Spring on steroids

No sooner had I put away my winter coat and woollies this spring, than the blue tits started zipping in and out of the next box by the back door. After a cold wet start, the natural processes of spring seem to have been condensed into this last few weeks of warmer drier weather. The apple trees had only just burst into their full pink petalled splendour when the ground beneath was a wash of confetti and tiny apples have taken the flowers’ place.

The roses are smothered in blooms, their buds formed quickly as the leaves unfurled and after searching for the first flowers of bush vetch, I’m amazed that within days, the plants are rampaging through the borders and scrambling over everything creating glorious colour combinations especially with the catmint, itself now in full bloom. Purple flowers, the favourite colour of bees, are everywhere in shapes and sizes to suit lots of insect tongue lengths.

It seems as if the whole garden has been rapidly playing catch up but despite the sheer volume of flowers on show for me to admire and for the insect population to make full use of, I have a very uneasy feeling that in my wild garden all is not well. There are no aphids on the roses yet and my alarm bells are ringing.

I was thrilled to see the first early orange tip and holly blue butterflies a few weeks ago but their numbers have not increased with the amount of nectar now on offer, neither have the solitary and bumble bees, just a few here and there and only a couple of my favourite tawny and ashy mining bees. Perhaps they have just not caught up with the season yet, perhaps last summer’s heat has something to do with it or perhaps our human onslaught and seeming intent to eradicate the world of insects has caught up with them.

On the plus side, two May bugs came inside a few nights ago to show us that they are still around and for the first time my box balls are host to box caterpillars. As blue tits are known to feed on them I’m happy that their leaves are being shredded in a good cause and that the escapees will be food for wasp or hornet grubs.

I was cheered by feeling that part my garden environment’s food web might be working as nature intends but this morning I read that a well known chemical company has developed a pheromone disruptor that stops male box moths finding their females.

No mating moths, no eggs, no caterpillars, no more moths. We humans, when will we ever learn?



Saving species in the suburbs

After a brief visit to old friends last week, it was a long journey home diagonally through Wales from Anglesey to Monmouth, from their suburban garden back to ours

We passed through spectacular landscapes, past rocky and sandy shorelines, through rugged mountains and sheep grazed hillsides down which racing rainwater creates steep sided ravines.

Passing lower than expected rivers, scattered conifer plantations and scalped and patchy old hedges, my unease grew as I recognised a depressing lack of space for wildlife.

A few red kites soared above a feeding station but beyond that I spotted a buzzard, a few members of the corvid family and only two or three smaller birds. We were travelling through varied landscape, but not through an equal variety of functioning ecosystems, just mile after mile of sheep nibbled short grass monoculture with only tiny fragments of regeneration and valuable habitat. A surprising and beautiful rock wall dripping with water and vegetation, a patch of land not much bigger than my garden where birch saplings grew, and a few small coppices and occasional verges left for the cowslips and dandelions to flower.

Welcome as these small areas are, as such disconnected islands, they do little to help reverse our lack of biodiversity, and although change to land use in proposed and more regenerative farming and rewilding may be on the horizon, I fear changes will not be speedy or universally welcomed, so I returned home feeling quite deflated, very unlike myself.

The next morning I woke to sunshine, always a good start. In my neighbour’s garden, blossom dripped from every cherry tree branch and next door but one had left the lawn to itself and cowslips, primroses and false oxlips were in full flower. In my garden the many spring flowers were out under the apple trees, themselves just bursting into bloom, mason bees thronged around their nesting tubes and honey bees moved methodically over the rosemary, humming from flower to flower.

A peer into the pond revealed nicely fattening tadpoles sunbathing in the shallows, bluetits, goldfinches and greenfinches hung from the bird feeder until a gang of boisterous rooks took a swipe at it dislodging seed which was quickly hoovered up by a boy band of male mallards.

As diversity in vegetation and habitat fosters biodiversity, our gardens and their close connections to one another and their variety can help to save us. Nature doesn’t see our boundaries as we do, only opportunities to move around, our hedges are highways for insects, birds bats and of course hedgehogs.

