Buglife are pleased to announce their new partnership with Dutch bulb suppliers Jub Holland. Jub Holland will be contributing a share of all large scale planting proceeds towards the creation of the B-Lines network. To mark the partnership Jub Holland’s Tony Lindhout presented an initial cheque for £750 to Buglife Director Paul Hetherington in Central Park Peterborough (close to the Buglife head office) the scene of a complimentary 100m2 of bulb planting delivered by Jub Holland last Autumn, to mark the partnership.
Paul Hetherington of Buglife commented. “Buglife is delighted to be partnering with Jub Holland as bulbs play an important and ever increasing role in providing food for our precious pollinators. Ten years ago most pollinators would hibernate through the winter months; today they are active almost year round. Bulbs provide some of the only early month flowers to sustain them; snowdrops, crocuses, anemones, daffodils, tulips and many more varieties provide striking early season colour for residents of our towns and essential sustenance for local biodiversity.“
Tony Lindhout from Jub Holland added. “Our company was started in the Dutch bulb area in 1910 and we’ve been supplying our bulbs to local government, nurseries and landscapers in the UK for decades. In recent years more and more people have started to realise that Spring bulbs play such an important role in biodiversity. In Holland we’ve been working together with various organisations for many years, such as the Dutch Beekeepers Association and the Butterfly Foundation. Together with those organisations we developed various special biodiversity mixtures, and our new partnership with Buglife is very exciting. Their knowledge, contacts and expertise will enable us to expand our biodiversity mixtures even further”.
As part of the partnership Jub Holland have also developed a special Buglife approved planting mix for municipal scale planting that should provide continuous flowering from February through to June.
The B-Lines are a series of ‘insect pathways’ running through our countryside and towns, along which Buglife and partners are restoring and creating a series of wildflower-rich habitat stepping stones. They link existing wildlife areas together, creating a network, like a railway, that will weave across the British landscape. This will provide large areas of brand new habitat benefiting bees and butterflies– but also a host of other wildlife.
