Planting Change: Leigh Biagi’s Path to Pollinators (Ep. 60)

In a world where native bees and biodiversity are threatened, change can start with a simple shift in perspective, a spark of inspiration, or a moment of serendipitous clarity. Leigh Biagi’s journey encapsulates all these elements, illustrating how passion channeled into action can transform communities and the environment. 

Our story weaves through Leigh’s creation of the organization On the Verge, aimed at establishing wildflower corridors throughout local areas and continues through her partnership with RePollinate, who spearheaded On the Verge’s Beds for Bees program and continues to champion bee-rich spaces throughout Scotland. Listen in for some inspiring actionable advice for every advocate.

Good to know

Leigh mentioned that studies have proven their method of sowing wildflowers increases biodiversity and attracts more pollinators than traditional areas with short, mown grass. You can learn more about what this study found here.  

Transcript

Jacy: [00:00:00] Welcome to the Bees Knees. A podcast wild about native bees. Wild and native bees are under threat worldwide. In each episode, we look at actionable things we can do to support these adorable little guys whose pollination work is crucial for maintaining biodiversity. I’m Jacy Meyer, and I thank you for being here.

Action is the antidote to despair. Those words spoken by Joan Baez resonate deeply. In a world where environmental challenges can feel overwhelming sometimes all it takes is one small step to spark meaningful change. In today’s episode, we meet Leigh Biagi whose journey from hearing about Bumblebee decline on a local radio program to founding a bee focused nonprofit is both inspiring and empowering. Leigh’s story.

is a reminder that passion paired with action can transform [00:01:00] communities, I hope her wisdom leaves you motivated just like it did me. So let’s talk about the day in 2010. When you first heard about Bumblebee decline, you made a dramatic pivot from acting to environmental studies. Why was this so important for you?

Leigh: Well, I mean, in full disclosure, I do both. I’ve run both things alongside each other for, for the past sort of 15 years. So the day in 2010, yeah, it was a sort of convergence of a number of different things that have been happening in my life. I had started an environmental studies degree with the Open University, so that opened my eyes quite a lot to environmental degradation, and I largely had my head in my hands quite a lot of the time in despair.

I’m a really keen gardener, so even though I did that time have quite a big garden, I decided to kind of adopt a little bit of verge outside my garden and I’d sewn in some [00:02:00] wild flower. Actually, I think it’s probably more a pictorial mix just to see what happened. And it had come up beautifully and I’d noticed it was buzzing with pollinator activity and a lot of people were remarking on it.

I thought that’s a, a nice thing to do. And then the most sort of. I suppose significant thing was I was in my kitchen one morning making packed lunches, listening to the radio, and I heard Dave Golson talking. Now you may know he’s one of our foremost experts on bumblebee conservation, and he does a lot of media stuff.

He’s a great guy, and he was based in Stirling where I was living. At the time he was based at university and he was talking about pollinator population decline. And I had noticed in my own garden a lot of dead bumblebees, but in retrospect, I think that might have been a bird attack. But it puzzled me and he was sort of talking about declining numbers and how some species of bumblebee had already gone extinct and others were on the verge of extinction.

And that was the [00:03:00] key phrase that leapt out at me and I thought, God, that would be a really good name. For a bee conservation project, somebody should definitely do that. And um, as the day went on that the idea kind of percolated in my brain and I sort of came up with a sort of a vague plan. It just sort of came fully formed.

And I spoke to a friend who was already working in the environmental sector and she said, oh, I think that’s a good idea. Let’s get a group together, see what we can do. And that’s what we did. And so from that, listening to the radio. And I think also because I was studying the environment, thinking, oh, you know, action is the antidote to despair.

It just sort of happened.

Jacy: It’s amazing where these sparks come from sometimes, isn’t it? Yeah. So you and this group of friends launched On the Verge. What were your goals for it in the beginning?

Leigh: Well, in the beginning, what we wanted to do was sort of establish a corridor of wildflower [00:04:00] sites throughout the local area.

It was kind of no more ambitious than that really. That did seem very ambitious at the time. And of course subsequently, you know, Bug Life have got wonderful beelines projects and, and that’s much more of a thing. And so initially we thought in order to get that geographic spread, we target schools because that automatically offers you that.

And also the added advantage in that we’re working with the kids and we’re getting the message across. And because back then it wasn’t what it’s now, which is much more current and people are very much more aware. Although people were aware it wasn’t quite so front foreground, so we targeted the local schools and.