Before bed we let the dog out and seeing his interest in something on the lawn I went to have look. The hedgehog’s beady eyes shone brightly back at mine and my spirits soared, our wild spaces may be wild only in small parts, but here in suburbia we can each bring wildness back to our own gardens.



Sunshine and showers

In forecasters’ terms, last week’s weather was ‘mixed’. Not so good for holidaymakers, but better for gardeners sowing seeds, and actually quite typical of the weather we might expect in April.

It’s lovely when the sun’s out, it feels as if spring has arrived. But rainfall is such a valuable asset and there will be less of it through the summer, so I for one can put up with getting wet for now, the blackbird’s crystal clear end of shower song is all the recompense I need for the soaking.

As the saying goes, April showers bring forth May flowers, April ones too, and I’m very pleased to see that they, and the warm sunny spells, seem to be encouraging insects to hatch. I spotted one of my favourite solitary bees a few days ago, a tawny mining bee and close on her heels, one of her predators, a bee fly. She will be watching where the bee nests and lay her own eggs in there for her larvae to consume the bee’s. Knowing that however gruesome it may seem, this is how the garden functions, there are predators and there is prey, I try not to take sides, but I can’t help but wish the little bee well and much as I love the blackbird too, I do hope she wasn’t on his menu.

The bright slanting rays of sun, when they appear through the sparsely leaved trees, light up the understorey and remind me of how much of my garden mimics the edge of a woodland where the trees thin out and the ground covering vegetation changes. The edges of places, where habitats meet and merge are important places for nature, and where nature flourishes then so do we, whatever the weather, come rain or shine.

'Weed' of the week

I had a wonderful day yesterday playing in my garden, the sun shone and the rain stayed away, so I made the most of the opportunity to cut back and pull away some of last year’s dead stems and discover a world of new spring foliage beneath.

Because I don’t ‘weed’ my garden in a traditional way, the soil is covered by a thick and diverse carpet of plants, some expected and very welcome like the wild strawberries which are so good for insects when they flower and sweet and tasty for me to eat when fruiting. That’s if I can find them before the blackbirds do, and there are others which I’m puzzling over too.

I would expect mosses to thrive in the drip line of trees and at the edge of the pond where they have access to moisture but I’m very surprised to find them colonising a south facing, hot and dry border as happily as they have. Holding in what moisture there is and forming a ground hugging micro climate for the soil organisms, they’re contributing to my garden’s biodiversity and with the most interesting delicate leaf structure, what’s not to like.

With a wildflower meadow lawn as their anti social neighbour, various grass species pop up throughout the borders, they are not unexpected but neither are they particularly welcome, so I try to act as a selective herbivore and pull them where I can. With an image in mind of a cow wrapping its tongue around the tussocks I hope to remove the roots from the damp soil too, but as the rewilder and gardener within me battle I do use an small adze as well, my version of a rootling pig!

Although our very real dog does his best to help the garden rewilding process, I can keep my imaginary animals away from the plants when I’m pleased with how well they’re doing. My favourite plants for seeding around and being beautiful as well as useful for the increasingly active bees this week, are primroses. I’ve watched over the last couple of years as their little crowns of leaves popped up around the garden and now they’re flowering. The wild ones look to have interbred with a couple of old established cultivars there are pink, cream, blue, white and pale yellow ones in the grass and the borders. Like the moss they don’t seem to mind full sun or deep shade or a mix of the two.

It strikes me as I rummage in the undergrowth of my garden not weeding, how much gardeners who do are missing and how much the nature of our gardens and we benefit if we just stop weeding.


A tipping point

The earth’s scales tipped in our favour yesterday as we passed the spring solstice when every point on our planet received light from the sun for 12 hours. Some places saw the sun no doubt, my garden had heavy cloud and rain, but above the clouds there was the sun, high over the equator and ready to head north and give my part of the world a taste of summer.

It wasn’t just me who noticed either, as if by magic after a winter of very sporadic laying, yesterday my hens each produced an egg. The wild birds were the most vocal and numerous yet this year and this morning a noticeable haze of green covers the garden as this year’s new leaves are all beginning to unfurl. Almost overnight a rose by the house wall burst into full leaf and my meadow lawn is now definitely appearing to be more meadow then lawn. Soon it will be time to mow a narrow path through so that I can wander around bee and butterfly watching without trampling emerging seedlings.

