BRITAIN is a nation of gardeners. Over the Easter weekend, millions of us
will dig out our trowels and potter among the daffodils and crocuses. We鈥檒l
visit our local garden centres in droves to pick up potting compost, herbaceous
shrubs and the like. The more energetic among us may even embark on building a
new garden pond or rockery. We simply cannot resist trying to recreate the
countryside in miniature in our own back yards.
It seems benign, but gardening is big business and some of the profits come
from plundering the natural environment, including some of Britain鈥檚 most
endangered habitats. Garden centres routinely get supplies from people who
illegally uproot wild bulbs, take JCBs to ancient, water-worn limestone pavement
and strip peat from moorland sites of special scientific interest (SSSI).
Geologists and botanists are so concerned about this environmental carnage that
they have started a campaign to persuade people to stop buying rare natural
products ripped from the British countryside. This Easter, activists from some
of the country鈥檚 leading wildlife organisations will be out in force at over a
hundred garden centres and DIY stores to spread the message.
The more clandestine trade in illegally uprooted wild flowers may prove hard
to stem. The practice is usually illegal in Britain unless you have permission
from the owner of the land from where the bulbs were taken. But the law, it
seems, is no deterrent. 鈥淧eople only rarely get caught,鈥� says Peter Spencer, a
botanist with English Nature, the government鈥檚 conservation custodians. He
estimates sales of wild bulbs are worth around 拢1 million annually.
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Most notorious is the orchid trade. Last October, someone dug up 200 wild
orchids, including the bee orchid, southern marsh orchid and common spotted
orchid, from two sites near Nottingham, one an SSSI. Peter Stone, director of
the county鈥檚 wildlife trust, puts the bulbs鈥� value at over 拢1000. 鈥淭his
was a professional operation,鈥� he says. 鈥淭he flowers were not in bloom. The
thieves knew what they were after.鈥�
More common plants are also traded on a large scale. Last November,
magistrates at King鈥檚 Lynn in Norfolk convicted two men of uprooting no fewer
than 25 000 snowdrop bulbs in a single night. Police found the freshly dug bulbs
in a car early one morning after a routine stop. The men were fined a total of
拢250鈥攁 penny a bulb.
Wild snowdrops are openly sold in nurseries, especially in Norfolk, where the
tradition of collecting wild flowers is still strong. Spencer complains that
some local nurseries sells boxes of snowdrops labelled 鈥渉arvested from the wild
under the woodland code鈥�. 鈥淏ut I鈥檝e never been able to get a copy of the code,鈥�
he says. There is 鈥渁 wall of silence in the retail trade鈥�, agrees Miles King,
conservation officer at the conservation group Plantlife. 鈥淓verybody knows there
is illegality behind much of the trade in wild bulbs, but nobody wants to
颈苍惫别蝉迟颈驳补迟别.鈥�
The biggest wild bulb market in England is for bluebells. Spencer uncovered a
big haul in 1992. 鈥淭hey dug up about 40 hectares, using a Rotovator,鈥� he says.
鈥淚 brought in experts from the University of East Anglia, who said it would take
a hundred years for the bluebell population to recover in that spot.鈥� But the
owner of the bluebell wood gave his retrospective permission for the heist and
the case had to be dropped.
King believes the government is about to offer extra protection for
bluebells. During the current review of the operation of the Wildlife and
Countryside Act, the government鈥檚 Joint Nature Conservation Committee is set to
recommend in October that bluebells be listed under schedule 8 of the act, which
will make it illegal to take any bluebell from the wild for the purposes of
trade without a licence, regardless of the wishes of any landowner. 鈥淚t鈥檚 an
important victory,鈥� says King. 鈥淏ut now we want the same for snowdrops.鈥�
The problem is not just home-grown, however. International trade in exotic
species is even more lucrative. 鈥淭he bulb trade involves literally millions of
wild-collected plants each year,鈥� reported Martin Jenkins and Sara Oldfield a
few years ago in a study for TRAFFIC, which tracks trade in wildlife. Much of
the trade is illegal under both national and international law.
According to Jenkins, in Turkey alone, tens of millions of snowdrops,
cyclamen, anemones and other bulbs are dug from natural bulb fields every year.
They are distributed through Europe via the Netherlands, the hub of Europe鈥檚
bulb industry. The most traded snowdrop species, Galanthus elwesii, is
widespread in Turkey, but with 15 million exported to Europe each year 鈥渋n some
areas populations have virtually disappeared,鈥� says Jenkins. Meanwhile, Portugal
sells millions of miniature daffodils and small narcissi. And there is
widespread trade in wild air plants such as Tillandsia ionantha from
Guatemala and Venus鈥檚-flytrap, Dionaea muscipula, from the US.
Paved paradise
Jenkins is concerned that demand for such plants is beginning to overwhelm
supply. And as cultivated snowdrops look much the same as wild ones, how can
gardeners be persuaded not to support the illegal trade?
But customers should have no such problems identifying the characteristic
water-worn appearance of limestone pavements. In the wild, these bare expanses
of rock were originally exposed when glaciers scoured away the soil during the
last ice age. Since the retreat of the ice 10 000 years ago, rainwater flowing
over the limestone surface has eroded fissures to form deep crevices known as
grikes, and smoothed the intervening stone into blocks called clints. The
pavements are both geological and botanical treasures. The grikes form
sheltered, miniature gardens where many unusual plants thrive, including ferns,
orchids, violets and wild thyme.
