Category Archives: Gardens

For she’s a jolly good Honorary Fellow (reduce, reuse, recycle part 4)

The signals of spring are appearing across Northamptonshire. Despite the current cold and wet weather, a couple of recent ventures out into the wilds revealed Prunus sp. and lesser celandine (Ranunculus ficaria) in flower, as well as lots of frisky birds doing their thing. But for me there is no surer sign of approaching spring than the start of a new series of Gardeners’ World on BBC 2. It’s a programme I’ve followed for many years and (as well as useful gardening information) it provides a barometer for how a significant sub-class of the Great British Public (amateur gardeners) thinks about the environment and its biodiversity. It’s also an influential programme that changes behaviours, as I argue in the following piece of writing from last year, when the University of Northampton gave Gardeners’ World presenter and gardening writer Carol Klein an Honorary Fellowship.

Universities award honorary degrees and fellowships to famous people and “celebrities” for a variety of reasons, not all of them laudable and some ethically dubious. But we proposed Carol Klein because of the effect her work has had on how gardeners garden. I had the pleasure of introducing Carol at the graduation ceremony, in front of an audience of a couple of thousand graduands and their families. What follows is the text of that presentation; as I’ve mentioned previously, why waste good words when they can be reduced, reused and recycled?

Following an introduction by the Vice Chancellor, Ollerton steps up to lectern dressed like an extra from a Harry Potter movie, be-gowned and be-capped. He starts to speak…..

Chancellor, insofar as the Council and Senate of the University have seen fit to establish Honorary Fellowships to confer on eminent individuals, I today present to the Chairman one on whom the Council and Senate have determined to confer such an award.

PAUSE – Carol was guided by a Marshall to stand at the front of the stage. Once she was in place and the Marshall had returned to his seat, Ollerton continued….

I am delighted to introduce to you Mrs Carol Klein.

SHORT PAUSE – just for effect…..

There can be no doubt that the British are a nation of gardeners. Whether it’s just developing a window box, a small back garden, or, for the more adventurous, an allotment, horticulture is a hobby that excites both young and old. This is reflected in some astonishing statistics; the Horticultural Trade Association estimated that in 2010 the Garden Retail Market was worth £4.6 billion to the economy, whilst public gardens such as Kew and the Eden Project both host over one million visitors a year.

Much of this public passion for gardening is both reflected in, and fuelled by, the coverage it is given in newspapers, magazines, radio and (most especially) television. And since its first broadcast in 1968, the BBC’s Gardeners’ World has been the pre-eminent gardening programme in Britain and Carol Klein is one of its most popular presenters.

Carol was born in Walkden in Salford, Lancashire and has never lost her accent! Following her school education she trained as an art teacher and taught in schools in London before moving to Devon. There Carol taught at North Devon College whilst developing her own interest in plants and gardening.

This grew, quite literally, into her own plant nursery, Glebe Cottage Plants, which she set up with her husband Neil.

What was once a hobby had become a career. The nursery exhibited at all the major Royal Horticultural Society shows, winning gold medals at Hampton Court, Westminster, Malvern and of course Chelsea. In 1989 a Gardeners’ World feature on Glebe Cottage Plants led to invitations to work as a guest presenter for the BBC and Channel 4.

In 1998 Carol wrote and presented a six-part series Wild About the Garden in which she promoted the ideals of finding space for native flora and fauna in our gardens, something which is very close to the hearts of those of us who teach and carry out research in the Department of Environmental and Geographical Sciences.

Carol has starred in other TV programmes, including two series of Real Gardens, as well as offering her expertise to television programmes such as Garden Doctors, Time Team and even Water Colour Challenge. Carol’s most recent series, Life in a Cottage Garden, was filmed at her own Glebe Cottage. In December the High Summer episode from the series won the prestigious Garden Programme TV Broadcast of the Year award at the 2011 Garden Media Guild TV & Radio Broadcast Awards.

Life in a Cottage Garden was also made into a book of the same name because as well as her television presenting work, Carol is a prolific author. Carol has written a number of bestselling books including Grow Your Own Veg, with over 200,000 copies sold, and contributes articles for periodicals including Garden News, the Guardian, the Daily Telegraph and, of course, Gardeners’ World magazine.

And it is Carol’s weekly appearances as one of the presenters of Gardeners’ World for which she is most famous. Every Friday night between March and October over 2 million of us watch the programme as it is broadcast, with many more catching up with it later on the BBC iPlayer.

