I spent a weekend recently on a farm in Kent that had friendly pigs to feed kitchen scraps to (no banana skins, who knew?!) and abundant nasturtiums to pick for salads. In the mornings I’d walk my son around the neighbouring woodland and watch, with every few steps I took, moths and little, brown butterflies flutter up from the verges next to my feet.
It was beautiful – and novel. My garden has been relatively quiet with regards to insects this year: plenty of slugs, but only a handful of bees and a couple of butterflies. Hoverflies have been regulars in recent years, but not this summer.
I’m not the only one to notice their absence. On Instagram and Facebook, where gardeners open up their plots to other interested parties, a gentle if persistent panic has been rising: where have all the bees gone? Why are there no butterflies? Most people involved with the land and growing things from it will be aware of the declining insect populations: the trend has been worryingly consistent due to the introduction of industrial agricultural practices and pesticide use, as well as habitat loss and climate change. But it doesn’t feel like we’ve ever had a year as visibly devoid of insects as this one.
The headlines are bleak. A spokesperson for Buglife, a charity dedicated to protecting insects, says that the past year has been a “perfect storm for insect declines” – a wet, warm winter and a wet, cool spring. Floods have wreaked havoc on ground-nesting insects. Bumblebees like to keep their nests at around 30°C; it simply hasn’t been warm enough. A recently published report from the Netherlands points out a worrying effect of low pollinator numbers: wildflowers aren’t being pollinated, and may end up vanishing from the landscape as a result. This is what will happen to many more plants, including those we depend on to eat, when our insect populations disappear.
It can all feel a bit hopeless, but it is worth checking out the author and biologist Dave Goulson’s work for context and advice – even hope. At the start of July he uploaded a video to YouTube pointing out some facts about insect life cycles that go some way to explaining the absence of bumblebees and butterflies (either their colony life cycle has finished by the end of June, or their pupae hadn’t hatched yet, respectively), while also estimating that we’ve lost 90-95 per cent of our insect populations over the past century.
I’ve found Goulson’s books – particularly The Garden Jungle and Silent Earth – incredibly helpful for shaping my understanding of what my garden can do and what non-human life it can benefit. If you find yourself enraged by slugs or aphids, Gould’s explanations of the ecosystem can bring a kind of inner peace. They also include advice for making your garden more pollinator-friendly, including being wary of garden-centre plants that may have been treated with insecticides, regardless of how “bee-friendly” the labels on the pots claim they are. If you’re still using pesticides, it really is time to stop: they can be incredibly harmful, and not just to the insects you’re trying to get rid of.
A lot of welcoming pollinators is, conveniently, a kind of gardening laziness. Let your lawn grow long and welcome in the buttercups and the clover; plant perennials rather than complicated annuals; let your herbs flower. Certain flowers are absolute pollinator crack: agastache, buddleja, nectaroscordum and alliums, borage, sage, stonecrop and hollyhocks, foxgloves, rosemary and bistort. It’s not too late in the year to scatter some nasturtium and calendula seed around the place. These pretty companion plants come in a vast range of flowers, are effortlessly easy to grow and will bloom for months yet.
If you’re pollinator-friendly at home but want to extend your reach beyond the garden, you can petition your council to consider its own actions. It was so heartening to see verges and public green spaces left to grow wild during No Mow May; it would be even better to see the mowers kept at bay for the rest of the summer. This year’s pollinator dearth has been a chilling premonition of a future we don’t dare imagine. We need to act now.
[See also: My head has been turned by the sunflower]
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