Surrey Homes | SH60 | October 2019 | Kitchen & Bathroom supplement inside

Above: Popular hawk moth
encourage this moth. Their hairy caterpillars feed off nettles,
dandelions, plantain, ground ivy and bramble. All plants that
the ‘tidy’ gardener might be strimming off as we speak. The
adult moth can be seen feeding off buddleias and borage in
the late summer months, as well as plants like Eupatorium
cannabinum, or hemp agrimony, an excellent late season
border plant with its clusters of pink flowers. There are
lovely, particularly decorative forms of this eupatorium,
including statuesque Eupatorium maculatum Atropurpureum
which has the darkest of flowers and purplish stems.
Moths are in the same insect order (Lepidoptera) as
butterflies and in fact make up 96 per cent of the
group. There are approximately 2,500 species of moth in
the UK and many of them have very specific caterpillar food
plants. European native plants species like hawthorn are great
attractants for moths and it’s always with a sinking feeling that
I see new builds being planted up with fast growing species,
such as laurel, rather than a good old native hedge. And like
other pollinators, moths do a valuable job of pollinating both
wild flowers, garden flowers and crops, as well as providing a
vital food source for bats. Many moth pollinated plants have
blooms which have evolved specifically to provide nectar
in return for which the moths cross pollinate the flowers.
Most ‘moth flowers’ tend to be either white or at least pale
in colour so that the moths can spot them as dusk approaches.
These would include highly scented flowers such as evening
primrose (Oenothera) and tobacco plants (Nicotiana). Some
of them have flowers with long tubes which exclude insects
with shorter tongues! Wild honeysuckle, for instance, has
a particularly long tube which excludes smaller insects and
is tailor made for larger moths. Silenes or campions are
particularly attractive to moths. Night scented catchfly, Silene
noctiflora, has pale pink flowers and is worth looking out for
if you want to encourage moths to your garden or meadow.
They are a late summer flowerer and look good in a border
but would be growing more naturally with knapweeds,
field scabious, meadow cranesbill and musk mallow.
Three years after the Kent Wildlife Trust provided
us with, and helped sow, some yellow rattle, otherwise
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