Initially my concern was that one of the challenges might be that people wouldn’t want to engage, but that was completely wrong. People really did want to engage. So in that first year, I think we signed up something like seven schools, which looking back now is a bit ambitious because we didn’t have any idea how we were gonna make this happen.

And there are a lot [00:05:00] obstacles to kind of overcome before we gotta the point of actually getting out there and sowing seeds. But we signed them up regardless.

Jacy: So what were some of those obstacles, some of the hurdles that you encountered at the beginning?

Leigh: Well, the ones I anticipated didn’t turn out to be the biggest challenges, so I did worry that people wouldn’t engage.

They absolutely did. Then we have the sort of practical challenges of who was gonna prepare the site because we were looking in schools, we were looking at short managed turf, which was never gonna produce, be allowed to produce any existing wildflowers. It was always cut, so we needed somebody to de-turf it and rotate it.

What we’ve changed our approach slightly now, but not with schools because that’s easiest way to do it there. So somebody put us in touch with the criminal justice service as it was then called in our local environment. Now, in our local town. Now that might be unpaid volunteers in in other people’s local areas or.

Community payback teams and they undertook to do [00:06:00] that work for us. And we’ve got a great relationship with that organization now. So that they’ll say, they’ll go in and say, look, we’ve seen a really good site. Do you want to try something there? Or we now use the existing turf and we stack it to make bee habitat.

So there’s all sorts of. Great sort of, um, serendipitous things that come outta that relationship. So they did all the prep, which was great. Then we had to get funding to pay for the seed, and that proved to be a lot easier once we’d constituted our group and got a constitution and very simple. That seemed like a big hurdle.

Oh my goodness. Official stuff. How’s that gonna work? No, it’s so easy. Download the document, fill it out, make the agreement. We did that. Got funding. That wasn’t too challenging. And I suppose the final bit of the jigsaw puzzle was getting the local authority on board. We obviously needed them to be behind us, but I also wanted them to kind of match what we were doing, wanted to bring about some sort of change [00:07:00] in the way they were managing green space.

I thought that would be really challenging, but we got so lucky there, made contact with the biodiversity officer. He introduced us to the necessary officer within the council to discuss it with, and he was obviously of that likeminded nature anyway, and he said, yeah, okay, let’s try. I think it was about 20 different sites that they said, yeah, it was amazing.

And you know, looking back now, our relationship with the local authorities got more and more complicated and less straightforward. Then we just went in, the right guy said yes, and it happened. That doesn’t happen anymore. So those were the potential challenges that I anticipated that didn’t turn out to be challenges.

However, I would say. The two big challenges of the project, which became apparent as we moved through the years. One, it’s much more challenging to establish areas of wildflower from scratch than you might think. It’s very unpredictable. [00:08:00] So you might go into an area which is beautifully prepared, nice and open and sunny, not too close to existing vegetation that’s gonna overtake it, and you think, oh yeah, that’s gonna be great.

And then nothing happens. Maybe not for the first year with the annual. Species comes through sometimes then the perennials will come through the subsequent years. Sometimes it just doesn’t do well at all. Other areas that we’ve gone into, we once did, um, they were doing sort of barrier work on a bridge and it left the verges exposed, the earth exposed, and somebody said, oh, yea, that’d be great if you go in, sow some wildflowers.

So we went in and it was absolutely horrendous. It was full of building debris. It was rocky, it was stony. We thought we’re wasting our time here, but we did it anyway. Fantastic result. Who knew? So this thing of getting the flowers to establish, particularly in the past four or five years where we’ve had these dry, dry springs and I mean, I sowed up a site with the school last autumn, [00:09:00] nothing there in the spring.

So I, we sowed it again. Still nothing’s come through. So sometimes that’s tricky. Something comes to eventually, but the weather is now a challenge with that. So that’s one challenge getting the flowers to establish. The other challenge is around public perception. Of what wildflowers should look like. So we use a sort of annual perennial mix.

So it was a small component of annuals to cover the first year, and then the perennials, which are the really important part of it because they offer much more for pollinators. They establish and subsequent years, and you hope will keep going into the future. Now everybody loves the annuals because they’re colorful and they’re quite well behaved.

