Lucy and The Weed Trust
This plant story starts with 6 year old Lucy Houliston and a club she set up one summer. There was a logo and information sheets and a welcome pack for members and the club was called The Weed Trust. Lucy felt the affinity with ‘weeds’ because as she puts it: “I think when I was a kid it was like, oh, I feel sorry for you. You’re just a flower like everything else.” What I found fascinating in this plant story is what does a 6 year with empathy for the unloved flowers grow-up to be?
Lucy Houliston
The answer in Lucy’s case is an urban ecologist and a storyteller. Lucy is currently studying urban orchards, working with the charity The Orchard Project. She is aiming to understand the value of these urban orchards for wildlife and in this episode she explains how these green spaces serve as refuges for insects, including bees and beetles.
“We know traditional orchards are valuable for wildlife, but what about these newer, urban ones?”
What to listen for in this episode.
Well there are wonderful stories from Lucy’s childhood because her passion for the unloved plants also extended to the unloved insects. In the reading corner she sought out the books about insects. She got her first detention for leading the other pupils into the out of bounds part of the playground to see the bees! Search her coat pockets and you might find woodlice and there is a very precious photograph of her at Disneyland holding a snail that she had found that morning! I mention these things because it perhaps explains Lucy’s squeals of delight on finding beetles in the second part of the podcast. And it will have relevance to what we should ‘learn to grow’. (I have mentioned the woodlice in pockets to a couple of people and been told stories of ‘pet’ earwigs and slow worms kept in the garden, so Lucy was not alone!)
But on a more serious note what this all leads Lucy to is an early understanding, cemented by study, of how interconnected plants and insects are and how in our quest to control our gardens and to be tidy, we risk breaking those connections.
The Conversation
Hearing Lucy’s plant story, I knew who I wanted her to meet. Benny Hawkesbee describes himself as a wildlife gardener and he works in the Eden Nature Garden in London. I had followed him on Instagram for a while and heard him speak.
Lucy immediately noticed Benny’s dandelion t-shirt and I knew she had met a fellow ‘weed’ lover though that is perhaps the first place to start an episode such as this - what is a weed? I had heard the mantra - a weed is a plant in the wrong place but Benny turns that on its head “I put weeds in places that most people wouldn't. So for me, I could flip that anyway. …plants in the wrong place, maybe a lot of our garden plants are in the wrong place and they're taking up space that weeds should have.……”
Below is the photograph that Lucy mentioned in her plant story, she is holding a snail and the photo was taken on the first morning in Disneyland!
What follows is a fascinating discussion about how we can garden with awareness and care for the wildlife of all sizes in our gardens and as we find bees, beetles and frogs in this beautiful garden, Lucy and Benny discuss how we can all change our habits to make a change in our gardens. And conversely how astroturf, tarmac and cladding etc have a detriment effect on habitats.
In the Eden Garden there was a Turkey Oak, and when part of it fell, the gardeners first pleaded to keep the trunk as tall as possible, knowing the value of standing dead wood and then:
“.. we also requested that as much of the wood that was being pruned away be kept in as big a piece as possible. So these chunks you see in the meadow, this is Turkey Oak and they came from that tree falling and yeah, they've got all kinds of fungus on them and there's all kinds of holes for beetles and if you lift each of them up, you'll see beetles and frogs underneath most of them. So the first, the first waves of deterioration in old wood or dying wood, deadwood is the fungal phase, then the beetles, then the bees and wasps and you get woodpeckers and all kinds of stuff following suit. But yeah, I just think these pieces of wood would so incredible. Why would you wood chip all of it?”
As you will hear in the episode, Benny carefully lifted the piece of wood, cue squeals of delight from Lucy as she reached in …he had mentioned the word beetles!
How to Grow
So we are also turning that on its head in this episode. I asked Lucy which weed she would like us to grown and she said:
“It might be a bit abstract, but fungus, you know, as an ode to that grub that I saw and I squealed and I grabbed because I loved it so much under that tree stump, you know, there's so much life there. So stick a tree stump or a lump of wood in a green space and let the fungi grow and let the wood decay.
Maybe it's the opposite of growing, you know, let it die and decay and see what happens. Does that work?”
I hope you may be able to find a piece of wood that you could put in your garden. In my garden as a child there was an enormous Walnut tree that my dad had planted. He always told us stories of Horatio the tree elf who lived in the Walnut tree. Dad and the grey squirrel had an ongoing battle for the nuts and most years the squirrel won! Dad took to making pickled walnuts so he could at least have a bit of a harvest.
My dad died in March 2017 and not long after the Walnut tree died too. Last year it fell, making a bit of a mess of the neighbours fence so it had to be cut into large chunks. I have now taken one of those chunks from my mum’s garden and placed it in my garden. I hope as it gently decades, it will become home to beetles and other bugs and maybe bees and its also lovely to have a part of dad and Horatio’s walnut tree in my garden.
A part of the Walnut tree from my childhood, now in my garden.
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Transcript of this episode
If you would like to read a transcript of this episode you can click the link below.