Volunteers at the Clerkenwell Pollinator Path project have been busy this summer, and lots more is planned as the nights draw in…
By Sarah Wood
On a warm summer’s evening in Clerkenwell, with the hosepipe ban hanging over us, a group of us gathered in the gardens at The Charterhouse to do something quietly radical. We made ponds. Small ones. The kind you could fit on a balcony, tuck into a paved corner, or sink into a raised bed in a community garden.
The workshop was led by Jack Jeans, Garden Education Officer at Walworth Garden, and it brought together London National Park City rangers and Clerkenwell Pollinator Path volunteers. The Pollinator Path is stitching flowering spaces together across Clerkenwell so bees and butterflies can move through the city. Ponds are the missing piece of that puzzle. Water is where a huge amount of urban life begins, and it is disappearing fast.
Jack spent the evening busting a few myths. You do not need a big garden. You do not need fish, which actually eat the invertebrates and amphibian eggs you are trying to attract. And you do not need pumps, filters or endless maintenance. A wildlife pond mostly wants to be left alone.
A few ideas stuck with me.
Container ponds are made for London. Where the ground is paved, polluted or full of buried services, you simply build the pond up instead of digging it down. An old butler sink, a half barrel, a bucket or a trug will do.
Keep it clean and keep it hungry. The single most common mistake is adding rich soil, which floods the water with nutrients and turns it green with algae and duckweed. Wash the compost off your plants, plant into washed sand and shingle, and top up with rainwater rather than tap.
The edges are everything. The richest life is found in the shallows and at the margins. A wavy edge holds far more habitat than a neat circle, and a bumpy profile creates a drawdown zone that shifts and changes through the seasons.
You can see some of the mini-ponds we made in St John’s Garden by Farringdon and in the pollinator garden at the Quentin Blake Centre. Small but mighty!
Moving into autumn, volunteers along the Clerkenwell Pollinator Path are starting to plan and plant for the year ahead. We’re focused on selecting long-flowering, drought-resistant species we can grow together across the neighbourhood and in our new community plant nursery at The Edible Yard, tucked away behind St Luke’s Community Centre.
If you’d like to help create and care for pollinator-friendly patches in your neighbourhood, there are plenty of ways to get involved. If you like eating cake, drinking coffee and sharing ideas, come on over to our Housewarming Garden Party at The Edible Yard, 1pm-4pm on Thursday, September 24th. If you prefer a gentle stroll, join us for “Where the Wild Bees Live,” a guided walk through Clerkenwell’s green spaces, exploring pollinator habitats on the way.
If summer was about mini ponds and hosepipe bans, this autumn is all about mini-pots and sowing the seeds of change. Pollinator populations across the UK have been decimated over recent decades, badly affected by deadly pesticides and disappearing habitats. We can change that story in Clerkenwell if we come together now.
We’re excited to be working with local groups this autumn and spring to plant up twenty “pollinator pitstops” in EC1, filling unloved planters and forgotten corners with nectar-rich flowers, spring bulbs, and wildflower seeds to feed bees and butterflies throughout the seasons, helping us on our mission to have a pollinator pitstop every 100m in Clerkenwell. If you have a space in mind and you’d like to help care for a pollinator pitstop on your street, drop us a line at [email protected] and let’s hatch a plan 🙂 You can find out about the events and workshops mentioned above on Eventbrite and Instagram @clerkenwellpollinatorpath and find out more about the project here.