Gardeners, whether experienced or novice, cannot help but be roused by Carol’s passionate and energetic on-screen persona. However, this is not an act for the benefit of the audience, it’s how she is! I learned that a couple of years ago when I had the pleasure of working with Carol for a Gardeners’ World special edition called The Science of Gardening. During a long day of filming Carol never lost her curiosity and enthusiasm for the subjects we were discussing.

The programme was filmed at Glebe Cottage. In an article for the Guardian newspaper a few years ago, Carol wrote: “It has taken a long time to get to know my garden – 30 and a bit years – and I’m still finding out about it……..at every twist and turn it unfolds new revelations. A garden is a place to enjoy and indulge in, something you can love, somewhere you can nurture. It stimulates all the senses, and its very unpredictability gives it a vitality not often encountered in our contrived and controlled world.”

This, to me, sums up what makes Carol such a special gardening presenter and communicator – even familiar things excite her, whilst the unfamiliar is approached with a keenness to understand and to communicate it to the widest possible audience. In that sense, Carol’s original training as a teacher has never been lost.

Chancellor, distinguished guests, graduands….

ANOTHER SHORT PAUSE – just for effect….

…..today we are honouring Carol Klein not just because of her work as a public gardening figure but also for her contribution to persuading gardeners to think about and to limit the negative impact of their hobby.

All human activity, including gardening, has an impact on the environment that sustains us. It is Carol Klein’s championing of gardening in an organic, wildlife friendly way which may be her most lasting contribution. Tellingly, a recent Public Attitude Survey by Defra showed that almost 70% of respondents “actively encouraged wildlife in their gardens, for example through feeding areas or specific planting”. It is people such as Carol who have helped to shape public opinion in such a positive way.

As Carol put it in a newspaper article a few years ago, gardening with the environment in mind: “relies on building up communities of fungi, flora and fauna in the soil, and any interruption or chemical intervention sets it back. It’s not a question of being hardcore; it’s about having faith in nature and natural processes.” That faith is more than just “tree hugging” or “Saving the Planet”: the UK National Ecosystem Assessment in 2011 estimated that our natural environment contributes over £30 billion to our economy every year through the provision of ecosystem services such as fresh water, carbon storage, pest control and pollination. Gardeners have an important part to play in ensuring that we do not compromise those ecosystem services and Carol Klein has played a significant role in promoting those values.

Chairman, In accordance with the decision of the Council and Senate, I am privileged to present to you Carol Klein that you may confer an Honorary Fellowship.

Applause from the audience as a very embarrassed looking Carol Klein steps forward to give an engaging and humorous speech. Ollerton goes back to his seat on the stage, relieved his part is over

Waxwing winter

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January has been a month of biodiversity firsts for me.

First New Year celebrated with Karin in our new home, quietly with friends and kids, plus the cats and chickens that are part of our personal biodiversity. I’m going to write a lot more about this notion of “personal biodiversity” later this year, but in short, we’re all of us directly connected to biodiversity physically and in the space we inhabit at home and work. Think about that next time you’re devouring a pot of Activia or watering the spider plant in your office.

The first paper (hopefully of several) from Sam Tarrant’s PhD thesis has finally been published in the journal Restoration Ecology online ahead of the print version. In this paper Sam compares the pollinator communities and available floral resources on restored landfill sites to those on nearby nature reserves. The landfill sites are just as good for pollinators as the reserves, a surprising finding that parallel’s Lutfor Rahman’s results in relation to bird communities on restored landfill sites . All of which has implications for how landfill sites might be managed after they have fulfilled their primary function. Opportunities for biodiversity conservation sometimes come from unexpected sources.

Another first was discovering some of our research cited in the recent United Nations Convention on Biological Diversity’s progress report on the International Initiative for the Conservation and Sustainable Use of Pollinators. We were very pleased to see our work getting that kind of exposure on the international stage, regardless of what one may think of the Convention on Biological Diversity. The CBD is not without its critics as I recounted the first time I blogged, live from a CBD-associated scientific conference in Germany. This was later published in Bulletin of the British Ecological Society as “Blogging from Bonn“.

And I achieved a first by finally (after several years of trying) seeing a flock of waxwings (Bombycilla garrulus) a bird that, whilst not uncommon, is one which you really have to be in the right place at the right time to observe. They are highly mobile and never in one spot for very long. A friend of mine who is a very keen birder and has been trying for 25 years to see them and only achieved that birding tick this year. One of our graduates, who blogs by the pseudonym of the Hooded Birder, has some great images of waxwings – take a look and you’ll see just what a beautiful bird this is, very exotic looking for a winter visitor to Britain.

