Genuinely upset at this wildflower destruction

[pelargoniums]

Live in a loooooong terrace that backs on to another similarly long terrace, with a twitten between the streets. All the gardens have a gate onto the twitten for access, but no one uses it for actual access: at one end, street access is bricked up; at the other, it’s so far from most of the houses and emerges on the road with nightmare parking so even if you clear your garden, you get the lads to go through the house because big work trucks can’t get down that road. Plus every spring it becomes impenetrable with overgrown plants and wildlife.

Most of my neighbours keep a compost bin, leaf mould, narrow tool storage etc out there. A general “live and let live” attitude prevails so if you put a tool store out, you stagger it against your opposite neighbour’s so everyone can have space.

And it’s lovely! Behind ours I have compost and leaf mould, plus wildflowers naturally – I’ve never planted anything but there was six foot tall cow parsley, green alkanet, bluebells, loads of things I can’t identify. DC spend a lot of time there bug hunting, it attracts loads of butterflies – the caterpillarfest in spring was amazing – birds, field mice.

The neighbours opposite have razed the lot. Not only on “their” side but mine. They don’t garden, theirs is fully paved. No reason to do this – they can’t get out through a bricked wall and they’ve left the next space along alone, which is solidly rose/bramble/thicket. A whole mini habitat gone. Now it’s just bare earth for the neighbourhood cats to poo in.

AIBU to be gutted but more importantly, how to respond?! I’d love to do a line of pleached trees in the twitten to block them from my sight but they’d only chop them down I think, and also £££. More wildflowers, obviously. While the land is bare the kids want to paint a mural on the wall saying Save Our Wildflowers & Our Planet (because I suggested it to them 😂) and paint butterflies, ladybirds, bees. Or something permanent/evergreen and purposeful on my side that won’t encroach over their half of the space, but is clearly meant to be there – as they obviously felt the natural aspect of the wildflowers was too much nature – but still pollinator-friendly. Japanese hogweed? 😈

I would be devastated if I were you OP, fucking devastated

😄They're just weeds!

You're showing yourself up with your ignorance there.

I challenge you to get a wildflower guide and start identifying these "weeds". You'll find there can be dozens of species of beautiful wildflowers growing in a tiny urban space. And then you can start looking up all the insects that rely on these "weeds". (Just as one example- hate nettles? Well, we wouldn't have beautiful tortoiseshell butterflies without them).

And in your researches, you might hear tell of something called "catastrophic insect decline", and the impact that that is having on beautiful birds like swifts, mammals like bats, and- ultimately- on our food supply.

Or maybe you'll just spray the glyphosate around your sterile garden again and moan about food prices going up....🙄

@crackofdoom Well said. Human centric ignorance at its worst.

Twitchell, ginnel or jitty here in Notts.

Vennel, here. Tenfoot where I grew up.

About 18 months ago we had someone dog rough but unaware of it move in nearby. She's all plastic lawn and decking and gravel and even has plastic plants and plastic flowers in the garden. That would be bad enough, but her prerogative; however, she moans about everyone who has actual plants and grass and trees in their garden. Gardens with a bit of nature in them are messy and unclean and attract birds (evil!) and vermin, apparently. (Although, I'm inclined to think that any vermin are more likely to be attracted by her munching crisps as she chainsmokes out the front in her dressing gown, myself.) One of my neighbours has the most beautiful fairytale front garden with a big tree and wildflowers and weathered Edwardian urns and benches to go with the house, and she hates it. There seems to be this modern trend for outdoor spaces to be horribly sterile and controlled.

I’m one of the only ones on my street who still has a garden full of nature, so many people love the sterile look now

OP I would be really upset too. I hate seeing unnecessary destruction of nature like that. I think a lot of people don’t understand that wildflowers and native ‘weeds’ aren’t a bad thing and just assume they all need to be chopped down without realising how important they are to the ecosystem.

I think you could put some pots out there and plant them with wildflowers so it’s more obvious that it’s deliberate. You could put up a bee / bug hotel, a bee / butterfly bath etc. Your DCs could make a ‘bug hotel’ sign. So not as brazen as painting the whole fence.

I remember we had two lovely trees on the road outside our house and the council had to chop them down as they were diseased. DD cried when she saw the stump! The road looked so bare.
One neighbour came up to excitedly tell me how great it was the tree outside their house had finally gone as they were fed up with leaves on their car.

Well yes that’s true, but I am sure you will also be moaning about how hot the city gets in summer / how you don’t get so many birds or butterflies in the garden any more / how bad the pollution is etc.

Anyway we helped pay for a new street tree to be planted and the DC helped water it (every week for at least 2 years) so something positive came from it.

