It’s meant to be a forum for sharing ideas, and knowledge – and working together to push for change.
On Saturday morning, Matthew Jebb passed a box of seeds he’d put together around to 25-odd people gathered in Grangegorman.
It contained one seed of every native species of flora in Ireland: 840 unique indigenous species in all.
Jebb is the director of the National Botanic Gardens in Glasnevin, as well as a botanist and a taxonomist – and one of three leaders of the Dublin Urban Biodiversity Network.
It was members of this network who had gathered on brutalist benches outside TU Dublin’s East Quad building, for a meeting beside a patch of dandelion and ragwort.
Jebb said he had started this collection after he picked up a couple acorns in the Botanic Gardens and put them in a jar. He thought he should get a hazelnut too.
He wondered how big of a container he would need to hold the seeds of every indigenous plant of Ireland.
“I thought it would take up sort of half a jam jar,” said Jebb.
“Over the next few weeks, I got ash trees, and then grass, various grass seeds. I kept putting them in the jar.”
He saw how quickly the size of the seeds got smaller and smaller.
“Those 80 seeds of grass would scarcely cover your little fingernail,” he said. “[They’re each] much smaller than a grain of wheat, certainly.”
“After I got through the first 12 big seeds, everything I could think of starts to equate to literally a grain of salt.”
Jebb admits not every one of the 29 wild orchid seeds in the collection is actually a unique species – but there are 29 like-sized seeds in there to represent them all.
Some were just too small, he says. “They're tiny,” he said. “Little grains of dust.”
“And then there are sedges, rushes. There are irises, water lilies. Some of those have fairly big seeds,” Jebb said.
“But, overall,” he said, “it didn't take me long to realise that I could squeeze the whole lot – the entire 840 native species in the Irish flora – I could fit them in a matchbox.”
It’s actually less than a matchbox-full. There’s plenty of room in there for more species – especially the many that sprout from teeny-tiny seeds.
For Jebb, this little box containing the seeds symbolises something deep and fundamental, he says: how something so tiny is the basis for a dynamic ecosystem.
Jebb and the local environmentalists at Saturday’s event shared a mission of growing the biodiversity in Dublin, and trying to help its ecosystems flourish. This will make it a nicer place to live, and also build resilience to help cope with climate change, he said.
The network’s going to have more and more work to do in the coming years, its leaders believe.
Ireland has a National Biodiversity Action Plan, and Dublin City Council has a biodiversity action plan as well.
But much of the legwork depends on volunteers, said ecologist and environmental consultant Mary Tubridy, at the meeting Saturday.
So Tubridy came up with the idea of forming the Dublin Urban Biodiversity Network, and set it up about two years ago, but she said she’s in the process of formalising it now.
It’s a forum to share knowledge, several of the people attending Saturday’s event said.
This can include sharing inspiration and ideas, said Jebb, the director of the Botanic Gardens.
A lot of people love the idea of improving biodiversity in their local areas, Jebb said. “But they're not sure what they should be doing, and this is the way that, essentially bringing people with a common mind together will assist that purpose.”
Yes, said Caroline Conroy, who was also at the event. “There's a real appetite out there in the community to get involved and do things, but there's a lack of information,” she said.
It also can also include sharing experiences of the best or most effective ways to do things, so work doesn’t have to be done twice, said Conroy, who was a Green Party councillor representing Ballymun, until last year.
“It means that we can just skip ahead and already have the background work done because somebody else has done it,” she said.
There’s also strength in numbers, Conroy said. “It also means that we have a stronger voice if we're approaching the government for funding, or if, you know, we want legislation that we feel on the ground needs to be done.”
People at the event chatted about their efforts in their own neighborhoods.
Siobhán McNamara said her local organisation, Bloomin’ Crumlin, has a community garden and a community allotment – and they just hosted their fifth annual “orchard project”.
“We like the idea of a kind of dispersed orchard, all over the area, and of people growing their own food and enjoying it,” McNamara said. So “we got funding to buy fruit trees and berry bushes and native trees to give to people to plant in their gardens”.
This year about 600 people came out, and already hundreds of neighbors have their own fruit trees in their gardens, McNamara said. “The queue was out the door on the day as people came to collect. It was fantastic.”
And while they were all gathering to collect the trees, it was a great time for people to meet each other, McNamara said. “Especially for people who are new in the area, who might not know many people, as a way to feel more connected.”
Crumlin is just one of the neighborhood groups working on spreading native fruit trees.
Conroy, the former councillor, said Ballymun Biodiversity Action Group got not only the seeds of ideas from a garden in Santry, but seeds from their native apple trees.
“We've planted an Irish heritage orchard with 30 varieties of Irish apple trees that have nearly gone extinct,” Conroy said.
Conroy said they also have their first pocket forest, and an outdoor classroom. Kids have pitched in too with the yard work.
The keynote speaker of Saturday’s meeting in Grangegorman was Essex-based endocrinologist and landscape architect John Little.
Little has rooted his own chaotic ecosystems in retired industrial sites across England, he said. “If you want it to look good, you need to make it chaotic. Chaotic, but well maintained.”
Increasing biodiversity is key to building resilience against the harmful effects of climate change, said Jebb, the director of the Botanic Gardens.
“What we need is a planet where ecosystems are given the opportunity to heal themselves from the damage we keep inflicting on them,” he said.
“When an ecosystem is intact and all the species are there, and there’s a food web that's functioning, it is very robust,” Jebb said.
Last year, the EU approved the Nature Restoration Law – and that’s going to mean more work on biodiversity for local volunteers, said Jebb, the director of the Botanic Gardens.
The Irish government has been working on a Nature Restoration Plan, aiming to have it in place by 2026. It has also established an Infrastructure, Climate and Nature Fund, which it plans to contribute €2 billion a year to, between 2024 and 2030.
Over that period, the government can withdraw up to €3.15 billion for “designated environmental projects”, says the National Treasury Management Agency, which is charged with managing the fund.
“This fund is expected to play an important role in resourcing the measures in the Nature Restoration Plan,” said a government press release.
Jebb, the director of the Botanic Gardens, said at the Saturday event in Grangegorman that the amount of money involved in the effort is “astonishing” and “the only way to cope with that is to essentially get local authorities to manage the funding of smaller groups”.
So the Dublin Urban Biodiversity Network hopes it will keep expanding, and soon, with the support of government funding.
Efforts by local volunteers taking action in their areas have long-lasting impacts, says Jebb.
“I often feel, for children, walking down the street, if they see an adult bend down and pick up some litter and then carry it and put it in a bin, they think, ‘Wow, did you see that?’ Did you see that voluntary work to improve the world?” Jebb says.
It’s not just kids, either, he says. “Once residents see their neighboring areas working on increasing biodiversity, many others want to do the same in their area.”
This domino effect is “how revolutions happen”, Jebb said. “And so a revolution of the appreciation of biodiversity is something that can be brought about at a citizen level.”
“We can't sit back and wait for politicians,” he said.
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