Category Archives: Gardening for wildlife

Gardening in more extreme weather – 1

26 July 2026

Today we had a little very light rain, the first in many weeks; and it’s cooler, only 26 degrees this afternoon. The forecast is for 31 degrees in a couple of days, with no likelihood of any more rain in the next couple of weeks. Apparently, this is the new normal.

So we need to adapt how we garden, both for drought and heatwaves any time after March or April, and for wetter, milder winters.

One way that we’ve been changing the way we garden has been accepting that some plants just won’t thrive in these conditions. In particular, roses don’t do well in heat, and we can’t just replace them with the Mediterranean plants we’re advised to use, as they don’t like our claggy cold wet soil in winter.

Instead, we’re encouraging the ones that self-seed, as they seem to thrive better when they’ve chosen where they’re going to grow, which in turn leads to less need for watering. We have wonderful tall fennels, wild carrots, teasels, geraniums, foxgloves and musk mallows. We’re still using dahlias and asters a lot, for more vivid colour, and to reassure people that we’re not just letting the gardens run wild.

We do have a good structure for the gardens as a whole – a lavender border down both sides, with flowering shrubs in most of the beds.

The lavender’s actually a bit tricky, we’ve lost quite a few plants over wet winters, but we take cuttings every spring and have (almost) enough plants to fill the gaps. There are several different varieties of lavender in those borders, and some seem to be more resilient to winter wet and cold soil, so those are the ones we’re taking cuttings from.

And we’re also trying not to waste any water in these hot, dry summers! Or exhaust our volunteers. We use watering cans anyway, so the current hosepipe ban doesn’t affect us, but we’re just watering plants that haven’t yet got established; and the ones that are flowering their socks off for us, like the penstemons and dahlias. We need to spend half an hour watering a little more often than once a week.

Fortunately, the soil holds much more moisture than it used to when we started work here, thanks to all the leaf mould and garden compost we’ve added to some of the beds, but we still need to water in this kind of heat and drought .

But like most of the country at the moment, we’re still hoping for rain to keep everything alive and thriving into autumn.

Preschool peas are here!

17 June 2026

Sorry it’s been such a long time since the last blog post – in fact, there’s been time for the peas to grow, flower, and fill the pods with peas.

Unfortunately the children hadn’t been able to come round when we were working there over the last few weeks, so this is the first time they’ve seen their plants since they first came through the soil; but it was worth waiting for.

We took the bucket of peas round to the gardens and met some of the children there, where they picked some of the pods and discovered that small raw peas are very tasty. They left some for their friends back at the Pavillion, too.

We’ll do this again next year, with two or three buckets. It’s much more successful when members of the gardening team can look after the plants when they’re in their own gardens.

Some of the children went searching for ladybirds, and found quite a few:

Children checking for ladybirds — Checking for ladybirds

Child looking at a ladybird on her hand — Found one!

It’s been quite warm this week, and dry, so the gardens really benefited from all the watering the children did next – happier plants, a few damp feet, and smiles all round.

The bluebells are coming!

3 April, 2026

The English bluebells are almost out in the bottom bed (nearest the war memorial). Always a welcome sign that spring is really here.

And a lot more flowers are coming out in the other beds, too:

Thalia daffodils

25 March 2026

I’ve been asked what variety our white daffodils are – they’re Thalia.

We learned some time ago that bees don’t generally go for daffodils, which have been bred for many things, but not for producing nectar and pollen. On the other hand, bees do like these, so we grow them; and they seem to like the garden, as they’ve spread out from most of the places we planted them.

They used to be really difficult to buy bulbs for, but over the last few years I’ve noticed that gardening articles, social media and TV gardeners have been recommending them, and many more suppliers stock them.

What have we been doing all winter?

