The government is about to spend a pittance on a very serious problem – but it should be celebrated as a start.
Our trees are under threat from imported diseases – perhaps from some diseases that stand a better chance of becoming established under new climate scenarios. So Defra and the (unreconstructed) Forestry Commission have published an Action Plan.
The action plan reads as though it has been written by someone fixated with trees as the issues it discusses and the remedies needed are general issues rather than tree-specific issues. Now if we had a Forest and Wildlife Service….
But the analysis is right – we risk importing diseases because we bring lots of foreign plants into the country. Globalisation is bad news for wildlife when it means that a new disease can arrive from anywhere in the world.
Bird flu led to the welcome banning of the trade in wild birds. Do you miss it? Are you straining at the leash to import a parrot which ought to be flying around the forests of west Africa? I bet you aren’t. Are our economic woes due to the loss of economic activity caused by such draconian measures?
But plants don’t cough and so we continue to import non-native plants into the UK and then spread them around the country in places called garden centres. There is a case to be made that gardening is one of the least green activities we carry out with its reliance on imported plant material, peat, water, chemical fertilisers, herbicides and insecticides – but let’s leave that subject for another time, perhaps.
But it is clear that there is a wide range of non-native plants that cause considerable economic and/or wildlife damage. Economic damage up to 2 billion pounds a year.
One of the problem species is a nice plant called Crassula whose English name is either New Zealand Pigmyweed or Australian Swamp-stonecrop – an interesting antipodean choice. Back on the side of the world where they play rugby very well Crassula is fine – it’s actually quite pretty. But over here it runs amok like the All Blacks will against France and completely dominates water bodies. Do tell me – what is the Big Society solution to this problem?
The CLA President William Worsley, who is, in his own special way, a bit of a tree-hugger, welcomed Defra’s announcement and spoke gushingly of Forest Research.
I’m a bit unclear about the research aspect of this problem. I hope it isn’t shutting the stable door after it has already got mildew.
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I thought the DEFRA response was a title with a blank piece of paper! That was until I ‘moused’ beyond and then saw the words ‘carbon store’. The same government has cancelled the underground storing of carbon under the North Sea apparently because the pipe was too short! When is it going to stop wasting money and put the same carbon into trees creating work and habitats fit for all? Or is it too scared because the same trees are going to be killed off with diseases brought here by garden centers!
Another problem invasive genera is cotoneaster which is still being HIGHLY recommended by the RSPB as a good shrub for wildlife gardening http://www.rspb.org.uk/advice/gardening/planting/shrubs/recommended.aspx. There are four species of cotoneaster favoured by birds which have been added to schedule 9 of the wildlife and countryside act 1981 which puts them in the same category as japanese knotweed.
It is still quite legal to sell many invasive plant species and why Defra have not made these sales illegal in the past I do not know. In view of the legality you cannot blame the gardener for buying invasive plants or the plant nursery for selling them. There is no education of retailers in these matters.
Mark please can you post a photo of your garden so that we can see that it is not full of cotoneasters and pyracanthas. Thankyou !
And of course Mark you know fine well that urban gardens along with most other gardens throughout the UK are wildlife strongholds for most forms of animal life. Anyone involved with the RSPB for so many years and with the big garden birdwatch in particular shouldn’t be presenting such controversial twaddle !!