Tonight:
5°c
Names to cherish before they perish
Felix Lloyd18 Feb 2009
Doris Longwing isn't the prettiest of the tropical butterflies currently making themselves at home in the huge glasshouse at Wisley but she wins hands down on name. Doris, who will be there until Sunday, is from Central and South America. From much the same area come the Mormon butterflies, so-called because there are several colour forms of the female, so males appear to have more than one wife.
They have a light touch with the naming of butterflies over in the Americas. Back home we're less humorous, although the yellow brimstone suggests we were fun at some stage. We're not doing butterflies many favours otherwise.
Anyone who thinks the countryside is safe in the hands of the farmers is, frankly, credulous. Habitat hedgerows are still being grubbed up, trees that impede tractors cut down and yield-maximising pesticides liberally applied. When I lived in Egypt, I used to think the peasant farmers were Third World imbeciles for mistreating that essential tool of their trade, their donkey. Now I realise that First World British farmers are just as witless when they denude and poison that essential tool of their trade, the land.
An Imperial College study centred on the Yorkshire village of Cherry Burton has found that country children will quite happily acquiesce in the degradation of their landscape because they know nothing about the wildlife that used to be there. Their parents haven't bothered to pass on their own knowledge. In effect, they are colluding with the farmers to degrade the very countryside they live in.
So if our butterflies are to survive, they need to follow the example of the foxes: pack up and head for town. Then it's down to those of us with a garden to enhance the quality of our own and our children's lives by guaranteeing that of wildlife.
When my fence falls down (a matter of weeks) I'm going to plant a mixed native hedge in its place - hawthorn, buckthorn, blackthorn, dogwood, holly, goat willow - to provide habitat for birds and food for butterflies. Spare a portion of a large garden for nettles, essential food for the larvae of the comma, peacock, red admiral and small tortoiseshell butterflies, and leave an area of lawn uncut so the caterpillar of the common blue can overwinter in grass tussocks.
Adult butterflies need nectar-rich shrubs and perennials to feed from, so I've planted Buddleia Lochinch, hebe and ceratostigma. On the allotment this spring I'll be sowing the butterflies' favourite annuals - poached egg plant (Limnanthes douglasii), cosmos, alyssum, cornflowers, marigolds and sunflowers - in among the veg. Bees will benefit too.
The children watching the tropical butterflies at Wisley were having a terrific time. Let's hope when they're grown up, we still have some home-grown specimens for them to admire.