At this time of year waxwings fly down from Scandinavia like avian vikings, marauding through the countryside devouring fruit from trees and shrubs such as rowan, hawthorn, apple, rose and any many others. It’s quite a sight to see a bird the size of a starling eating large rose hips in a single swallow. They are very approachable birds and we got quite close to them. Some years are marked by massive irruptions of these birds and are termed “waxwing winters”. The latest data from the British Trust for Ornithology suggest that this is one such year and the Northants Birds site has regular reports of their appearance around the county.

Although I’m not by any means a serious birder, bird watching falls into the category of cultural/spiritual ecosystem services that is clearly supported by biodiversity. Birding organisations are popular: the Royal Society for the Protection of Birds has over one million members and financial resources of almost £100 million, for example.

This weekend the RSPB will be running its regular Big Garden Birdwatch, a great example of citizen science in support of biodiversity monitoring. I’ll do my hour of watching on Sunday morning; the current cold winter weather has brought birds into the garden that are normally found out in the wider countryside. No waxwings yet but I live in hope.

Thank the insects for Christmas (reduce, reuse, recycle part 2)

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The university term has drawn to a close in a flurry of activity as we complete our pre-Christmas teaching and assessments, and the Department of Environmental and Geographical Sciences conducted a successful five-yearly Periodic Subject Review of its degree programmes. I’m conscious that some of the things I wanted to write about since my last blog entry have slipped past without action, including a week that was bookended by visits with students to iconic localities on the biodiversity and conservation map. These were a Monday trip to the Darwin Centre of the Natural History Museum in London with students on my final year Biodiversity and Conservation module; followed by a Friday visit to Wicken Fen, arranged by my colleague Janet Jackson for second year students on her Habitat Ecology and Management module. Both great days away from the lecture room, if for different reasons.

At the Natural History Museum we looked at the insect research collections, behind the scenes where the public does not normally venture. Wicken Fen, on the other hand, is open to all and we met birders and walkers as we toured the site. I kept a tally of the number of bird species we identified and the final count was 29 (30 if you include the chickens being kept in a back garden close to the visitor centre). It would have been impossible to make a meaningful species count at the Musuem as we were overwhelmed by the statistics presented by the curators: 85,000 butterfly and moth specimens in the Lepidoptera section, 3 to 4 million specimens of true flies (Diptera). On it went; wonderful diversity and an incredible scientific resource.

Which brings me neatly to the main topic of this entry: the importance of insects at Christmas! I’ve mentioned before that one of the intentions of this blog was to reuse some of the writing I’ve done over the years in various fora, sometimes updating and re-casting it ro reflect recent activities or events (hence the “reduce, reuse, recycle” epithet). The publication this month of the final report of the Government-sponsored workshop Insect Pollinators: Linking Research and Policy in which I was involved has prompted me to modify and re-post an entry that first appeared on the University of Northampton’s blog at this time last year.

The social and economic news is not great, global poverty is on the increase even in the richest countries and the range of human-influenced assaults on the natural environment seems to be escalating on a weekly basis. But at least it’s Christmas! A time to relax and enjoy ourselves, to share time with family and friends, and to unwind during the cold and gloom of winter. Whatever your faith, or lack of it, Christmas should be about taking a break and reflecting on the year that has passed. We’re helped in that respect by the ceremonial seasonal trimmings: the Christmas tree, strings of flashing lights, baubles and tinsel. So while you’re kissing a loved one under the mistletoe, admiring that glossy holly wreath, or tucking into your Christmas dinner, spare a thought for the insects.

“What in Saint Nicholas’s name” you are asking ”have insects got to do with Christmas?!” Well, like the turkey, we’d be stuffed without them: they play an essential part in providing us with the things we associate with the Christmas. If we had no flies, wasps, bees and other bugs acting as pollinators there’d be no berries on your mistletoe or your holly. Kissing and admiring would be a less festive affair and that’s just for starters. These insects also pollinate many of the vegetables, herbs and spices on your plate, as well as some of the forage that went to fatten your roast bird or tender joint of meat. Not to forget much of what went into the nut roast that’s feeding the vegetarian relatives.

