The petals have all fallen on the cherry blossoms but life is ramping up in a big way. All around Edinburgh plant life is exploding, and the once plain green carpets of grass are being filled with colour.

This is a time of weeds, wasps and butterflies. Species that get mixed reactions to say the least. While butterflies are loved for there beauty, and gentle grace, wasps and weeds are a nationwide pariah. I will admit, it is only fairly recently that I began to soften towards wasps. I started to consider they may play an important role I’m not aware of. And that is the thing about these unloved species. I believe we dislike them so much because we assume that they don’t serve a purpose. We tear up those weeds and kill all the wasps we can find because we see them as only a nuisance, but they are anything but.

Wasps

Like honeybees, wasps are incredibly important pollinators. And in a time of insect collapse, and fears for food security, a group of organisms essential for crop pollination are one we definitely want to protect. Not only do they pollinate but they also act as pest controllers. Without wasps certain insect species numbers would explode, such as aphids, spiders and caterpillars.

Ragwort

However, ragwort is widely viewed as public enemy number one in the farming community, especially those that own horses. Even many gardeners will enthusiastically pull them up because of the belief that it is highly poisonous, and a horse eating only a few plants will die. This is simply not the case. While it is poisonous, animals would have to eat it in very large quantities. And unless an animal was starving why would it eat a poisonous plant? It would taste terrible, and animals have evolved alongside these plants long before we came along.

So then, all those species you either ignored or disliked, why not have a closer look. Maybe not in the wasps case. In fact, walk a bit further. But for everything else, weeds, brambles, deadwood to name but a few, give them some of your time and I promise it will be worth it.