s worse than you think and we should be panicking” about the long-term trends (he guessed 90-95% of insects had been lost over 100 years) and drivers of decline like pesticides and climate change.
The difficulty with this, which long bedevilled climate change communications, is that humans are hardwired to respond to short-term threats, so there is no better time to respond to a gradual long-term change than when it’s acutely manifest in the short- term. Nature groups need to work out how to do this, or else the shifting-baseline effect will mean the opportune moments to raise the alarm are never seized.
As with climate attribution, where thanks to the work of Friedi Otto and colleagues we now have near real-term attribution of climate change to real weather events, the ‘biodiversity’ community needs to be able to relate things people notice and are concerned about, to probable causes, while the relevant events are ongoing and the critical context (see CAMPCAT) validates the message.
As it was, the highly motivated engagement with the UK’s ‘Silent Spring’, which verged on the cusp of despair, drew a slow and strangely tepid response from established conservation organisations.
I am pretty sure because they’d also noticed but didn’t know what to say. The UK’s mini ‘Silent Spring’ preceded and followed the June 22 Restore Nature Now march and yet it didn’t seem to feature at that event, although I may have missed it.
Insect week and the ‘missing insects’ were discussed on BBC Radio’s Today Programme on 24 June, and on July 19, Tony Juniper, Chairman of Natural England, wrote a personal Opinion piece in The Guardian Where are all the butterflies this summer? Their absence is telling us something important which reiterated Goulson’s emphasis on the longer term drivers.
Scientists and nature groups have some long-running structured surveys which try to measure the ups and downs of insects in a standardised way, to avoid relying on ‘anecdotal’ reports from Twitter or elsewhere.
In an August article also called Where Have All The Insects Gone?, Manuela Saragosa explored the world of insect-counting for the Financial Times.
She mentioned Britain’s Hoverfly Recording Scheme (Hoverflies are important and endangered pollinators and the UK Hoverflies Facebook Group has nearly 7,000 members) run since at least 1991, and the UK Butterfly Monitoring Scheme, which has been going since 1976 (and has a sister more popular app-based Big Garden Butterfly Count 18 July – 10 August, with 135,000 counts in 2023), along with the Rothamsted Insect Survey which as been using light and vacuum traps since 1964.
It’s data from such surveys which proves that the UK’s insects have massively declined. But like most science, such surveys are run and analysed slowly and carefully. On 29 July Butterfly Conservation, organisers of the Big Garden ‘Count did give a mid-survey update:
‘… very low numbers of butterflies have been spotted so far in their annual Big Butterfly Count. On average participants are seeing just over half the number of butterflies they were spotting this time last year. The unusually wet and windy spring, coupled with the colder than usual temperatures so far this summer could be contributing to the lack of butterflies. While there is a chance of a later emergence of the insects if there is a prolonged sunny spell, numbers are currently the lowest recorded in the 14-year history of Butterfly Conservation’s Big Butterfly Count’.
[In October I was at a nature reserve with a summer population of Nightjars, birds which feed on night-flying insects. I was told that scientists studying the birds had found they were badly underweight due to lack of food during the late May – early August breeding season and had probably not reared few if any any young.]
Opportunity Missed
But by August and September many nature oriented Twitter users were reporting slightly larger numbers of bees and butterflies. It was, now, in communications parlance, a ‘falling’ rather than a ‘rising’ issue. Engaging a potentially huge audience catalysed by those with the natural history ability, the time, the motivation and the stories – about the nature gardens and places they had lovingly created – was an opportunity missed.
2024’s Big Garden Butterfly Count results were published on 18 September. They were confirmed as the lowest ever in the Count’s 14 year history. Butterfly Conservation called it a Butterfly Emergency and Tony Juniper said it was a “warning” of what lay ahead but the findings were no longer so salient. It was autumn. The surge of concern driven by the unexpected stillness and silence of flower-filled gardens and hedgerows at the crest of spring and the height of summer was long gone.
People who are active custodians of nature in their gardens on a daily basis, are a growing cultural phenomenon. They use social media on a short communication cycle. There will be more opportunities for that to reach out to MPs, government, Councillors and Councils but not at the pace of formalised science, citizen-science or otherwise.
To embed this locally-rooted contemporary nature awareness in political consciousness, will require a more agile way to engage politicians while the public is actively engaged by real events. In strategy jargon it needs a tighter OODAloop. While the 2024 Silent Spring surge existed, it had nothing to connect it to politics, not even on July 4, General Election Day.
