THIS weekend thousands of people will make their way to the nearest garden centre with the aim of bringing more colour into their lives.

Many will pick up a bag of peat compost without thinking twice about it. Sadly, they will be helping to destroy a precious habitat.

Lowland peat bogs were once common across the North west of England. Back in 1830 the engineer George Stephenson famously had to 'float' his pioneering Liverpool and Manchester railway over the notorious Chat Moss. As elsewhere, most of it has now been drained.

Last month I visited one of the very last lowland peat bogs in our region. Called Wedholme Flow, it's in the far north of Cumbria. From a distance it looked solid enough, but the experts with me from English Nature said that it was mostly water. Treading carefully on the sphagnum moss even I, who hardly can tell one flower from another, could appreciate the richness and diversity of the plantlife that includes some of the rarest species in Britain.

Just 400 yards from where we walked the scene was very different. Ditches had been cut to drain the bog. The living plants were gone, and the ground was a great expanse of bare peat left drying in the wind. Once a year huge milling machines are brought in to cut it and carry it away, to be bagged and sold to gardeners.

The Royal Society for the Protection of Birds says that 95% of these precious lowland bogs have been lost, yet the destruction continues. With the growing popularity of gardening the use of peat has increased by half in the past four years alone.

TV gardener Monty Don has called for the use of peat-free composts. I am told these are more 'challenging', but surely no-one will be happy to use peat once they realise that wonderful habitats are being destroyed to provide it. If you are visiting a garden centre, please look at the labels carefully and insist on buying only peat-free materials.

Chris Davies Lib Dem

North West MEP