"Nick Maclaren" wrote in message
...

In article ,
"Franz Heymann" writes:
|
| For heaven's sake, gardening is about living with nature. If
you
| don't want to give an inch, you are the sort of person that
regards
| Monsanto as a "green" company. You can't eliminate ants
without
| creating a totally artficial ecology.
|
| Ditto aphids and the like?
| The truth is that you cannot garden at all without creating a
totally
| artificial ecology.

No, that is false, on many grounds.

Firstly, ants are far more important to the ecology than aphids,
and local elimination of aphids is a relatively minor disturbance
to it. Even massive reduction over a large scale does not cause
a major disurbance, though the methods used to do so may.

That is not in any sense contrary to my general statement that
gardening inevitably creates an artificial ecology. (I should have
been more explicit by using the adjective "local" and I exaggerated by
using the word "total".)

Secondly, ants are FAR harder to kill than aphids, and the only
practical way of eliminating them is to poison your garden so that
it is lethal to many or most insects (perhaps even many or most
invertebrates).

That is not my experience in a previous garden which I had, which had
far too large a population for my liking.

Thirdly, almost all gardening does not create a TOTALLY artificial
ecology, but a slightly perturbed one - a.k.a. "living with nature".

I disagree. If you are right, we should not have introduced rampant
foreign weeds like Japanese knotweed, Himalayan balsam and
Rhododendron ponticum into our gardens.

Killing a few particularly annoying ants' nests is compatible with
this, but wholesale slaughter of them is not.

I did not recommend, nor would I contemplate "wholesale slaughter" of
ants. On the other hand, I would be quite prepared to eradicate those
whose use of my garden was in contradiction to my expectations.

Franz