My Twitter ‘nature sentries’ are not typical of the general population: many of them have devoted large amounts of time, effort and money to maximising the suitability of their homes and gardens to support wildlife. Used to sharing examples of bees and other insects visiting their gardens, and in some cases able to identify a lot of insects and plants including wildflowers, they are very ‘tuned in’ to nature and likely to notice unusual absences or changes. But they are just the tip of a gardening culture which is increasingly pro-nature. They are potential ‘mavens’ and ‘connectors’ who could be used to engage friends, relatives and neighbours – if they engaged at the opportune moment.
Nature’s Changing Place In Gardening Culture
“Norwich is said by fame to be a City in a Wood, or a Wood in a City’ some calls it a Grove in a City, or a City in a Grove; and others say, it is a Garden in a City, or a City in a Garden.”
The Records of Norwich 1736 [thanks to Patrick Barkham for tracking down this quote when I couldn’t find it]
‘A nature-literate Britain must become a widely shared political objective. To achieve such political backing, nature ability and quality must become aspirational, for example by being attached to popular past-times like gardening, and being seen as a desirable feature in gardens and homes’.
Why Our Children Are Not Being Connected With Nature, 2014
Gardening is a major part of UK culture because of what we do, not because there are a lot of gardening books, university degrees in it, or gardening museums. We spend a lot of time and money on, and in our 16 million gardens. More of us are now including nature in our plans.
According to the UK’s HTA (Horticultural Trades Association), UK households collectively spent around £8 billion on retail garden products in 2023, much of it from about 1400 garden centres and retail nurseries. 91% believe gardens and green spaces benefit the environment and wildlife and 51% say they use their garden to feed, watch or encourage wildlife.
78% of British adults (about 43m people) have access to a private garden. 62% use them to grow plants, trees and flowers. 34% grow some herbs, fruit and vegetables. 84% of British adults believe gardens and green spaces benefit their state of mind, and 79% their physical health.
The average UK garden is 16m x 16m or 256m2, excluding window boxes and balconies, and the combined area of the UK’s domestic gardens is roughly the same as Somerset – with obvious potential to both increase living space for native flora and fauna, and increase nature ability, such as recognizing and understanding wild plants.
For instance the Fairyland Trust has been running ‘Fairy Gardens’ Workshops (children take away coir pots with plug plant of native wildflowers to plant at home) and campaigns about planting wildflowers in gardens, since the early 2000s.
Wildflower plug plants in ‘Fairy Gardens’ at a Fairy Fair, and wildflowers established from a ‘Fairy Garden’ planted into the ground in a garden (Greater Stitchwort, Wild Strawberry and Red Campion).
The Trust worked out that if all 16m gardens grew a square metre of Dandelions at the density found in one garden in Norfolk, that could support 1.7m extra colonies of Bumble Bees. While if all gardens included a four square metre patch of wildflowers, it would add an area equivalent to half of all the remaining natural flower rich meadows in the country.
Birds are already part of garden culture in a way that wildflowers are not just yet. The BTO (British Trust for Ornithology) says we spend £2-300m on wild bird seed every year. A 2012 study found a majority of households feed birds (64% across rural and urban areas in England, and 53% within five British study cities, fed garden birds. That is about 18m households feeding birds in their garden, considerably more people than even the most optimistic estimate of the membership of environment groups. Another investigation found that over 40 years, such feeding has affected the fortunes of national bird populations, with those using garden feeders going up, compared to those that don’t.
Horticulture Magazine’s website has reported that there ‘has been a conscious move towards organic and eco-friendly products, with 46% of gardeners using organic fertilisers instead of those filled with chemicals’, and 87% wanted to bring more wildlife to their gardens by feeding them or providing shelter. It also found 37% thought wildlife was the best part about owning a garden, ‘rating it ahead of growing their own plants or vegetables’. This is a real change from attitudes prevalent in the 1990s when research for early Plantlife campaigns found that even many people who were pro-nature baulked at the idea of wild-flowers in gardens, as ‘wild’ implied a loss of control.
The Wyevale report found that 46% of gardeners were consciously selecting organic fertilisers ‘rather than those which contain potentially harmful chemicals’. Slug pellets, previously their top selling slug product ‘were not even in the top 3, with an organic alternative now clinching the top spot’.
