How green is your Gully

paulstrach

I live on an estate in the suburbs of Birmingham which was built in the early 50s all the houses have gardens and garages and sheds at the end of the garden or just fences, beyond this there is a gully for car access. As time wore on everyone stopped storing their cars overnight in the garage and now park their cars on their front drive. Twenty years ago security gates were installed so no one casually walks in the gully. Nature has now taken over this land and it is beautiful. It is full of wild flowers shrubs bushes and trees  at the back of their gardens. Today I saw ten different varieties of butterflies with stunning colours, red, blue, green, black. All the houses have these gullies and all have security gates which adds up to a fair amount of land in a urban setting which not many know or care about (which is a good thing for nature).        

paulstrach

1Runnybeak1 said:

That’s lovely Paul.  We were only saying the other day how we hadn’t seen any or many butterflies, Ladybirds, hover-flies etc this year.    It seems that you have them all over there.  You sure they haven’t escaped from the Botanical Gardens ?  😉 
I lived in B’ham most of my childhood life too.   Came from Nottingham and Skegness when I was 5-6 yrs old.  

I am going to take photo's as soon as I figure out how to transfer pictures from my i phone onto this web site

Fire

We have back allies all over our patch in North London that link the gardens and give theoretical back garden access. But long ago the council abandoned them (they own them). They were taken over by cat poo and foxes - now overgrown with brambles and bindweed and used for fly tipping. It struck me recently that these could be used as great wildlife corridors for hedgehogs, if holes were made in the gates. Most the gates are probably are falling apart anyway, so holes might be unnecessary.

Our community street group is full of mad people so I loathe to suggest it for fear of some random, crazy anti-hedgehog backlash. Rows would start about fly tipping and cats. But it's not a bad idea.