And they’re very pretty. And then the perennials come through. Of course, much more muted, much wilder. Quite often people will say, oh, oh, we really like the annuals. You know, even when we say, look, it will be very different. This is what does the work for the [00:10:00] pollinators and, and we had some studies done at the university that kind of proved how much better the perennial species were, but still, the public perception of being untidy is an issue.

I’m hoping that will become less, as more information comes out in the media. And I think it’s, and it’s never an issue in schools, but in community sites, we do have to be careful about where we put the flowers. We do have to be very clear about how they might look. And of course they will look tatty at various points in the year.

So the public perception is, uh, an issue. So what drew you to RePollinate? Well, RePollinate kind of found me actually during lockdown. I was very busy during lockdown, lobbying the local council to adopt a pollinator strategy. So that was ongoing. So we’ve launched a petition and made presentations to council, and I would say that did agree to adopt it, and they have finally adopted that.

So there was a lot of publicity around that. So I think [00:11:00] RePollinate found out about On the Verge. Through all of that, they RePollinate is the sister charity of a company called the Scottish Bee Company who produce honey, proper honey. And um, they’d set up this charity to put back into the environment to support pollinators, particularly wild bees because, you know, farms honeybees can take a toll on the environment.

So there’s put back. And they weren’t quite sure what to do with the charity. It’d been in existence for a couple of years. They didn’t really know what direction it should take, so they kind of consulted me to talk about On the Verge and to see if I had any ideas. Coincidentally, through On The Verge, we had launched a pilot scheme

called Beds for Bees because of this challenge of public perception. So for areas where wildflowers just weren’t gonna work, we were keen to kind of move away from bedding plants, which are pretty much ecologically redundant, like the junk food flowers, [00:12:00] and get a sort of, um, a kind of hybrid thing going with planting beds

of cottage garden perennials, but also wildflowers, getting this kind of mix to get people to accept a much wilder look, but still very beautiful and still working for pollinators. We piloted this scheme with two beds. It worked really, really well, but we realized On the Verge was not big enough to roll this out.

We were a very small organization. We didn’t have capacity, so I was a bit despondent thinking, I dunno what we’re gonna do with this. Along came, RePollinate and I said, well look, we piloted this. It’s worked pretty well, and talk about serendipity. We could try this as a starter project. What do you think?

And they went for it. So we rolled out Beds through RePollinate. Now the great thing about doing it with RePollinate is the guys are really committed to this. They really get it, but they’ve got that infrastructure of a business to support the charity work, which we don’t have with On the Verge. So it meant our reach and our [00:13:00] capacity is much greater.

We can get much bigger sums of funding. From bigger funders and we’ve got great funders in the construction side of sector, which is great because they really need to put back into the environment. And so it opened up a whole new world and, and from that bit ease RePollinate has rolled out into whole lot of other brilliant areas of work We do.

Got great designer called Nick Troll, who I work with is a great colleague and he actually helped me with the pilot for On the Verge. So we’ve stuck together and he’s just done a wonderful chemo garden. Which we had took very careful designing because obviously there were a lot of constraints around that.

And he’s done a beautiful job there. So he does a lot of work in hospitals and other big businesses designing these lovely gardens, which are this kind of hybrid idea between your cottage garden perennials, and your wild flowers and the, and I did grow that in my own garden, and it works really nicely actually.

So what’s

Jacy: next? What [00:14:00] projects or goals or maybe even your hopes for On the Verge RePollinate, and of course, most importantly, Scotland bees.

Leigh: Yeah, big question. So On the Verge, we’re still working with our local authority to kind of get that pollinator strategy up running and working properly. That is enormously challenging.

Local authorities are so strapped for cash. I mean, this. Can save them money. It’s just getting that head mindset turned around. So we are plugging away at that with On the Verge and still doing what we do. We’ve got Community Meadows projects there and I’d love to see that rolled out more widely. So areas of Parkland that aren’t being cut anyway.

We work with local communities to sew in yellow rattle, to get in other species to manage it. And that’s a lovely part and it’s a much more natural way to do it rather than digging up the turf, which we don’t really like, but we still do it in schools [00:15:00] in small areas. But the community meadows is a much more natural way to do yellow rattles.

Wonderful. I’m sure a lot of your listeners know all about that Parize Grass helps to establish those measures. I’d like the community Meadows. Scheme to expand and, and we’ll push to get that to happen with On the Verge. I mean, RePollinate and my hope is it’ll just go from strength to strength as people, because I think we’re quite uniquely placed to connect up communities, local authorities.