In 2016 1 in 5 reported they were changing their gardens by reducing the size of lawns in favour of other features. These trends suggest that it might not be that difficult to encourage people to make further changes to help nature, especially discrete features each with their own logic, such as:
- More ponds, small marshes & wet ditches for frogs, and swales to help water soakaway into the ground rather than overloading drains, and rain gardens
- Wet mud for Swallows and House Martins to make their nests with
- Swift towers and boxes in gardens and on homes
- Green roofs with low nutrient substrates to allow high diversity of wild plants
- Green Walls and rain gardens
- Bramble and nettle patches for butterflies and other insects
- Hedgehog holes through fences to create roaming on ‘Hedgehog Highways’
- Low nutrient unfertilised and chemical free flower beds and mixed length lawns for wildflower and insect diversity
- Leaving areas of fallen leaves and deadstems in place for spiders, overwintering insects and foraging birds and animals
There’s no shortage of examples of nature-improved gardens. Expertise goes back to Miriam Rothschild (whose wildflower garden became a SSSI), and study to Jennifer Owen’s work on a single garden from 1971 – 2001, and almost every environmental NGO has given ‘wildlife gardening’ advice but it’s generally remained socially invisible, a matter of personal choice, carried out in private.
Open Garden Days and community-level networks based around particular actions can make a difference to that but scaling up and sustaining such initiatives requires resources and continuity which have often been lacking.
To take just one of many hundreds of such projects, in 2013 the Warwickshire Wildlife Trust launched a Help For Hedgehogs campaign and in 2015 sought funding for a dedicated Hedgehog Officer, in post for a year, to set up a Hedgehog Improvement Area (HIA) around Elmdon Park in Solihull, involving gardens and open spaces. The HIA was announced in 2016 and the project engaged 26,000 adults and 12,500 school children but was ended in 2020
A Hedgehog Highway sign from Hedgehog Street run by the PTES and BHPS
To give such activities sustained social visibility requires some sort of permanent organisational scaffolding, which not only enables it with funding but signals that it has public backing and political legitimacy. In the 1950s-1970s farmers got grants to destroy nature (eg hedges, wet meadows), while being invited to consider leaving unwanted “corners’ for it. Later, agri-environment schemes were set up to incentivise nature-friendly farming, but only for farmers and rural landowners. It’s time this recognition extended to gardeners and urban land.
Crediting The Value Of Home And Garden Nature
A Lapwing nesting on a green roof in Switzerland
In a 2022 post I suggested giving local Council Tax payers a rebate in proportion to the nature features they supported by their homes and gardens, in the same way that farmers are now paid for ‘environmental public goods’ on agricultural land:
Reward Everyone Who Helps Nature … democratize the use of public money for nature (public goods) so it is not restricted by ‘eligibility rules’ based on agricultural holdings … but on outcomes. While the majority of finance would still flow to farmers as so much land in the UK is farmed, there in no natural justice in paying a farmer if s/he produces two Song Thrushes where there was one before, and not a householder with a garden, or other landowner. One way to deliver this would be through Council Tax rebates for nature.
In 2023 Ross Cameron from Sheffield University made a similar call to use council tax or water bill discounts to incentivise greener gardens.
Bumble Bee on an English Green Roof – from www.livingroofs.org
Such payments could also incentivize property owners in developed areas (and not just gardens) to reduce rain run off into overburdened sewers, by diverting it into domestic wetlands and allowing it to recharge groundwater and reduce flood risk.
Running such a scheme would require identification of qualifying features, as has already been done on a coarse scale for agri-environment schemes and is required by the biodiversity net gain planning requirements for new built developments (see 13 CIEEM principles).
These features could and should be related to characteristic local nature, and so could give each home and garden a ‘Nature Score’ and an ‘Ecological Vernacular’ rating, creating new social selling points and become something to be proud of, in the same way that an historic Blue Plaque or Listed Feature, or inclusion of a garden in the Register of Historic Gardens is seen to enhance the value of a property. They would need to be detailed, recognizing the fine scale of most gardens and the importance of ‘ecological details’, such as food plants for insects (see some moth foodplantsand a Jersey example), birds and animals, or nesting places such as Swift Bricks.
In the past two years Swift Brick advocate Hannah Burn-Taylor has made waves with her one woman Feather Speechcampaign, seeking to convince politicians to mandate Swift Bricks in new homes. It is an extraordinarily modest demand, and so far it’s not succeeded. It shows how little traction nature has in Westminster.
