If we’d been born between the fall of the Roman Empire and 1582 when Pope Gregory XIII decided to shake up the calendar, we would actually celebrate a lighter, brighter and less nippy New Year on the 25th of March.
Despite my grim imaginings of how miserable and short life would have been during the Dark and Middle Ages, New Year in spring must have been much pleasanter and a lot more in tune with the rhythms of nature at our latitude. The lengthening hours of daylight and warming temperatures mean that spring is nature’s time for new life and it makes perfect sense to us too when we see ourselves as part of nature’s world, completely and utterly dependent on the our earth’s orbit around the sun.
This mid winter New Year had me gazing out of my window onto a garden dappled and patched with melting frost and snow, shades of brown and not quite white like an uncertain mountain hare. Now today the sun is out and the same view is brown and green.
Already we find mid winter isn’t the bitter place our ancestors found it to be, snow and ice are not the norm, but less regular occurrences. These sudden changes from one day to the next make me wonder what will happen when temperatures and day length get even more out of kilter as climate change progresses.
Phenological mismatch is when the lifecycles of plants and animals which depend on each other, no longer coincide. Hibernating animals wake up to find little food, plants flower before their pollinators are hatched and on the wing and conversely some pollinating insects are out, feeding and breeding before the flowers which depend on them for pollination have opened.
In the great scheme of things this really matters to our already dwindling wildlife, so as our gardens are giving us some mid winter downtime and this is the season of human new beginnings, how can we resolve to help? Reducing our personal daily carbon footprint as much as we can is an obvious given, but our wilder gardens have the potential to help us do so much more.
When we allow nature to lead the way and we begin to understand its processes, we see ‘weeds’ as the essential parts of our gardens’ ecosystems they are. We start to understand how the soil and all its inhabitants are protected by the plant growth that ensues. We see more bird species coming to nest in our safe and scrubby places, to feed from the berrying shrubs and trees and voraciously feast and feed their chicks from our rose and box bush buffets of greenfly and box moth caterpillars. Every log we look under is alive with woodlice and under every fallen leaf overturned by blackbirds rummaging for them, beetles and earthworms, of which there are more in our healthy and productive soil.
Besides the obvious visible benefits, we might need to be told of the invisible ones, like how much more carbon is being captured and held down in the ground by those long roots of the mixed species meadow lawn. How much more rain water is being held there too, instead of rushing off our closely mown grass. We might only feel the benefit on a hot day of cooler temperature in the shade of the trees which popped up where we allowed them to, but all year there is shelter for amphibians and invertebrates where humidity is held and native plants like mosses colonise. When we add a pond, the benefits expand, not only providing habitats for so many more creatures, but more plants to take in carbon and give off oxygen, more cooling of the atmosphere through evaporation.
More and varied habitats offer more plants the opportunity to thrive, and there lies the key to biodiversity in our wilder gardens.
In nature, less is not, and never has been, more. More plants of more diverse species are more. More flowers in a wide range of colours, sizes and shapes for insects to forage from, at almost any time of year, whatever their mouth parts and feeding needs, results in more food for insects and more resulting seeds and fruits for small mammals and birds. The more invertebrates completing their life cycles the more food for their predators. And so life continues.
The more we allow our gardens to contribute, the more natural life they will support, the more there is for us to see, understand and enjoy and the more we learn about our gardens, the more we will appreciate their natural beauty. Isn’t that what we’d all like this New Year, a truly beautiful garden?
