Most gardeners, presented with a quarter-acre pocket of arable land with which to do exactly as they wish, would almost certainly fill it with plants. Not Adam Hunt. Having recently acquired one small corner of a field next to his cottage in Somerset in the south of England, this award-winning garden designer is instead using it to create a habitat for glow worms.
These bioluminescent beetles are also known as fireflies, and their nocturnal mating habits are distinguished by the adult female glow worms’ near-magical ability to give off a strange, otherworldly green glow at night to attract a mate. They are native to all of Europe except Ireland (such a shame), but they’re in steep decline in the UK, their populations increasingly fragmented as a result of habitat loss, climate change, light pollution and the widespread use of pesticides.
By his own admission, Hunt’s plan has presented him with what some would consider a horticultural paradox. The glow worm larvae’s primary food source is slugs and snails, both of which it needs to eat in vast quantities if it’s to reach
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