promoting biodiversity : Living Verges & Green Spaces

Small steps (September 2023)

We’re proud of what we’ve done this year to further biodiversity within the parish.

• LIving verges throughout the parish, left to Bloom in June' and beyond so wild flowers can set seed

• Swathes of The Green left unmown as bee friendly, B-Lines for pollinators

• Management of cattle grazing on the common, carefully timed so wild flowers can flourish

Yes, there’s been a couple of complaints that the village looks unkept - but these concerns have been far out-numbered by positive comments. One informed resident, David Chetham of the Brill Environment Group, took to the pages of August’s Bernwode News to remark on the changes on The Green:

Amid the grass stems we’ve seen splodges of colour - red poppy, blue chicory, yellow ragwort, purple thistle, pink willow herb and white plumes of meadowsweet […] flowers* visited by hosts of butterflies, questing hoverflies, and small shiny beetles. Grasshoppers click and whirr in the long grass whilst bees clamber inside open-mouth flowers getting coated in pollen.

It gets better! As David explains:

These insect populations have been valuable food for our summer visitors […] swifts scything rapidly through the air, swallows skimming low over open fields and house martins flittering higher up […] this diet of insects not only keeps the birds alive and actively flying but is sufficient for them to rear and feed their young and then migrate to another continent.

Watch out next spring! We won’t be reneging on our responsibilities to the environment. Whilst we appreciate the concerns of a minority of residents, some decisions and actions are bigger than all of us in the face of the existential threat of climate change and decreasing bio-diversity. Furthermore, under the Environment Act 2021, Parish Councils now have an obligation to conserve and enhance biodiversity.