Collie Ennis

just leave it alone let nature take its course if there's japanese knotweed down there somebody asked earlier on i believe about tackling japanese knotweed call someone in for that because the danger is in trying to be a good person and trying to do it yourself a tiny little piece of that gets moved somewhere else and it takes over you know it may be an important wilderness site or something

But call it in.

Make sure you call it in because councils are paranoid about that.

They want to make sure that it's under control.

But, you know, the best thing we can do for nature sometimes is leave it be with a little bit of hard management when it comes to invasives.

Does that make sense?

It does.

So you let nature do her thing, let the native plants, and the thing about the native plants, you're right, it's hard to get the seeds.

But sometimes if you just leave it alone, they'll show up.

I mean, the great success story we had was the rare orchids coming up on the front square of Trinity College.

Oh, tell us about that.

Yeah, so we stopped cutting the lawn in the inside gate.

So the outside gate of Trinity College, we stopped cutting the lawn a good few years ago.

We went to a vote in the college.

We asked the college community, would you be interested in doing something visual for nature to say, look, we're in a biodiversity crisis and we're going to try and make a difference.

90% of people said yes, which was very shocking to me.

I was delighted.

So we planted it out.

It's not all native, but it's very wildflower friendly and it served the purpose of making a statement at the time.

And we're learning as we go.