Wildlife at the heart of the City: the Beth Chatto Meanwhile Garden

The county of Essex, much maligned, has a rich diversity of wildlife and wild places, with its coastlines and ancient woodlands widely recognised as of the greatest priority and value. But a close third to these are its brownfield sites, a legacy of the proximity to London and a gentle topography, ripe for development.

‘Brownfield’ or ‘previously developed’, call them what you will except ‘wasteland’. These places are anything but wasteland, full of wildlife, and bringing the benefits and joys of green into the lives of anyone who lives nearby, especially important to those of limited mobility.

Brownfield sites come and go with the ebb and flow of development, abandonment and redevelopment. Each is unique as a response to its history and locality. Each contains a unique mix of plants species, a multicultural mix of plants from around the world, that generally arrive under their own steam (eg members of the daisy family and willowherbs with long-distance wind-dispersal) or emerge spontaneously from a long-buried seed bank.

The latest addition to the ranks of Essex brownfields is the Beth Chatto Meanwhile Garden in Colchester. For many years a bus station, when demolished it became an area of urban rewilding. But then a partnership between Colchester City Council and Beth Chatto Gardens saw the arrival of the gardening influence, to enrich it botanically for human and insect visitors alike, and to hold back the march of monoculture (especially buddleja and ailanthus) which would overwhelm its open sunny biodiversity in a matter of years if left unchecked.

To some eyes it may not look much like a garden: bare ground, rubble, twisted and rusting metal, a mix of planted specimens and things that have just moved themselves in. But that’s Nature for you, and why should the ‘trimmed and tidied, primped and preened’ look be seen as desirable compared with this unplanned urban jungle full of life?

The summer of 2025 represented the first full summer of the Meanwhile Garden since its creation in 2024. We followed its colonisation by insect and invertebrate life with monthly visits from April to September in fine weather. Each visit was only an hour long so this must be regarded as only scratching the surface of its biodiversity, a series of spot-surveys that nevertheless revealed lots of interest.

Any new habitat has to be colonised, and unless it is right next door to an existing habitat, insects are more likely to find it if they are powerful fliers. Many butterflies and moths are therefore good colonisers, and included Painted Lady among the array of summer butterflies, attracted especially to Buddleja davidii, often known as Butterfly-bush.

Moth colonists included three species with very distinctive caterpillars. The black-and-yellow-spotted Mullein Moth is common everywhere, while the Toadflax Brocade, more stripy but a similar colour pattern, is a relatively recent recolonist of the UK, and a specialist of brownfield sites and gardens in the south-east. Similarly the green Small Ranunculus, wonderfully camouflaged among the dead flowers of its foodplant prickly lettuce: extinct in the middle of the 20^th century but now on brownfield sites across southern Britain.

Given the lack of water in the Meanwhile Garden, all damselflies must have come some distance from their breeding ponds and rivers. We found two species, the Common Blue Damselfly (below) and Azure Damselfly.

But not everything flies so well. Take spiders: they have no wings. But there were plenty around the garden in the first summer, presumably having arrived on the wind as spiderlings, ballooning on silken strands. Three of the species we found were the Zebra Jumping-spider, Cucumber Spider and Gorse Orbweaver, the latter more typically associated with heathlands.

Bagworms are moths that spend most of their lives in a silk bag adorned with bits of their environment. Indeed females spend all their life in the bag. So they don’t fly. Grasshoppers can fly but not far, so to find three species suggests they have come from a nearby grassland. And Firebugs, another new arrival in the UK, are generally wingless. So how did these get to this brand-new site? Of course, there are lots of people passing by and through the garden, so it may be that the visitors inadvertently bring hitchhikers on their footwear or clothing.

Visiting the flowers throughout the summer were many bees and wasps, attracted especially to the plants introduced by the Beth Chatto team. The selection below includes rare species, some brownfield specialists, and all are pollinators: particular note should be made of the Spined Mason Bee, Little Blue Carpenter Bee, and Pantaloon Bee, all of which are very scarce in the county, found mainly in the Thames-side brownfields. Bee Wolf was similarly rare until its recent explosive spread northwards, fuelled by climate change. All could well be breeding around the site, but one we know certainly is, the also-scarce Four-banded Flower-bee, taking advantage of the bee-hotel.

I could go on through all other taxonomic groups - flies, beetles, bugs and the rest - and pick out special features of the garden in the same detail as the above. But suffice to say that in its first summer, Colchester’s Meanwhile Garden was packed with biodiversity, species both common and rare, many specialists of brownfield habitats and many that have benefited from climate change and are spreading northwards using these stepping stones in the landscape. The insects are using all members of the brownfield plant community, the showy garden plants especially for nectar and pollen and the spontaneous flora as larval food plants.

Our final sighting to mention is one of the most surprising to us. July 2025 will be long remembered for the almost unprecedented influx of ladybirds and hoverflies to coastal Essex, probably from the continent. Sadly, the influx which lasted about a week didn’t coincide with one of our surveys. But two weeks later we could still see its remnants, with Seven-spot and Harlequin Ladybirds in abundance (although the latter seemed not to feature among the hordes of incomers).

But what attracted our attention was the number of a much smaller beastie, Adonis Ladybird. This is another scarce species in Essex, and one that seems to be concentrated close to the Thames, on brownfield sites and arable margins. Prior to this visit we had seen only a bare handful ever in Essex, and the first record from Beth Chatto Gardens was during the influx two weeks earlier. But in the Meanwhile Garden we found dozens, in the July and two subsequent surveys. Most were found on Fennel and Teasel, conveniently at eye-level, but they were everywhere. Will this be carried over to the second full summer? We hope to find out, continuing these surveys for the whole of the coming summer. And we do expect to see changes, some species lost, others appearing: the dynamic lifeblood at the heart of brownfield biodiversity.

The Beth Chatto Meanwhile Garden is a brownfield site like no other, at the interface between natural urban habitat development and gardening. We have no idea how long it will last: the idea of a Meanwhile Garden is that it represents a productive use of and area of land that may ultimately be destined for development. If it ends up being lost, that would be a sad loss for the city centre, but we can at least be happy that the site has pulled its weight for the natural world in the interregnum, and formed an inviting, attractive talking point about the way we want our urban surroundings to look.

Chris & Jude Gibson (with thanks to other occasional surveyors – David Gates, Eleanor Mucklow and Angie Reid)