19 March 2026

We haven’t posted much recently, but we’ve spent the long grey wet winter preparing the Gardens for this year’s flowers. There’s still plenty going on round at the gardens.
Now at last we’re seeing the sun, and seeing the effect on all the plants – not least the weeds, which have really started to grow. We’ll be starting to deal with over the next couple of weeks.And at last, we’re seeing the sun, and seeing the effect on all the plants – not least the weeds, which we’ll be starting to deal with them over the next couple of weeks.

A lot of what we do over the winter involves leaves and compost bins. When it’s not raining, we might be emptying one of the compost Daleks (bins) so we can turn the other bins into it; or we might be adding leaves to the leaf bin to make mulch – ‘black gold’ – to keep moisture in, and stop weeds growing.

And the Town Council’s Grounds Staff have added many large bags full of leaves to the bin – thank you very much! They’ll be put to good use.

We’ve also been nursing a lot of cuttings through the winter – it’s one of our main ways of increasing the number of plants here, without having to buy more. And when we grow our own, we know they haven’t had to be treated with pesticides to look good for sale, or with hormones to make them bloom earlier – neither of those are good for bees. They’ve had a tough time getting through this long wet winter, but they’re really beginning to take off now.

We’ve been asked a couple of times how we decide which weeds to take out, and which to leave – I’ll do a more detailed post on that in a week or so. But basically, what we’re doing now it trying to remove just those invasive plants that could be trouble later on, like ground elder, sheep sorrel, celandines and violets (lovely as they are, they run rampant and can choke other plants). We still want to leave a lot of ground cover for insects, for another couple of weeks till the soil warms up.

Then the fun bit starts, when we try to work out which seedling is a plant we really want, and which so isn’t!

Sneak preview – here’s the first patch we’ll be untangling. A real haven for bees at the moment, they love red deadnettle as it’s full of nectar; but give it a couple more weeks, and it’d be a mess. That’s the balance we’ll be trying to sort out.

https://linsladememorialgardens.uk/2017/11

A few photos as spring arrives

12 March 2026

Here are a few photos of the Gardens, taken this week as primroses and hellebores take over from the winter aconites and crocuses.

The crocuses don’t photograph well, which is a pity; over the last few years they’ve spread all over a couple of the beds. Bees are just starting to look for nectar and pollen, so it’s well timed! Here are a few photos of the other flowers in the garden at the moment:

The first flowers of pulmonaria and grape hyacinths – these two are real bee magnet flowers in early spring

The primroses have spread all over the garden

Hellebores and a clump of crocuses in one of the bottom beds

Protecting plants over winter

23 November 2025

A couple of blog posts ago [https://linsladememorialgardens.uk/2025/10/27/using-dead-leaves-in-the-gardens/] we mentioned that we’d be putting dead leaves directly onto the beds to protect plants over the winter. We’ve had a couple of sharp frosts this week; it was time to get started.

The frosts turn dahlia leaves and stems black and manky – not a good look for a public garden, and not particularly beneficial to insects for hibernation. So over the last couple of visits the team has cut them all down, added some of the dry stems from the wild flower bed and chopped them all up (to make them rot faster) and added them to the compost bins in the work area.

We’ve still left a lot of stems in the wild flower bed for hibernating insects, but leaving some airspace between the plants shows off the seed heads, and looks just a little more deliberate – and it gives us on-site Browns to add to the Greens that are (were?!) the dahlia stems. When we make compost we aim to have about the same volumes of Greens (leaves, stems, grass, coffee grounds) as of Browns (dry stems, broken-up sticks, cardboard, shredded paper, torn-up egg boxes). And we tear or chop things up so there are more broken surfaces, which rot down more quickly.

We emptied a few more bags of leaf mould over or round specific plants, then raked up a few trugs full of leaves from the grass and added them on top – this will help to protect the roots from the cold wet winter to come. A number of plants like dahlias and salvias can withstand frost, but they really hate cold, wet, poorly drained ground – which is exactly what we have here. Adding this extra organic matter should help; most of our dahlias have come back year after year.

