Category Archives: Wildlife

Is it working?

It’s hard to know if gardening for wildlife is making a difference to the wildlife in my garden. I know it makes me happy, but does it work for the wildlife?

I don’t know if we have more bees, bugs & insects. I think we do but I didn’t look for them before so I don’t know. I know we have fewer birds (we used to have blackbirds, dunnocks, wrens, more robins, lots more blue tits) but I think that’s probably cats and gentrification.

I think my garden is so small, it’s hard to see if it makes a difference on its own. So many external factors affect it. I don’t have the skills and patience to do in-depth bug counts like that lady in Sheffield. But I guess part of the point of recording it here, is to see long term if stuff works.

Today it was sunny for the first time for ages. There were hairy footed flower bees (finally)) and lots of different hoverfies (I have hoverfly lagoon in the back passage); and maybe small wasps, a cabbage white and a speckled brown (which I’ve never seen before). The tadpoles are hatching, and the 4 birds that do visit are eating from the plants not just the bird feeder, and the “waste” I didn’t clear off the beds but left to rot down looks like it’s turned into flowers. So today feels like a good day!

Are foxgloves really biennial?

My new foxgloves seem to be growing out of old foxgloves…

I have lots of foxgloves, which have seeded across the garden, white ones and purple ones. After the flower spikes have dried and rattle with little seeds, I wave them round the beds, hoping they will seed and grow.

  • Bee
  • At the back

Sometimes, they seed, and then when I find them in places I don’t want them (in the lawn/ in pots/etc), I move them or stick them in little pots and plant them out later.

I once read an article which turned out to be by an American (sometimes you can’t tell until it says something like “superb for humming birds”) who used foxgloves as a cut-and-come-again flower, saying if you chopped them early enough, you got more spikes.

I’ve never dared do this but my kids and the actual foxes have snapped them off occasionally and I have got other spikes – though usually a bit more branched off than the first one.

Normally I pull them up once I’ve taken of the flower spikes/ seeds but this year I have left them – mostly in my attempt to leave stuff for bugs and not tidy up too much. Now the old gloves seem to be sprouting…

  • Foxglove in a pot
    Old Foxglove, with new growth at base
  • Old foxglove stem with growth at the bottom…
  • foxglove leaf
    .. and at the top too, like a palm tree

What is going on? This isn’t new plants, it’s last year’s ones. Maybe it has been so mild, they think it’s still the end of summer? Or might they do this sometimes if you don’t pull them up? I don’t know but I’m going to see what happens.

I’ve done some research!

But it’s still not completely clear. Apparently some foxgloves are perennial – but short lived, they only come though for a couple of years. And some, if you cut off the “king spire,” will grow flowering side branches. The problem is, I don’t know what my foxgloves are. I think one might be just plain woodland ones (the purple ones) but I don’t know what type the whites are.

Also an expert lady foxglove grower at Chelsea says the seeds lower down the spine tend to come true more than the ones lower down the spire.