There are around 2600 hectares of limestone pavement in Britain, mostly high
in the Lake District and Yorkshire Dales, though also at sea level round
Morecambe Bay. But, according to Simon Webb of English Nature, only 3 per cent
of the sites are undamaged. And gardeners are to blame. They pay more than
拢100 a tonne for the stone, often using it to recreate the original
habitat in their own rockeries.
In theory, limestone pavement is protected under the European Union鈥檚
Habitats Directive, which lists it as a habitat requiring protection. In
addition, most pavements are within SSSIs鈥擝ritain鈥檚 main category of
protected habitats. The majority are now also covered by Limestone Pavement
Orders made under the Wildlife and Countryside Act, which specifically ban
removal or destruction of stone. But under British law, old planning permissions
have priority over environmental law, unless government conservation agencies or
local authorities such as the national parks buy out the permissions by paying
compensation, or by purchasing the land. There have never been any prosecutions
under the Limestone Pavement Orders, says Webb.
Clive Kirkbride at Yorkshire Dales National Park is currently negotiating to
buy Winskill Stones, an area of pavement high above the Settle to Carlisle
railway line in the Yorkshire Dales. Rough sheep pasture on this bleak hilltop
sells for under 拢5 a hectare. But farmer Alec Robinson has planning
permission to carry on heaving stone from his 30 hectares of pavement until
2042. The market force of thousands of British gardeners have allowed him to
demand around 拢200 000鈥攎ore than a thousand times the land鈥檚 value
without the mineral rights.
Kirkbride said yes. The pavement was that important. But that was three years
ago. He has secured a 拢120 000 grant from the Lottery Fund, but still
needs the balance to clinch the deal. 鈥淢inisters say it is our job to negotiate
compensation terms, but they don鈥檛 give us any money to do it,鈥� he says. He is
hoping that Plantlife may be able to come up with the money.
In the next county, Lord Lonsdale, who owns much of the Lake District between
Penrith and Kendal, has been more magnanimous. Lonsdale, a former chairman of
the Lake District Naturalists鈥� Trust, has decided that after a century of
destruction, stone-hewing will halt this year at Orton Scar limestone pavement,
part of the Asby pavement complex in the southern Lake District.
Despite these victories for conservation, in Britain there are still seven
full-scale limestone quarries from which contractors remove pavement. And
illegal fly-by-night quarrying also continues. 鈥淪ince 1990, there has been
proven damage to 13 pavement sites and reported damage to eight others,鈥� says
Webb. 鈥淵ou only need a digger for a few hours to make several hundred pounds.鈥�
Favourite places are clearings in the wooded pavements of Arnside and Silverdale
on the shores of Morecambe Bay, designated an area of outstanding natural
beauty, where diggers can work undetected among the trees. 鈥淚 have seen diggers
painted with camouflage working in there,鈥� says Webb.
The garden centre protesters who will be pleading with gardeners to stop
buying limestone are also targeting another rare natural feature being ripped
from the British countryside: peat. Stand in the middle of Hatfield Chase near
Doncaster, and around you lies one of the largest stretches of uninhabited land
in lowland England. It is, or was, a thousand hectares of peat bog that has
gradually grown from the remains of sphagnum moss in the ten millennia since the
end of the last ice age. Now, says Stephen Warburton of the Yorkshire Wildlife
Trust, thanks to the gardeners of Britain, it is a wasteland. 鈥淪tanding here,鈥�
he says, 鈥渋t is hard to believe that this is an SSSI, where nightjars are
supposed to breed undisturbed, where archaeological remains await
诲颈蝉肠辞惫别谤测.鈥�
But the vegetation and surface layers of peat have been removed for
kilometres in every direction by giant milling machines on rails that peel away
the peat, layer after layer, to be poured into bags, shipped to garden centres
and sold to gardeners as a growing medium鈥攖o hasten the growth of their
tomatoes and potted plants.
In 1950, large-scale industrialised peat cutting began on Hatfield Chase and
neighbouring Thorne Moors. Following growing anger from environmentalists,
English Nature and Levington Horticulture, who had acquired the land from
Fisons, signed a deal in 1994 that would permanently protect about 10 per cent
of Hatfield Chase and half of Thorne Moors. But, under the same deal, the peat
millers will continue their remorseless removal of those parts where cutting is
already under way. Even so, the deal is bound to increase the pressure for peat
cutting to intensify elsewhere.
Bogged down
Some gardeners are switching to alternatives but, according to a recent study
for the Department of the Environment, 2.5 million cubic metres of peat are used
in Britain each year, an increase of 20 per cent since 1988. Amateur gardeners
use 60 per cent of this and the industry expects them to be using more each
year, certainly into the next century.
The Peat Producers Association says that, unless gardeners cut their demand,
they will want to open new 鈥渕ajor peat production sites鈥� to replace the 4000
hectares that will come out of production in the next 20 years. Yet, according
to government scientists, there are only 6000 hectares of intact lowland peat
bogs in Britain. 鈥淥ur overriding aim is to diminish the demand for peat so that
the value of these bogs falls and there is a greater chance of production being
stopped,鈥� says Warburton.
Somehow, gardening, a domestic celebration of our links with the natural
world, has turned into a quasi-industrial operation, sustained by peat,
limestone pavement and bulbs ripped from the wild. Jeremy Purseglove,
environmental consultant, calls such acts 鈥渢he ecological equivalent of knocking
down a cathedral and using the dust to line the garden path鈥�. Maybe it鈥檚 time
for the vandals of suburbia to reassess their relationship with the world beyond
their garden fence.