The economic value of insect pollination in the UK was estimated by the recent National Ecosystem Assessment to be about £430 million per year . In fact this is a huge under valuation because the labour costs alone of paying people to hand pollinate those crops would run into billions of pounds. This sounds far fetched but it’s already happening to fruit crops in parts of China. The answer is to encourage wild insects, not artificially managed honey bees, because collectively the former are far more abundant, and often more effective, as pollinators. Their diversity is an insurance against losing any one species in the future.

The NEA’s valuation is also too low because it only deals with edible crops. Mistletoe and holly are both dioecious species, which is to say that individual plants are either male or female, as is the case with most animals. This means that the plants cannot self pollinate and insects are absolutely vital to their reproduction and to the production of the decorative berries we so value (a holly wreath without berries is just a big spiky doughnut, in my opinion). Whilst researching the economic value of the annual mistletoe and holly crops for this blog posting I’ve been having a conversation with Jonathan Briggs over at Mistletoe Matters and he tells me that “the mistletoe trade in Britain is entirely unregulated and not documented in any tangible way” and the same is true of holly. We therefore have no idea what the economic value actually is. But some back-of-the-red-and-gold-Christmas-lunch-napkin calculations can at least give us an insight. Auction reports this year show that on average the best quality berried holly was selling for £2.50 per kg whilst equivalent quality holly without berries cost only 75p per kg. In other words, pollination by insects increases the value of that crop by over 300%. Similarly the high quality mistletoe averaged 80p per kg, whilst the second grade stuff was only 20p per kg. And the best holly wreaths (presumably with berries!) were averaging £3.40 each. These are wholesale prices, of course; retail cost to the customer is much greater. A decent holly wreath will set you back between £15 and £30 whilst online shopping for mistletoe is in the £5 to £15 bracket. The national census of 2011 shows us that there are 23.4 million households in England and Wales, plus there are 2.36 million in Scotland and 0.70 million in Northern Ireland. Let’s round it down and say there’s 26 million households in the whole of the UK. Let’s also be very conservative and estimate that only 5% of those households bought one holly wreath and some mistletoe at a total cost of £20. Multiply that by the small proportion of households buying these festive crops and you arrive at a figure of about £26.5 million! And that doesn’t include non-household use in shops, offices and businesses. So there you have it: an industry worth a few 10s of millions (at least) all being ultimately supported by insects.

With pollination, timing is everything, and Jonathan also made the point that spring flowering mistletoe and holly can be important early nectar sources for insects. Therefore despite the poor summer weather, this year has been a good one for mistletoe berries because the pollination happened before the heavy rains began. Despite being quite common plants, rather little research has been done on either holly or mistletoe pollination in the UK and it would make for an interesting student project.

The Landscape and Biodiversity Research Group here at the university is playing its part by working to understand the ecology of plants and pollinators, and how to best conserve them. In this blog I’ve referred a few times to some ongoing projects researching how the wider landscape is supporting pollinators in habitats such as country house gardens (Hilary Erenler’s PhD work which she’s currently writing up) and urban centres (ongoing PhD work by Muzafar Hussain). There’s also the recently completed work by Sam Tarrant and Lutfor Rahman on pollinator (and other) biodiversity on restored landfill sites. Plus work that’s only just started by Kat Harrold on how whole landscapes support pollinators in the Nene Valley Nature Improvement Area. This is all part of a broader programme of research into the conservation of biodiversity in our region and beyond, including a contribution to the Shared Enterprise Empowering Delivery (SEED) sustainability project. Biodiversity matters and its importance to our society is being increasingly recognised by government, business and the public.

So if you make one New Year’s resolution on the 31st December, let it be that you will put away your bug sprays for 2013 and learn to love the insects (even wasps!) who give us so much and help to support our economy in a very real way. It costs us nothing; all we need to give them is well managed, diverse, unpolluted habitats in which to live.

Have a great Christmas everyone!

When is a yucca not a Yucca?

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Notice the difference? The italicisation and capital initial of the second Yucca. That’s how the genus name of a species should be formally presented in a scientific paper, or in a newspaper article, or wherever. Like Homo – the genus in which our own species (Homo sapiens) sits.

It might seem like a narrow and pedantic point, but it’s important. Accurate and descriptive naming of species, genera, families and other taxonomic ranks is crucial to those of us who study biodiversity and is at the core of our science: without names for species, for example, we cannot make informed conservation judgements or comparisons between habitats in relation to which species are present or absent. Names matter.

