Wildlife Trust visits Co-op Gardening Group
April’s meeting of the Central Co-op Gardening Group hosted an excellent talk by Jake Williams, Conservation Manager, of The Birmingham and Black Country Wildlife Trust (BBCWT).
Jake told us of BBCWT’s projects which focus on huge landscape scale conservation such as restoring heathland, removing barriers in rivers to allow invertebrate and fish to return and growing local flora to plant in woodlands. He told us that the natural landscape has been fragmented and that sites need to be reconnected to allow movement of wildlife. This work isn’t just in rural areas but can (and should) be in urban areas too.
Although at first this work may not seem to fit in with community and urban gardening, Jake explained how these smaller areas are vital to their work. For example, flora needs to ‘crawl’ along green corridors to enable it to continue growing- gardens, green roofs and even roadside verges are a great addition to these corridors and allow plants to move across the landscape.
As with most of our meetings, we looked at working with and not against nature. Jake gave us examples how this not only helps reconnect fragmented land but also how we, as gardeners, benefit from this approach. Allowing wildflowers to grow of course attracts pollinating insects but can also attract insects that eat those pests we are constantly battling against!
Another example was ‘slow the flow’ which Jake explained was a way of reducing flood damage. So much of our urban landscape has been tarmacked over/built upon that any water hitting the ground runs extremely quickly into storm drains and then to rivers- which can not cope with such a high influx of water and burst their banks. However, ponds, rain gardens, rainwater butts etc. can hold water and slow its flow. This leads to water trickling into rivers so they don’t overflow.
To close we were given a lovely way of looking at gardening with wildlife in mind was given to us as Jake told us a of a gardener who said they didn’t mind birds eating all their cherries- it was payment for the blackbirds’ beautiful songs!
For more information on The Birmingham and Black Country Wildlife Trust see: https://www.bbcwildlife.org.uk/
The Central Co op Gardening Group meet the 4th Wednesday of each month at Cotteridge Church Pershore Road South, B30 3EJ at 7.30- 9pm. Meetings are £3 and you must be a member of Central Co op to attend.