What's the point of a wasp? Or a midge, a horse fly, a tick, or a chicken mite the size of a full stop that gets into your ear while you're cleaning out the hens? Cue a deep sigh.
James Alexander-Sinclair and Joe Swift agree that biodiversity is a good thing. They are less sure about the bits of it that bite. So this week they go looking for the point of the creatures nobody puts on a tote bag, and find out whether "it's food for something else" really is the answer to everything.
Along the way: the strip of village green James is quietly annexing, a hedgehog spotted at four in the morning under circumstances Joe would rather not detail, five wasp stings at a French bottle bank, the spider lobbed out of a bedroom window at midnight, why Robert the Bruce means James has not killed a spider since, a squirrel with a mohican on Hampstead Heath, deer being repelled by motion-sensored water pistols, parakeets that may or may not be Jimi Hendrix's fault, and a piranha that bit back after it was already dead.
No conclusions were reached. Several were nearly reached.
TIMESTAMPS
00:00 Cold open
01:41 Summer's over, back to proper gardening
03:19 Letting a patch of village green go wild
05:32 What is biodiversity, actually?
08:24 What's the point of wasps?
11:47 Stung five times at the bottle bank
16:08 The spider in the bedroom
17:48 Robert the Bruce and his spider
20:55 Bitten by a squirrel
25:27 Chicken mites, the worst thing in the garden
30:00 Ticks, long grass and Lyme disease
33:46 Deer numbers and eaten roses
37:56 Parakeets and invasive species
44:47 Bitten by a piranha
To ask us a question email gnome@jamesandjoegarden.com or go to our website www.jamesandjoegarden.com
ABOUT OUR HOSTS
James Alexander-Sinclair is a garden designer, writer and broadcaster. He is an RHS Vice-President and was awarded the Veitch Memorial Medal for outstanding contribution to horticulture in 2022.
Joe Swift is a familiar face on television as a presenter of BBC TV's Gardeners' World and other gardening programmes. He is a garden designer, broadcaster, writer and design director of Modular.
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No dead plants. No dull questions. And no spiders out of the window, apparently.