Weeding and tidying up

08 April 2025

Or rather, why we haven’t done it yet.

Last year about this time, we explained why we don’t cut back all the old plant stems in the autumn, as people used to do to make their flowerbeds look emptier and tidier over the winter (spoiler: it’s because insects and small mammals need places to hibernate in, and dead leaves on the ground and hollow stems in the air seem to be just the thing).

We have cut most of the old stems down now, but we’re still not weeding thoroughly – this isn’t just laziness! A lot of the flowers we encourage here are ones that have self-seeded, and too many of them haven’t germinated yet. So if we weed to bare soil between plants, we’re destroying a lot of plants we might like to keep.

The warm weather over the last couple of weeks has really brought a lot of plants on faster than usual, so we’ll be starting to tidy up in earnest for the rest of this month, and sowing seeds where we find any bare patches.

And perhaps most importantly, we’ll be lifting even the useful wild flowers like Geranium lucidum [find photo] in the third bed up from the memorial itself – that’s the bed the preschool children will be planting their peas out in when they come back after the Easter holidays, and we need it to be ready for them then.

Geranium lucidum in the preschool bed — Geranium lucidum

We’ll leave a couple of plants – there’s a large viper’s bugloss which will be a real bee magnet later in the year – but mostly we’ll be clearing more space for them. It’s a big ask to avoid digging up lots of plants by mistake when you’re only 2 or 3 years old!

Replanting some of the wildflower bed

21 September 2024

The wildflower bed’s looking a bit different after this week, as we’ve cleared a lot of the plants out.

Garden writers and presenters tell us to ‘leave things a bit untidy’, and ‘don’t cut plants back till spring’ and that’s usually what we do here – so why have we changed the plan this year?

There were two main issues. One was that the bed had become extremely untidy, and we are mindful that we’re approaching Remembrance Day in a few weeks. We want to keep it wild and maintain the ecosystem that’s developed here, but also keep it more respectful, in keeping with its surroundings. It’s a difficult balance, and we’re very appreciative of the Town Council and the British Legion for giving us the chance to do it.

The other issue is that scabious and knapweed have begun to dominate the bed and crowd out many of the other plants that flower at different times of the year. That in itself has been restricting the biodiversity we’ve been trying to increase.

A corner of the wildflower bed last week, before clearing – the larger plants are crowding out the smaller ones

When we started managing the site, the wildflower bed was just sown with cornfield annuals – poppies, oxeye daisies and cornflowers, which provided pollen and nectar for a few weeks. Over time we’ve also encouraged any native plants that just arrived in that bed as well – black medick, self-heal, the odd foxglove, things like that.

A few years ago we added scabious and knapweed as they’re perennial plants that would flower every year, but the soil’s really too fertile for them; they’ve grown massive and crowded out many smaller plants that provide nectar and pollen earlier in the season. When you see them in their natural environment – on Ivinghoe Beacon, for example – they grow knee-high, not shoulder-high!

We want to keep some of them, but we need to let more light and air in immediately – so this year, we’ve cut the stems down, so we can see what’s growing where, and where we need to replant. There are still plenty of wild carrot seedheads in that bed, and plenty of undergrowth in the other beds in the gardens, providing habitat for insects and our resident frogs.

A slightly confused frog, wondering what happened to all the ground cover (there’s still plenty left, just a metre or so away, it found it)

We’ve also removed the stems rather than letting them compost down as usual, as that increases soil fertility – which is great for cornfield annuals like poppies and cornflowers, but not good for other natives.

We’ve left a few areas uncleared for the moment, so as not to disturb too much of the resident insect population, and we’ve started putting in a few more plants – water avens in the soggiest corner (nearest the flowering cherry tree), more foxgloves, red deadnettle, viper’s bugloss, primroses and cowslips; and we’ll be sowing more foxgloves, birdsfoot trefoil, and field poppies and Welsh poppies too.