Same here, more and more front gardens on my street are completely paved. it’s so sterile.
Mine is all planted up and wild looking, I love seeing the birds in the tree and the insects on the flowers. Plus it helps my house stay cooler in hot weather.

Actually bindweed is a UK wildflower and very beneficial to wildlife and provides food for pollinators. Yes it does spread easily and is often unwelcome in planted gardens, but the RHS says if you have a wild planted area it’s fine to leave it.

(Unlike non-native invasive species like Japanese knotweed for example which does need to be removed).

https://www.rhs.org.uk/weeds/bindweed

Lots of food for thought here! Thanks everyone. Especially the side chat about different names for twitten 🩷

Fire escape wise it didn’t even occur to me – our last house was a terrace in London back to back with other terraces, no twitten/jitty/ginnel. I’d do what we’d do there: hop the wall to my neighbour’s garden. One more wall over is end of terrace and escape.

Most neighbours have very wild and wildlife-friendly gardens, I’m not the harbinger of weeds. I started our garden just a year ago from nothing, it was entirely paved before. Any “weeds” I have are blown in. Apart from the daisies and buttercups and such in the lawn: a kind neighbour dug up clumps of things from his grass and we transplanted in. And the wildflowers in our bit of the twitten probably easier to run through than the patch next door which has some kind of tree growing…

I think a bug hotel, pots, hedgehog home and bird feeders is the way to go: keep it looking intentional and structurally slim against my wall, but planted up with lots of pollinator-friendly things.

On a cow parsley note there’s something that looks identical on the council-owned triangular verge at the end of the road – will go and look later to identify it and look for purple bits on the stems.

I’ve cheered up a bit about our patch of the twitten – next door’s bit still looks like this, and I’ve got the chance to explore planting some of the flowers one of the early posters mentioned. A new gardening project! Haven’t finished all of the old gardening projects.

Sorry OP, I’m not in the tidy brigade and love gardening but that does look like a mess to me and I can see why your neighbours cleared it if that’s what it looked like.

What a lovely area.
Put up a couple of signs "Nature area", "Nature lives here" to help others see the beauty in wild things.
Don't worry about the bit of bare wall, quite a lot of creatures do like the warmth that they bring and he has left the moss on it.

What the fuck?
I can guess what type of gardener you are!
Neat lines of marigolds and lobelia around a lawn aka 1975.

OPs area is a stunning little biodiverse and wild plot. Stop embarrassing yourself.

@Candleabra Ours was even wilder than that! 😂 It’ll come back, green alkanet can’t be stopped by nuclear bombs.

My patch is now this. Corrugated plastic was buried under it all so I can get rid of that at least before everything grows back. The thicket beyond is the next neighbour along; beyond it, a few houses on, the twitten is bricked up – I really don’t think access was the goal.

Ah that is a shame. Having lived in lots of terraced houses I’m still struggling with the idea of the alley at the back not being accessible but it’s clearly not used for access where you are. Have fun with your planting.

I don't get it either and would upset me. We see wild, they see weeds.

At present I have 2 vases of different peonies in my sitting room. By far the most beautiful though is a vase of ethereal looking, dill seed heads. I saved them to spray gold and silver for Christmas decorations along with allium seed heads.

The dill is so beautiful I won't be spraying them. I can't ruin that natural beauty.
I do wish I was an artist though so I could paint a watercolour of them.
If your destructive neighbours saw my dill, they'd consider I had a vase of dead flowers.

i would be upset too but nature grows! Would definitely explore pollinator hotels - solitary bee bricks etc can be made easily. Even better if you can add little dishes for collecting water esp in shadier spots

your brick wall to the left would lend itself to trailing baskets from the top too if you were doing intentional willing i wonder if you might consider brambles - we’ve managed to make our back fence very fruitful!

given how small my own garden is this would become a prized reading spot with a small bench!

Oh OP I think you will be able to make it lovely and wild again. As you say it’s a chance to clear any plastic.

We’ve been watching Springwatch with DS and I enjoyed the ‘Springwatch Street’ part where they showed how much nature and biodiversity you can have in terraced back gardens in a city. It looked like lots of the neighbours really tried to encourage nature, and when they set up cameras were amazed by all the animals that visited the gardens at night like hedgehogs, foxes, even badgers, particularly in wild areas like your twitten.
It’s made me resolve to have my garden less tidy!

I love the idea shared earlier of getting all the neighbours together for a rewilding project. Then you could come up with a pretty design that everybody likes, get all the children involved and learning about wildlife, and it becomes a community project.After all, the lane belongs to everybody so they should get to input on how it is used. Plus, you’d be less likely to come home one day to find a neighbour has weeded out all the wildflowers..,

Looks much better now

It’s an extension to the outside world of the MN obsession with deep-cleaning their houses daily and washing their towels after one use.

Insects are vital to humans and animals.

Well, just animals in fact!