Wednesday 25 July 2012
Flower margins bring new hope for pollinators.
This week the Reading team have been
visiting the flower margins (which were sown in May) and removing the fast
growing, resource sapping weeds – back-breaking work - but worth every twitch
of pain. Removing the weeds will allow the low growing wildflowers to flourish,
and so produce the flowers favoured by our declining pollinators. We captured
this longhorn beetle Leptura maculate on
a cosmos daisy, together with a shot of one of our margins in Prospect Park,
Reading, showing the varierty of flowers therein (Nadine, in the background,
was making a photographic record of this margins progress).
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Fab beetle, and lovely flowers there - the margins really are coming into their own, aren't they? Well done for all the weeding - I've a few patches in my garden that could do with a tidy up, but it's a bit like taking my work home with me ;)
ReplyDeleteThe weeding was really back braking but if we look back what we have achieved it was really worth it. We will maybe do some blog tomorrow with before and after pictures of the weeding. The annual flower margins start to look nice now (but not as nice as yours ;-)), and we actually found quite a lot of perennial plants in the perennial meadows underneath the weeds.
ReplyDeleteWe're finding quite a contrast between sites, in what has come up and what hasn't, especially in the perennial beds - patchy seed distribution seems to have been a bit of an issue in places, for one reason or another, but we'll work on that for next year. As for the annuals - I guess I ought to come clean and admit to only posting our very best pics! They are, however, stunning...!
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