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Why Native Plants Usually Beat Exotic Ones

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  Why Native Plants Usually Beat Exotic Ones A beautiful garden isn’t always a useful garden. Walk around almost any garden centre and you will find plants from every corner of the world. Some are spectacular: huge flowers, glossy leaves, unusual colours and long flowering seasons. They look wonderful in pots, borders and show gardens. But the question for a Going Green garden is not just, “Does this look attractive?” It is also, “Does anything live on it, feed from it, shelter in it, or depend on it?” That is where native plants usually have the advantage. They have grown alongside British insects, birds and mammals for thousands of years. Many of our caterpillars, bees, hoverflies, beetles and birds are adapted to particular plants. A garden filled only with exotic ornamentals may look colourful to us, but to much of our wildlife it can be like walking into a supermarket where every shelf is empty. The RHS gives a useful, balanced message: the best wildlife gardens can includ...
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Today’s rain could be next month’s watering can

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 Today’s rain could be next month’s watering can There was a time when rain in Britain was mostly treated as an inconvenience. It ruined barbecues, cancelled cricket matches, soaked school uniforms and made the washing stay on the line for far too long. We grumbled about it, sheltered from it, and watched it rush off roofs, patios, drives and roads as quickly as possible. But that way of thinking is beginning to look outdated. Rain is no longer something we can afford to waste. Climate change is changing the rhythm of our weather. We are seeing heavier downpours, mo  re intense rainfall events, flash flooding, overwhelmed drains, and then — sometimes not long afterwards — long dry spells where gardens struggle, lawns turn brown, soil cracks, and vegetable plants need daily attention. The problem is not simply that we have too much rain or too little rain. The problem is that water is arriving at the wrong time, in the wrong way, and disappearing before we can use it. That is w...
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The Silent Decline of Insects If Insects Disappear, Almost Everything Else Follows

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  The Silent Decline of Insects If Insects Disappear, Almost Everything Else Follows When I was a child, one of my jobs on a Sunday afternoon drive was to clean the insects off the windscreen. It sounds like a small memory, almost comic now. A bucket of water, a cloth, and the front of the car covered with the remains of flies, moths, beetles and other flying insects collected during an ordinary journey through the countryside. Today, that job has almost disappeared. Many people have noticed the same thing. Long journeys that once left the windscreen speckled with insects now often leave it almost clean. It is easy to dismiss this as nostalgia, or to suggest that cars are more aerodynamic, roads are different, or we simply notice less. Some of that may be true. But the wider evidence points in a much more worrying direction. There are fewer insects around us. And that matters far more than most people realise. Insects are not just background noise. They are not just things that buz...
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The Lost Art of Making Things Last

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  The Lost Art of Making Things Last The most sustainable purchase is often the one you only have to make once. There was a time when buying something good meant expecting it to last. A tool was not bought for one job. A camera was not expected to be replaced the moment a newer model appeared. A boat was not abandoned because the varnish had failed or a fitting had worked loose. Science apparatus, if looked after, could serve generations of students. Previous generations did not always have a choice. Products were expensive, wages were lower, and replacing things casually was not an option. But there was also a different attitude. Things were repaired, sharpened, polished, serviced, protected and passed on. Today, we live in a world where replacement often feels easier than maintenance. A phone battery weakens and the whole device is replaced. A printer refuses to cooperate and ends up at the recycling centre. A cheap tool breaks and another cheap tool is bought. A perfectly usable...
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The World Is Getting Warmer — And We Need to Stop Pretending It Is Still a Debate

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  The World Is Getting Warmer — And We Need to Stop Pretending It Is Still a Debate There are some subjects where pretending to be balanced becomes a problem. If someone says it is raining and someone else says the sky is bone dry, the sensible response is not to stand in the garden with one hand out saying, “Well, both sides have a point.” You look at the evidence. You check the ground. You notice whether your socks are wet. Climate change is now rather like that. The world is getting warmer. The records are not vague. They are not hidden in a dusty filing cabinet guarded by a suspicious scientist in a white coat. They are measured by meteorological organisations, satellites, ocean buoys, weather stations, climate centres and independent scientific teams across the world. And the pattern is painfully clear. The warmest years on record are not scattered randomly across history. They are clustered in the very recent past. We are no longer talking about some distant theoretical probl...
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