’cause between us, we’ve got lots of good contacts with big business. To get them funding this environmental work on the ground. And we can kind of, we work largely remotely because we can’t go out to every site, but we’re there to help get those projects rolled out. And I think the scope and potential for that is really, I mean, today we’re going to look at a local prison to see about building a garden there.

So there’s all sorts of things that could come from that. We just have to keep making [00:16:00] those contacts. And making it happen. My hope for Scotland’s bees. Oh my goodness. Well, I’m hopeful that people’s awareness around that is much greater. People want to do things. They are doing things, particularly in their own gardens.

They’re doing things and so that’s. Great. But still we have the challenge of, I mean, for example, where I live in Central Scotland, I’m lucky, I live in little town. We’ve got lots of lovely green space around there. Lovely fields yesterday. It’s just nature working brilliantly. ’cause it’s left alone. So there are loads of wild flowers, lots of small mammals, lovely grass.

I mean, it’s just beautiful. But it’s under threat because a big housing organization wants to build 400 houses. And we’re having to fight it like mad. Now, who knows if we’ll stop it happening. We may not. And that’s just heartbreaking. And [00:17:00] as long as that’s going on, it’s not just the bees that are gonna suffer.

It’s, yeah, it’s everything. So my hope is. And it’s probably slightly vain, hope that we’ll eventually stop prioritizing the economic growth over the environment to such an extent. I mean, obviously it has to be happen, but you know, but we can just really preserve the spaces we’ve got as best we can, and that of course, benefits.

The bees are the kind of canary in the mine for, you know, for me, emblematic of things going badly wrong. So my hope is that we get our heads together and stop doing it optimistic.

Jacy: So if you could recommend people do just one thing to support our native bees, what would it be?

Leigh: Okay, so depends how much work you want.

The obvious thing is if you’re lucky enough to have a garden or a green space, [00:18:00] or even just, I have a friend in Edinburgh in an tenement , and because I nag him constantly, his window boxes are a thing of beauty and buzzing with bees, and he’s just got really three window boxes. Just be very careful what you plant.

Walk away from the bedding plants. Nectar are bred to produce flowers, not nectar. They do nothing. You just have to look at a garden full of bedding plants to see my favorite plant annual plant to put in your garden’s a thing called blue bedder and you won’t find it, I don’t think, in a garden center. You’d have to sow them from seed and they’re very easy to sow.

They germinate really easily. They grow on really easily, and. Which is a wonderful species, incredibly nectar rich because the nectar fill up really quickly, so it’s an almost constant source of nectar. Beautiful plant. You can get blue or white. Um, I tend to have blue and it’s a very well behaved plant in the garden.

You can put in pots in the garden, it’ll trail, it’ll stand. It’s wonderful. [00:19:00] And the bees. Love it. So check what’s in your garden. Make sure everything is offering something for the bees. Some plants will offer more nectar than others. You want a wide range of different kinds of plants to appeal to a wide range of pollinators.

They need a bit of water, they need a bit of habitat. There’s loads of stuff on the internet about that. So in your own sort of little space, but if you wanna make a bigger impact and you’re very committed, you’ve got a bit of time. Lobby your local council. Get onto them. Check what they’re doing, check how they manage their green spaces, if there’s still a lot of spraying and mowing going on.

Get a petition together. Speak to the people who make the decisions. Get them to change their minds. That’s the biggest difference you can make. It’s not for the fainthearted. But you can bring about real change that way and get as many people on board as you can because it’s the weight of voices that [00:20:00] that will carry it through, and that can make a huge difference.

Jacy: Not everyone has the means to start a nonprofit, and that’s perfectly okay. What matters is doing what you can, where you are with what you have. What struck me most about Leigh’s work is its beautiful practicality. She’s bringing together schools, councils, and communities to support native bees while nurturing and beautifying shared spaces.

Leigh’s actionable advice. Plant native flowers that bloom through the seasons, and if planting isn’t feasible, advocate for green space improvements through your local authorities. What do your neighborhood green spaces look like? Could they be better allies to our pollinators? Thank you so much for your time today.

To learn more about Leigh’s work with On The Verge and RePollinate, visit thebeeknees.website . Until next time, don’t be afraid to make your voice [00:21:00] heard.