It’s good to see Monty Don (Daily Mail Weekend Mag) extolling the virtues of native ivy. The bees adore it as do the butterflies and unsurprisingly the wasps, but at least they’re not around for quite so long. With the hawthorn/native hedge always comes native ivy and whilst it’s tempting to try to get rid of it, in a native hedge it accounts for a degree of thickening to promote privacy at eye level while fulfilling it’s role as friendly to wildlife and essential to insects. The trick is to gently keep it tidy and never ever “slash and burn” because if you do you’ll probably do it at the wrong time of year, and frankly that’s almost any time of year. All it needs is a regular gentle and careful tidy so that you’re not cutting off the flowers or the berries – easier said than done? absolutely, but entirely possible if you just take care.
Pests
If there’s one pest I’ve tried doggedly to deal with over the last three to four years it’s the Red Lilly Beetle (Lilioceris lilii). I can usually live and let live (maybe with the exception of the Vine Weevil grub) but these creatures hardly possess a redeeming feature, except perhaps their colour, and how adept they are at avoiding capture – they simply plummet into the greenery and are gone! So in the new year I’m accepting defeat, up to a point, mainly to protect my snakeshead fritillaries, which have survived up to now. I’ve removed most of my lilies from the ground except a clump of very pretty pink and yellow day-lilies and I’ve potted my favourite blousy Casa Blanca
(the one that smells like a tarts boudoir) and popped it in the greenhouse where I’ll attempt to protect it until it’s time to put it outside again. 
Maybe with fewer specimens to attack, the beetles that escaped a crushing this year, will clear off and plague my neighbours instead.
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