The frogspawn has gone, the eggs have hatched and somewhere around the edges of my pond will be tadpoles. Although I can’t see them, I have faith that they are there, ready to grow themselves through all their stages of metamorphosis until one day I know they will appear, deep down under the long grass as fully grown little frogs.

The cherry plum flower petals are scattered around like confetti and in their place are leaves, primed just like every other leaf, ready to absorb the sunlight for as many hours each day as they can.

Our gardens are all about change, it’s how the world works and here we can be part of the process and enjoy every moment.


My rewilding garden

There’s a part of my garden which looks spectacular at this time of year. I’m so proud of it, at the least excuse I’ll drag any willing visitor out into the cold as I ramble on about its many joys, but I’ll willingly admit to having had very little input into its success.

The passage of time has played a big part, as the original ornamental planting has settled down, interbred and accommodated all the species of native plants which have seeded or crept in and now there is a very settled community, happily coexisting. Hellebores, lungwort, violets, wild strawberries and Geranium macrorrhizum carpet the ground and snowdrops, bluebells, wild garlic and crocuses push up through them.

Above are the branches of a cherry plum, so prettily spangled with blossom, and a witch hazel with its weird spidery yellow flowers erupts out of it. All these flowers, of so many shapes and sizes, are a feast of forage for any brave pollinating insects daring to be out at this time of year. Usually it’s the big fat queen bumble bees, but any bit of warmer sun and the honey bees venture out too.

Ivy marches determinedly across the path and creeps through and beneath everything. Evergreen shelter to the soil and all its millions of its tiny inhabitants. I don’t now who they are, but I do know that they are there, no doubt some are food for the wren, robin and dunnock I see hopping through.

From time to time there are changes which bring me a bit of excitement and add to the diversity. This spring’s new foliage includes lots of teasel seedlings in a patch where more light comes in after a tree removal next door and also a little woody plant has popped up, which now it has a few leaves, I can see is a member of the currant family, no doubt I’ll discover which one in time.

This is my garden rewilding itself, an ecosystem developing where everything works together harmoniously and planting changes happen as habitat changes do. At its most appealing as a garden for me to enjoy right now, all year it offers shelter, food and home to something wild.


They're back!

I’m still cold and a bit grumpy outside, but despite the grey gloom, my garden’s wild inhabitants are already gearing up to make the most of a new year. The frogs have survived another winter (phew) and returned to lay a small mountain of spawn in my pond and the courting mallards are back with their ritual head bobbing and, to my ears, monotonous quacks, which of course must be music to theirs.

A big increase in bird song is really noticeable now, as is a lot of frantic zipping around the garden, particularly by the blackbirds which seem to be a bit argumentative from my human point of view, as do the goldfinches, squabbling with the greenfinches and each other over the sunflower hearts in the feeder until the magpies fly in and everyone else makes a sharp exit.

Like all their corvid family, quick to learn, they’ve worked out how one of them can cling on to the feeder and dislodge the seed so that their other corvid relatives waiting patiently below get a good feed. Then as quickly as they arrived they’re off again and a blue tit might get a look in before a sudden explosion of birds and feathers and I catch a glimpse of dark wings as the terror of all small birds zooms through the branches of the apple tree.

There’s an uneasy quiet for a while as we all draw breath and recover, me from excitement, they from fear as the sparrow hawk shoots off like an arrow to aim for more luck elsewhere, but he/she knows this garden is a prime spot for a take away and calls by most days.

That’s how nature works, unkind as it might seem to us who can buy our food wrapped tastefully with no indication of any bloody origin. It’s called a trophic cascade by ecologists. The top predator preys on what he/she can catch keeping everyone else on their toes. The smaller birds in my garden will then feed on all sorts of invertebrates as well as the seeds I mess up the system by giving them, and help my roses thrive by feeding their babies on the aphids which would otherwise suck the sap from their juicy fresh stems.

