This is nice

Well, it is only a sawn-off uprooted tree stump in St Giles' Churchyard with some not very impressive daffodils on top. But what would be very nice is if it is now the Council's policy to leave such stumps in position to become food in the future for the myriad small creatures that love munching their way though rotting wood, most spectacularly stag beetle larvae.

As to the daffodils, they are a bit higher up than they expected. It will be interesting to see how they get on.

Pecking order

Feeding the crows in Burgess Park, I find that the front stalls are soon occupied by town pigeons. They are bolder than the crows, although the crows are willing to come closer than they used to be. But what strikes me is how little aggression the crows show towards the pigeons. When a crow and a pigeon are going for the same piece of bread the crow normally gets it, but the crows make no general attempt to keep the pigeons at a distance.

The crows are larger, with fearsome beaks, and it is not as though they don't know how to be aggressive. Yesterday two of them appeared to be trying to tear a third apart, and when crows and magpies get together things can get very wild.

Pigeons, generally, seem very aggressive. In the garden they see off woodpigeons which again are somewhat bigger, and chase smaller birds away habitually. They are not aggressive to the crows in the park, but nor do they seem to take much notice of them.

I wonder why town pigeons are so aggressive - too much contact with people perhaps.

Fish

There is some good news. Somerfield on Butterfly Walk has Marine Stewardship Council certified wild salmon fillets, Alaskan pollock fillets in beer batter and glazed Cape hake fillets, all Youngs products. And Lidl (not quite in Camberwell I suppose) has MSC certified Ocean Trader products: Alaskan pollock fish fingers, and both pollock and wild salmon in puff pastry. One has to assume that everything else is contributing to the extermination of fish stocks somewhere or another.

Waste food

Last week's Southwark News had an item under the heading "Bin strike could mean smelly summer". And we've had concerns expressed about the possibility of less frequent rubbish collections, and that report about a third of food being thrown away.

But whatever food you throw away, if you throw it into a compost bin you don't have to worry about a smelly dustbin. Even the smallest garden can accommodate one of those nice plastic beehives which you can buy at a subsidized price of a few pounds.

On the other hand, composting remains resolutely unpopular. I was brought up to it and have always taken it for granted. But I suspect that for many people there is a quasi religious objection, religious not in the sense of any particular religion's doctrine but in a more primitive sense of taboo, of dirtiness, which may affect people who are fairly rational in other areas of their lives.

There is also the issue of what you can compost. The answer is almost anything: raw food, cooked food, meat, orange peel, teabags, nappies of the right kind, cotton clothes, woollen clothes, feathers from old pillows or duvets and of course all non-woody garden waste. Just bung it all in, and in a year or so you have a dark brown to black material, looking a bit like a mixture of dry coffee grounds and chopped straw, with no smell whatsoever.

Of course the books are full of don'ts, raising fears of rats and heaven knows what else. But the nice plastic beehive has a lid and I guess is pretty well rat proof. We have three and have never seen sign of rat in ten years. The rats will be more interested in the dustbins round the front with fresh supplies weekly of uncomposted waste.

Rats themselves of course are very much on the taboo, dirty side of the line - oddly unlike pigeons, which on any objective assessment are less desirable but which manage to seem "clean" so you can feed them in Trafalgar Square.

Camberwell Green buildings

I learn from the Camberwell Quarterly that Southwark Council has rejected a renewed application to redevelop Butterfly Walk. It mentions the proposed facade on Denmark Hill.

Amen to that - by and large the buildings around Camberwell Green are elegant and harmonious (and we are so lucky). It is terribly important that very ordinary strip on the east side of Denmark Hill, if it is to be replaced, should be replaced with something better, something that reflects the existing fine buildings in the vicinity. As I recall, what was proposed was your usual tubes and glass Arizona shopping mall effect .

Required reading

No Nettles Required The Truth about Wildlife Gardening by Ken Thompson (Transworld Publishers 2006, £6.99). Much of it is based on gardens in Sheffield, but all of it could apply to Camberwell - urban gardens small or large, scruffy or manicured, are homes to much more wildlife than we think. (Just don't use the nasties in plastic bottles on the garden centre shelves.) Unputdownable.