But it’s not just the names themselves, it’s also how they are presented which is important: when I see the words yucca and Yucca in print, they signify two different things to me. The word “yucca” is an informal name for a group of plants that is widely applied by gardeners and has no formal scientific status. Yucca on the other hand refers to a very specific group of plants and has a clear meaning to a biologist.

To give you an example of this I’ll first have to introduce you to the Northamptonshire Natural History Society (NNHS) which was founded in 1876 and must be one of the oldest surviving local natural history societies in the country. Some important 19th Century scientists were honorary members, including Charles Darwin, Thomas Huxley and Joseph Hooker. This perhaps reflects Northampton’s proximity to London though there may be other factors: one could compile quite a long list of scientists with links to Northamptonshire.

The Journal of the Northamptonshire Natural History Society was first published in 1880 and continues to the present day. Which brings us back to yuccas. Last year a short article by a NNHS member summarised the local weather conditions in Northampton for each month of 2010 (J. Northants Nat. Hist. Soc. vol. 45, no. 1). December of that year was a particularly cold month and the author notes that “the species of Yucca trees planted in Northampton, which although thriving in recent years, were killed by the cold period”.

Strictly speaking Yucca refers to plants of a particular group which are endemic (i.e. only naturally occurring) to the New World. The genus Yucca is a member of the asparagus family (Asparagaceae), subfamily Agavoideae. The plants which suffered so much in the cold winter of 2010 are in fact New Zealand Cabbage Trees (Cordyline australis) which, as the name suggests, are endemic to New Zealand. The genus Cordyline is also a member of the family Asparagaceae but belongs to the subfamily Lomandroideae and is therefore only distantly related to Yucca.

The leaves and stems of Cordyline and Yucca do look very similar, hence gardeners tend to use yucca as an informal name for both. However when these plants flower it is clear that they are very different. Flowers of the various species of Yucca are typically quite large and are adapted to pollination by a very specialised group of moths which lay their eggs within the flowers. The reward for these moth pollinators is a brood site for their caterpillars, which feed on a proportion of the developing seeds of the Yucca plant. In contrast the flowers of Cordyline australis are small and produced in very large numbers in dense inflorescences. They are also highly fragrant, to which anyone who has grown one of these plants to maturity in their garden can testify. The fragrance attracts a range of insects which feed on the nectar produced by the flowers and so pollinate them in the process. It is these differences in flower structure, more than characters of stems and leaves, which taxonomists use to classify such plants.

Until recently large New Zealand Cabbage Trees were a feature of many front gardens across Northampton. Some particularly fine examples were to be found along the Kingsthorpe Road between Osborne Road and Balmoral Road. I suspect that the largest Northampton specimens were planted in the 1970s, perhaps because people wished to recreate something of the exotic feel of package holidays to Spain and Portugal. Following the freezing weather of December 2010, the growing tips of most of Northampton’s New Zealand Cabbage Trees were killed and the top growth gradually withered and died. I was sad to see this happen to my own plant, a medium-sized specimen that I had rescued from a skip at the University several years ago, and which had become well established in my garden. However later in 2011 my plant, and those in neighbouring gardens, re-sprouted from its deep tap root and started to produce multiple rosettes of leaves around the base of its dead trunk. Give it a few years and Northampton gardens will once again be crowned by these exotic imports from the Southern Hemisphere. I moved house in early 2012 and wasn’t able to take my rescued plant with me, but I have a feeling it will survive many more cold winters to come.

Names matter to biologists, indeed to scientists of all types. They signify and tell us things beyond just the words themselves. To give a very personal example, a few people have asked me why I chose the title “Professor of Biodiversity” rather than “Ecology” (my main area of training, though confused in some peoples’ minds with New Age philosophies); or “Biology” (a much broader designation than I feel comfortable with); or even “Pollination Ecology” (narrow, to the point, but too restrictive). After a LOT of thought I chose “Biodiversity” because it very broadly reflects my interests in the whole of Earth’s life forms, the interactions between these species, and how they come together as assemblages, communities and ecosystems. But I’m also interested in the history of our understanding of biological diversity and this title gives me scope to pursue those interests too.

It’s all in the name.

The Walls of the Garden

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Old stone walls have always held a fascination for me. Growing up in Sunderland I’d see substantial walls made of the local Magnesian Limestone, rough cut blocks often patterned with impressions and ridges that to my child’s mind looked like exotic coral or fossils of weird animals. A friend reliably informed me that an odd shaped piece we had found was a “fossil dog’s skull”. I didn’t believe him. Even then I was skeptical of unsubstantiated claims. When I understood more about the intriguing geology of that part of England I discovered that these patterned rocks were of chemical rather than biological origin, but no less interesting for that.