I grow roses in my garden for the aphids, blue tits and sparrow hawk. Their beauty and scent are just the icing on the cake.

Winter garden beauty


Today began as we would wish all midwinter days to begin, beautifully. An early mist lay in strands over the river valley as the sun rose in an ice blue sky to lighten the garden with a cold glow.

The Panicum grasses around my pond are hanging with seed sparkling pale gold and now they must be perfectly ripe, the birds know just when to visit and as they dance around the stems eating their fill I can watch through the window and shiver on their behalf.

In my home office all day, I’ve looked out on and off and the birds have come and gone in turn, to eat, drink and bathe. Goldfinches, bluetits, dunnocks, chaffinches, sparrows, a solitary robin and always two or more blackbirds.

Later in the day, as the light gathered along the western horizon, there were larger ripples on the water which as I watch, transpired to be caused by a large rat swimming across to the soundtrack of a blackbird ‘pink pinking’ in alarm call from a cherry tree.

What a treat of a bird reserve my winter garden is, no long journey to visit, no entrance fee or queuing for a hot drink or a cold toilet, just a moving feast of birds by water and fine foliage.

It’s true that there are more exciting sights at an official nature reserve, like the lapwing flock and starling murmuration I was lucky enough to see recently, but my garden birds and I do have a particular connection.

They wouldn’t come to congregate here if I hadn’t dug the pond and planted food and cover plants around it, so we have a symbiotic relationship, each benefitting from the other, they find food, water and shelter and I find that my winter garden is full of beauty.



Fine for fungi

Autumn has arrived in my garden bringing with it much needed rainfall, a glut of apples and a second spring with warm weather and a flush of new lush grass. To go with this unnerving reminder of our changing climate there are a few late flowers, some fiery foliage and fungi popping up from their hidden mycelium just about everywhere, in containers, among fallen foliage and unfortunately, also from the planks of the timber deck!

As expected, the cotoneasters, self sown and intentionally planted, are smothered in berries and on cue the birds are back in the garden. Yesterday brought the first of the autumn’s migrants, a redwing, it came down to the pond for a quick wash and brush up with a dunnock, a great tit and a coal tit. Song birds don’t seem to be fussy choosing bath time buddies, there’s safety in numbers no matter what their size.

Last weekend, I went on a fungus identification walk, something I’ve intended to do every autumn for years. Once we got our eyes in there seemed to be fungi fruiting bodies everywhere. One of the organisers told us that what we were seeing was only just scratching the surface, it’s almost overwhelming to realise just how much the life of our gardens, fields and woodlands are inextricably linked to their fungi, never mind the black mould creeping around inside our bathroom window! We might find the weather strange but for fungi it seems to be just fine.

Hidden in plain sight

Every year, brambles prove themselves to have an unrivalled potential for damaging uncovered skin, but despite the inevitable splintered fingers and scratched forearms, the reward of a haul of glistening inky purple berries carried proudly to the kitchen is well worth the pain. There is huge satisfaction in following all those countless generations of foragers before us, who braved the entangling and piercing thorns without the aid of a fine tipped steel needle and bottle of TCP to disinfect the inevitable damage.

Not only a link to our ancestors, blackberry picking gives us an opportunity to see beyond the brambles seemingly unfriendly embrace. After a summer of pollen and nectar rich flowers, they then offer safety for small birds and mammals as they feast on their share of the berries safe within the tangled stems and then leave evidence in purple stained poo on the path.

Wetter weather creates ideal conditions for fungi to grow on the softening fruit, unpalatable to us but irresistible to flies and wasps, which in turn are predated by spiders waiting patiently, ready to ensnare unwary insects. Their webs delight us as cooler mornings create dew to sparkle like jewels along the fine silk, and now as blackberry season fades it’s the time for ivy flowers to open and for me to peer closely at every insect foraging on them.

I’ve searched for ivy bees with their brightly striped abdomen and furry thorax every year since they first appeared in Britain in 2001, as important a marker of the changing seasons to me now as the blackberries are, and a reminder that the really important things in my garden are not the ornamental flowers I fancy growing, but the ordinary, often overlooked natives, winding their way through the hedges and the unique wildlife they support, hidden in plain sight.


