Shouldn’t we be welcoming weeds into our gardens to grow alongside their cultivated cousins, asks resident wildlife columnist Jane Adams

Earlier this year, TV gardener and Royal Horticultural Society (RHS) vice-president Alan Titchmarsh caused quite a stir when he urged the RHS to stop ‘pandering to current trends’ that seem to welcome weeds into gardens.
But what exactly is a weed? The Cambridge Dictionary defines them as ‘any wild plant that grows in an unwanted place.’ I assume Mr T was making a stand for cultivated plants, and isn’t against wild plants per se. In spite of that, does it really need to be an all-or-nothing debate? With 53 per cent of our native plants in decline, surely there’s room for both wild and cultivated plants in our gardens.
Take my garden.
It’s a mishmash of garden-centre-bought plants and long and short grass with quite a few wild flowering plants (cough weeds) in between.
I love my garden – and so, it seems, does the wildlife; more than 300 species call it home. Most of us will never have (or even aspire to) a ‘perfect’ garden, with neatly tended flowerbeds, zero weeds, neatly trimmed lawns and perfectly clipped hedges. Personally, I think that’s okay.
Take ivy. A weed, yes? I’ve had a love-hate relationship with it for years. It creeps through the garden and, if I don’t watch it like a hawk, it makes a dash up the walls of the house.
But at the bottom of the garden where it has climbed a long-dead apple tree, it explodes each autumn with a firework display of blooms that fizz with pollinators (more than 100 species of insect feed on ivy).
At this time of year, my ivy is a veritable smorgasbord for them; from honeybees to angle shade moths and ivy mining bees to holly blue butterflies, they can’t get enough of it. Not to mention the blackbirds that eat its berries, and birds and insects that nest and hibernate in its dense foliage.
Not bad for a weed.

What might help?
We won’t fix the massive declines in flying insect populations (a shocking 60 per cent in the last 20 years) by allowing a few dandelions, ivy plants and nettles to grow in our gardens, or by letting the grass grow taller in places. But neither are these things ‘a trend’ or wrong. They’re just the evolution of everyday gardening.
Shouldn’t we instead be more worried about the garden centres and DIY stores still promoting the sale of weedkiller and insecticide?
Shouldn’t we educate ourselves on how to use natural pest deterrents in our gardens? Everyone’s outdoor spaces can be beneficial to disappearing wildlife and wildflowers, as well as attractive and useful places for their people.

Further reading:
There are 23 million gardens in the UK, covering 433,000 hectares (an area a third the size of Wales) according to estimates.
A total of 87 per cent of UK households have a garden.
In England alone, gardens cover an area four and a half times larger than National Nature Reserves
For advice on gardening for wildlife, visit the Wildlife Gardening Forum wlgf.org
The ivy mining bee arrived in Dorset in 2001, more at bumblebeeconservation.org

Swimming with blue sharks reveals their stunning beauty, says DWT’s Julie Hatcher – but lack of regulation makes them deeply vulnerable

Recently I was lucky enough to
swim with blue sharks in the south west. While standing on the boat looking into the sea, the biggest thing that hit me when I saw the graceful outline of a shark below me was how incredibly BLUE it was! While the blue back of the animal was so noticeable, the sides, fins and snout were all picked out in pure silver. As a ray of sun peeped
between blankets of grey cloud, the shark appeared lit from within as its colours burst
through the choppy sea’s surface. Then it was gone.
Blue sharks are a highly migratory, open-ocean species that follow the Gulf Stream to visit UK seas, including Lyme Bay, in the summer months. They are here from June to October and usually travelling in all-female groups. What a privilege to swim with these masters of the high seas, so effortlessly graceful in their element, so powerful and in control and yet at the
same time so vulnerable and threatened by our careless attitude and ignorance.
So timid and sensitive – how did they ever acquire such an erroneous and unjust reputation?

Scary as a cushion
The blue shark has to be the most beautiful of all sharks. With its stunning blue colour, its graceful shape and big puppy-dog eyes, how could you not fall in love with it?
As for being scary … this shark was as as scary as a fluffy cushion. Rather, it was to be admired, treasured and appreciated as a thing of wonder, of evolutionary perfection.
It is the apex of an entire food web, a precious and yet fragile being.
Unfortunately, open-ocean sharks have declined by an estimated 71 per cent in the last 50 years and overfishing is the biggest threat to sharks globally.
Blue sharks are being decimated right here in our North Atlantic. In fact, blues are the most heavily fished species of shark, with
most countries having no restriction on the number that can be taken. They are disappearing, almost unnoticed, right in front of us. It is heartbreaking to think that this wonder of nature may, in a few more decades, no longer be a summer visitor in our waters.

What can we do to help them?
Seafood-eaters can choose sustainably-caught, local species
and avoid any type of shark meat. Sharks produce few offspring, mature late and
may not reproduce every year. Blue sharks are mostly caught on long lines with a devastating by-catch of seabirds and turtles.
And if you are in two minds about sharks in Dorset, remember, you are more likely to die from falling out of bed than from a shark attack!

• Find out more about these blue beauties on the DWT site here dorsetwildlifetrust.org.uk