A perfect weed-free plot offers little to our embattled insects. There is a gentler approach than pulling every unwanted plant
I have watched and silently wept this spring as trees ready for nesting, forget-me-nots in full bloom, and buttercups about to burst forth have all been clipped and ripped, torn and shredded. And in their place? Nothing. Under the rules of good husbandry, this sort of pruning and weeding makes your plot look perfect and well-ordered, the soil pleasingly flat and tickled. But I am going to take my feminist rage at this word, husbandry, and rip it up like it has done to the wild things. Enough of this obsession with control and order.
Our world is in grave danger; the smallest beings that crawl and fly around this globe are disappearing. Yet there is a yawning gap between knowledge and practice, and it sits around one of the fundamental tenets of gardening: weeding. Between the nothing of bare earth and the next set of weeds is a hungry caterpillar, weary bee, or a sawfly larva with nothing to eat. There are no pointless insects; they all matter, as they are intricately interwoven into the food web.
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