14 ★ FTWeekend 17 August/18 August 2019them with traces of Roundup as well.
Goulson is good on doublethink
among eco-conscious gardeners. Some
of them cheerfully buy glossy bedding
plants and pot plants from garden cen-
tres and think they are thereby doing
their bit to keep the planet green.
Wholesale growers have often pre-
treated the bedding plants with neoni-
cotinoid pesticides, recently banned
for ordinary gardeners. Goulson
extends the same criticism to dogs.
If their owners fit them with an anti-flea
or anti-louse collar or if they apply
an anti-flea treatment recommended
by a vet, they are highly likely to be
using a compound based on neonicoti-
noids which gardeners are forbidden to
use. The dose for one “spot on” flea
treatment is enough, Goulson calcu-
lates, to kill “about 60m honey bees or
about 60 partridges.”
What are his recommendations for
gardeners? Here, either I am unsur-
prised or we part company. I do not
want to leave part of my lawn unmown
so that its weeds can seed all over the
place. I do not want a fiddly little pond,
which will soon go green. I do not mind
a stick heap or some nettles out of sight
to feed a few types of butterfly. We agree
that pesticides are the last resort, but
whereas he uses none, I use minimal
quantities for very few purposes indeed.
The bees are loving my dahlias just
now, but there would be none if I had
not used slug bait around the young
plants. There would be no lily flowers if I
had not used chemicals against lily bee-
tles: the bees are loving their open trum-
pet flowers too. They are also loving
early asters from north America, aga-
panthus from South Africa and a red-
flowered scutellaria, whose parents
come from the Balkans.
The global garden is a much richer
and prettier jungle than the sort of
Brexit mess that Goulson champions.
His concluding recommendations are
more about farming than gardening,
lumping farmers together as if they are
all blithe enemies of the planet. What
about himself? He polemicises against
sugar and its effects on health and obes-
ity but includes recipes at the start of
each chapter, five of which use sugar,
sometimes on the grand scale.Dave Goulson, The Garden Jungle
(Jonathan Cape, £16.99)Robin Lane Fox will speak at the FT Week-
end Festival, September 7 at Kenwood
House, London. For more information, visit
ftweekendfestival.comB
usy with deadheads and
removing ground elder,
should I also be saving the
planet? If only gardeners
could. “Every little helps” is
the moral of the moment, but whatever
gardeners do, it is as nothing to what
farmers might do instead. The plain fact
is that gardeners alone have never saved
a butterfly species, a bee population or
anything furry and four-legged.
What about wasps and mos-
quitoes? Do you want them
to fast-breed too inside
your fencing panels or
garden walls?
If so, try Dave Goulson’s
new bookThe Garden Jun-
gle, whose subtitle isGarden-
ing to Save the Planet. He is pro-
fessor of Biological Science at Uni-
versity of Sussex and author of more
than 200 scientific articles aboutbugs.
His chapters include “Earwigs in my
Orchard” and “Ants in my Plants”. He is
rather apologetic about the yearly yields
on his fruit and vegetable plot, as if
500kg is a poor return. For a full-time
professor I consider it enviable.
For much of the time I totally
disagree with him. I disagree about
growing nothing but native plants. I dis-
agree with the16 plants that are his
favourites for pollinators and I disagree
with his list of the12 top berry plants for
birds. I totally disagree that it is a good
idea to let dandelions flower by leaving
the lawn unmown and then “pay the
small price in having to hoe their many
seedlings from the flower beds later in
the year”. I disagree that the sight of
double-flowered hollyhock plants on
sale in a local Waitrose should make
me “want to go and remonstrate with
the staff” just because they are useless
for bees, whereas single-flowered
ones are not. Doubles are pretty, theirflowers last longer and bees have
masses of other options in any garden
whose planting is global, diverse and
unfettered by Goulson’s drab nativism.
I also disagree that “the best sources
of plants are neighbours, families and
friends”. They have given me second-
rate varieties of crocosmia, invasive
varieties of sunflower and a menace
called Achillea The Pearl which
I have been trying to eradicate
naturally for 30 years. The
best sources of the best
plants are our heroic spe-
cialist nurserymen, who
grow them from seeds,
cuttings and divisions and
constantly watch for better
varieties, many of them
hybrids, than those that a
neighbour is going to pass to me in
a plastic bag at the village fête.
On the way through, Goulson has
some fine flourishes. He likes earwigs,
as do I, and he points out a little-known
fact: that some species of male earwig
have two penises. The wooing of Miss
Earwig takes “several hours”, but it is
not done with both penises at once.
Imagine if you could choose which one
to use first.
Goulson also gives some apt figures
for the chemical preliminaries behind
those smooth, rosy-red apples that we
buy in stores. In 2004 a Defra report cal-
culated that the average Cox’s apple
orchard in the UK received “13 fungi-
cide sprays, five plant growth regulator
sprays, five sprays of insecticides, two
herbicide sprays, and one spray with
urea”. The main insecticide,
Goulson notes, was chlorpyrifos,
belonging to the chemical family of
organophosphates which are also toxic
for people. Such is the background to a
smooth-skinned Orange Pippin on a
fruit counter.Nearly 50 years ago the poet James
Fenton, later a gardener, anticipated
him in his memorable poem “The Fruit-
Grower in Wartime”. After characteris-
ing all the many bugs that a skilled fruit-
grower has to control, he stops: “But
something remains/ Which gives us
pause. We think of all those gallons/Of
arsenate of lead being pumped over/
Our native soil. How can we help com-
paring /Ourselves to the last idiot heirs/
Of some Roman province. Still for the/
Sake of form eating off lead platters?”
When he wrote, lead-poisoning was
being publicised as a cause of the decline
of ancient Rome. Goulson urges us to
grow heritage apples of our own instead.
Excellent advice as their flavours are
indeed varied, but he is optimistic, in
my experience, to claim that anything
from moth to apple sawfly can be con-
trolled by earwigs. Integrated pest man-
agement, using one “pest” to kill
another, is quite helpful at times, but on
a big fruit plantation it is unsustainable.
What about the “toxic cocktail”, as
Goulson graphically calls it, the array
of chemicals that wash into the water
supply or enter us on any salad crop
we buy? Glyphosate, that godsend of
a weedkiller, has had a bad pressAn orchard in Kent and (below) heritage west country apples; (left) bee on a dahlia— Alamy; Caiaimage/Marie StoneBugs about the
moral high ground
Global gardens outperform areas planted only
with native species yet pests are happy in either
House Home
Robin Lane Fox
On gardens
recently, but the jury is still out on its
alleged propensity to cause cancer.
Goulson gives the argument a new
dimension. Apparently, a 2016 study of
more than 2,000 Germans “found
glyphosate in the urine of more than 99
per cent of them, with particularly high
levels in children”. Some 75 per cent of
them had a concentrate of it “five or
more times the acceptable safe limit in
drinking water”. If Angela Merkel were
tested, I bet she would turn out to be
glyphosate-positive.
I like the idea of this. On summer eve-
nings I break off from gardening to pee
on patches of ground elder, hoping to
kill them with uric acid. I may be killing
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