Where have all the pollinators gone?

Our pollinators are in crisis, with populations declining across the board – Monty reveals why we must take urgent action and what we can do, even in the smallest garden

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I was brought up in the deep shadow of World War Two. Like so many veterans, my father, who fought every day of the six years of war, being blown up at Dunkirk, joining the new Commandos and finishing up in the Burmese jungle, never spoke about it. But he was prone to deep depressions and violent rages and the only time he ever seemed to be truly at ease with the world was when he was with other veterans.

By the time I came along – 10 years after he came out of the jungle – I was fed a diet of comic-book heroes and films and the enduring myth of this plucky, sceptred isle holding out against the dastardly Hun. But certain songs would come on the radio and fill the room with a sadness so deep that even I, a small child, could sense my parents forcibly holding back their emotions. The voice of Kathleen Ferrier was always a trigger but I particularly recall Marlene Dietrich singing Where Have All The Flowers Gone?, opening a window onto a profound, inconsolable grief.

Well, my parents have themselves gone to the graveyard, long time ago. There is hardly anyone left alive now to remember the war and my garden is filled with flowers. Wounds have healed. My generation has known unprecedented peace and prosperity although it seems, for all our good fortune, we have not learned very much. But where have all the pollinators gone? We gardeners have been exhorted to “plant for pollinators” and many of us have done so, thinking that we were both doing our bit for ecology as well as making beauty, in the process. But the alarm bells are ringing among those that monitor these things and should be sounding loud and clear for all of us, because pollinator numbers are dangerously low and falling.