Swift Brick campaigners 20 September 2024
Concern for Swifts was set up to campaign on exactly the same problem of Swifts losing their nest sites, back in 1995, when Burn-Taylor was nine. 15 years before, in his seminal 1980 book The Common Ground, Richard Mabey wrote of Swifts, ‘how good it would be if we also found room for them in our modern buildings, as they do in Amsterdam, where re-roofing is illegal unless access for swifts is retained’. The UK is still a long way behind.
Garden Centres
Garden Centres and Supermarkets play a huge role in shaping the choice-architecture of UK gardening: they are the default go-to gardening hubs selling everything from seeds and live plants to fish, machinery, plastic grass and garden ‘care’ products, meaning mainly herbicides, fungicides, insecticides and artificial fertilisers. They are the shop front of a horticultural industry whose prevailing ethos has long been not nature but artifice, with plants as ornaments.
Garden centre plants
Camouflaged by their benign trappings of cafeterias and floral hanging baskets, conventional Garden Centres are the arms suppliers for a domestic war on nature. Many of the flowers they sell are so artificial that they are useless for nature because they contain no nectar or pollen, or it’s inaccessible, and they are not food plants for native wildlife.
In 2017 Dave Gouslon from Sussex University found some garden centre plants labelled ‘bee-friendly’ actually contained systemic insecticides (ie insecticides inside the plant). Most Garden Centres also sell ‘lawn improver’. These can contain a mix of herbicide to kill truly bee friendly flowers like Self-heal or Dandelions, moss killer, and to make grass look bright green, artificial fertiliser which may also be toxic to insects.
Well into the 2000s this ‘normal’ was so ingrained that it was common to see ‘weedkiller’ such as Glyphosate (aka Roundup) advertised in magazines of conservation organisations. UK readers will remember Therese Coffey, who served as Secretary of State for the Environment in the Conservative administration of Rishi Sunak, and is said to be a keen gardener, and who made a point of endorsing Glyphosate.
Therese Coffey talking to the NFU conference in 2023 – from The Independent
As the Wyevale Garden Centres report highlighted above hints at, there is change at the margins. Whereas in the early 2000s wildflower seeds and wildflower plug plants (small rooted plants that can be easily planted and give much better results than using seed) were only available from a couple of specialists, I found ten online in as many minutes, including established major suppliers, and many more companies sell seed. There are also dozens of companies offering ecological landscaping and habitat creation services.
Coffey and the conventional garden centres represent the market ‘laggards’. The ‘wildflower’ customers, along with installers of green roofs and other ‘new green features’, are market innovators followed by the early adopters. This is the cultural change dynamic tracked for any innovation by CDSM, Cultural Dynamics Strategy and marketing, in their Values Modes model. The Inner Directed Pioneers experiment and innovate, and if it looks socially successful, they are emulated by the esteem seeking Prospectors. Once a behaviour spreads enough to be seen as ‘normal’, it’s adopted by the change resistant security-driven Settlers, by ‘norming’, ie changing to stay in line with a new normal. (Social change dynamic #13 & book here).
This process can be speeded up if large and familiar actors signal that they are adopting the new ways – ripe territory for campaigns seeking a social tipping point. If the environmental NGOs were now to pressure Garden Centre chains not just to stock and promote nature friendly products like wildflower plug plants grown without pesticides but also stop selling garden chemicals, in line with demands of campaigns such as the Pesticides Collaboration (environment groups and unions) to ban pesticides in urban public places it could catalyse rapid behaviour change.
Of course there would initially be an internal furore in the horticultural industry with many arguing against change, and the most effective way to quickly convince them of the need to change would be the prospect of competition. Nature groups could set up their own garden centres, and urge their members to use them – groups like RSPB and National Trust have plenty of properties where this could be done, with or without acquiring additional adjacent land, and plenty of corporates and possibly Councils would be interested as potential partners.
All sections
1 – Introduction And Nature Ability
2 – Missing The Garden Opportunity
3 – Signalling and Marking Moments
4 – Nature Events in Popular Culture
5 – Why Conservation Should Embrace Natural History
6 – Organising Strategy and Ways And Means
7 – Afterword: Aren’t We Doing This Already?
Contact: chris@campaignstrategy.co.uk