Walls then seemed to become a continuing back drop to my life. As an undergraduate my final year research project involved clambering around on the 17^th century walls of Oxford University’s Botanic Garden, surveying the plants that had naturally colonised them. The wall flora was an odd mix of exotics and natives, many of which had no obvious means of dispersing on to the walls. I joked at the time that perhaps the dispersal was by gardeners and ecologists working on the walls. That may have been close to the truth.

Stone walls provide unique habitats for many plants and animals as they mimic rocky out crops and cliff faces. Perhaps less obviously, so too do brick walls, as I saw on Friday morning which I spent having a grateful break from the office with Hilary Erenler. Hils is one of my research students and is funded by the Finnis Scott Foundation. For the past couple of years she has been surveying the pollinating insects found in the gardens of large country houses around Northamptonshire and into adjacent counties. Our county is particularly rich in these estates (it’s known as the County of Spires and Squires, a nod to both the large number of churches and the historical pattern of land ownership). So on Friday we conducted a couple of surveys of some large walled gardens on two private estates. Amongst other things we measured the lengths and heights of the walls, counted a sample of the density of mortar holes that may have been nest sites for solitary bees such as Osmia rufa. We also returned some soon-to-emerge bee cocoons to artificial nests as part of an experiment Hils is conducting.

For reasons of privacy and security I’m not allowed to divulge which estates we visited. But I can say that the walled gardens were fascinating relics of a time when such large households and their staff relied on these sheltered, productive patches to provide food twelve months of the year. One garden had retained an avenue of some of the oldest espalier apple trees I’ve ever seen. Thick and gnarled and festooned with epiphytic lichens and mosses, they must have been planted at least 100 years ago. Whether the household appreciated it or not, the wild native bees that the walls hosted, and those coming in from the surrounding estate, also played their role by pollinating these apples, as well as pears, cherries, nectarines, beans, squashes and other insect reliant crops.

On the way back to the car we found a small patch of violas, primulas and celandines in a dry spot under a tree. We counted at least 6 species of bees: two bumblebees (Bombus species); at least two (possibly three) andrenids, including the tawny mining bee Andrena fulva; Anthophora plumipes; and what may have been a Colletes species. The bumblebees were queens, of course, filling up on nectar to give them energy to look for nesting sites. But some of the solitary bees were males and exhibited their typical behaviour of patrolling the flowers in search of females with whom to mate.

Back in the office that afternoon I dealt with emails. One was an unexpected communication from Steve Buchmann regarding a recent paper I’d published with Nick Waser and Andreas Erhardt in Journal of Pollination Ecology. The paper deals with the historical development of some ideas pertaining to pollination syndromes. I’ve admired Steve’s work for a long time; together with Gary Nabhan, Steve wrote the now classic book Forgotten Pollinators which can be credited with playing an important role in raising the issue of pollinator extinctions and declines in the public and scientific consciousness. The JPE paper gives a historical perspective on understanding the interaction between Solanum flowers and their pollinators. The long standing assumption is that Solanum flowers are pollinated by bees that vibrate their bodies at a particular frequency to shake out the pollen from the anthers, a reproductive strategy termed “buzz pollination”. Steve was writing to tell me that many years ago he published a paper showing that some Solanum species are buzz pollinated by hoverflies. I’d missed that paper so am looking forward to reading it when he scans it and sends me a PDF. It worries me that much of the primary literature from before the widespread use of information technology is going to get neglected like this, because it’s not easy to access electronically. Depositories that have started to archive older work, such as JSTOR, Biodiversity Heritage Library and Google Books, are great, but there’s still a lot of material to retro-input into these systems.

On the way to invigilate a one hour test for my second year Habitat Ecology and Management students later that afternoon I bumped into Muzafar Hussain, another of my research students, who had been out surveying solitary bees in the urban centre of Northampton. His first year of surveying in 2011 revealed a surprisingly high diversity of species and he’s continuing that work this year. Some of these bees are nesting in old stone and brick walls in the back streets behind the main thoroughfares of the town and are exploiting wall plants as pollen and nectar sources, a topic that’s being researched by Lorna, one of my final year project students. Everything was coming back to walls today…..