Nature Isn’t Neat: Backing the Call to Stop Spraying Weedkiller Around Our Trees
You’ve almost certainly walked past it without giving it a second thought. A young street tree on a grass verge, and around its base a perfect, bleached ring of dead, brown grass, the unmistakable signature of a herbicide sprayer. It looks tidy, in a municipal sort of way. We’ve been trained to read it as “managed”, “cared for”, “neat”. At Molescroft Wildlife Network, we’d ask you to read it differently. That brown ring isn’t a sign of care. It’s a small chemical wound, repeated thousands of times across the East Riding, in exactly the places where we should be working hardest to give nature a foothold.
That’s why we’re adding our name, and asking you to add yours, to the 38 Degrees petition calling on East Riding of Yorkshire Council to stop spraying glyphosate and other weedkillers around trees.
The chemical in question is almost always glyphosate, the active ingredient in products like Roundup and the most widely used herbicide on the planet. For decades the reassuring story has been simple: glyphosate blocks an enzyme (called EPSPS, part of the shikimate pathway) that exists only in plants and microbes, not in animals, so, the argument went, it can’t harm wildlife, pets or people.
The problem is that “not in animals” turned out to be the wrong place to look. Animals don’t have that enzyme — but the bacteria living inside them do. And it’s there that the trouble starts.
In 2018, researchers at the University of Texas published a study in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences showing that honey bees exposed to glyphosate, at concentrations they’d realistically meet on roadsides, in gardens and along field edges, lost key members of their gut microbiome. Bees with disrupted gut bacteria were significantly more likely to die when they later encountered a common pathogen. Follow-up work has found similar effects in bumblebees, our most important wild pollinators here in East Riding.
We want to be precise, glyphosate is not “the main cause” of pollinator decline, habitat loss, other pesticides and disease all play their part. But it is now well documented as one more pressure on insects that are already in serious trouble. When there’s an easy way to remove a pressure, you remove it.
Yes, longer grass around a tree base looks different from a sprayed ring. But “different” is not “dangerous”, and it certainly isn’t “unsightly” once you retrain your eye. A tussock of grass and a few buttercups at the foot of a street tree is not neglect, it’s a tiny pocket of habitat: nectar for insects, cover for invertebrates, a seed source for birds. The tidy brown ring is the genuinely unnatural sight, once you know what it costs.
And where grass genuinely does need controlling, for sightlines at a junction, say, or to protect a very young tree’s stem from strimmer damage, there are straightforward alternatives that the petition rightly highlights:
- Hand-cutting and strimming do the job perfectly well around trees.
- Mulch mats or a ring of woodchip suppress competing growth, retain moisture and actively help a young tree — the opposite of spraying.
- Where any herbicide is judged unavoidable, targeted spot-treatment with a spray-gun is vastly preferable to blanket spraying from a quad-bike, which kills wide areas of grass that never needed touching in the first place.
None of this is radical. Please head over to 38 Degrees to sign the petition!