Patience.

It’s been a very unusual couple of weeks for me and my garden. We’ve had quite a few visitors, some for charitable causes and others to listen to me explain how I manage (very loosely!) my rewilding, nature driven garden.

It seemed only polite to spruce the place up for guests, as I would the house, but as I fretted about potential twisted ankles on uneven steps, bramble scratches and nettle stings, my garden carried on oblivious to the fuss. In just two weeks, the single flowered, pollen beetle friendly roses went over but in recompense the Buddleja, beloved by honey bees, began to bloom.

The nettle leaved bellflower, a beautiful hedge bottom native, drooped and turned disappointingly brown, but the purple loosestrife’s attention grabbing vivid cerise flowers suddenly began to open and towered above the pond, while the delicate fluffy meadowsweet flowers remained like cream candyfloss cones around the margins and my meadow lawn became a haze of dancing wild carrot flowers.

The first visitors saw very little wildlife as the July weather imitated mid November with leaden skies and heavy rain and all my garden’s wild residents stayed in bed for the day. The second set were treated to perfect weather for walking around outside, not too hot and too cold, but too cloudy for many insects to be visibly active. The third group were professional designers and gardeners, so much more interested in what was growing than the wildlife it satisfies; but today as I sit in the shade sheltering from the now fierce heat of the sun, the insects have decided that the weather is much more to their liking and are putting in an appearance just for me.

There are meadow brown, ringlet, gatekeeper, red admiral, comma and both large and small white butterflies, honey, bumble, carder and solitary bees in several sizes, green, black and brown beetles whose names I don’t know, several types of hover fly and a grasshopper jumped up out of the long grass onto my shoulder to surprise me and make sure I knew he was there.

I enjoyed sharing my wild garden with human visitors, although I do wish the insect residents had been more noticeable for them. But that’s the thing about nature, it doesn’t work to our well planned timetable of events, it responds only to nature’s.

Perhaps the most important aspect of a wild garden is for the gardener to have more patience!



Magic

I’ve wanted to visit Knepp Wildland since I first heard about it and late last year I was lucky enough to be able to buy the last available ticket for an afternoon visit this spring.

I’d booked a ‘safari’ and together with other lucky visitors, bumped along tracks through former arable fields in an Austrian ex army Pinzgauer,. The Serengeti it isn’t, no exotic animals to look out for, tamworth pigs and long horned cattle stand in for wild boar and long extinct aurochs and the beaver pair are as yet confined within a compound.

What is there is a tantalizing insight into the magic our own British landscape can perform if only we allow it to.

Every thicket seemed to hide a nightingale in full and glorious song, defending his territory against all the other nightingales, there were in fact forty singing males the day I visited.

White storks sailed overhead while more sat on eggs and young in nests, clearly visible despite the densely foliaged crowns of the mature oaks which held them.

Obviously growing there for hundreds of years before the estate was rewilded, the oaks have now taken on a new lease of life and the acorns not devoured by the pigs are able to germinate. Young oaks are growing well within the protective embrace of brambles, blackthorn and wild roses. The saying ‘the thorn is the mother of the oak’ suddenly made obvious sense.


But what has my exciting day out got to do with our gardens? Well just about everything.

My garden sits within its own landscape as all our gardens do. Each unique but sharing a common ability, to be a thriving, functioning ecosystem able to perform its own particular version of nature’s magic.

I did once have a nightingale perch briefly in the big birch tree in my garden, if he was to return, set up a territory and stay to sing, that would indeed be powerful magic.


In the wild wood

In a corner of my garden is a group of two apple trees and a once coppiced hazel all overshadowed by a neighbouring hornbeam. Beneath them is a ground covering of plants, developed over years by previous gardeners and lately my attempts to introduce native woodland bulbs, wild garlic, bluebells, snowdrops and wood anemone. It is particularly beautiful through winter and spring and the plants are so happy there that they have spread and live together in happy equilibrium. As a densely shaded border it works very well but although I call this patch my wood, in reality it is nothing like the wild wood where we walk the dog and where I’ve found some real treasures.

On the edges of a managed plantation, there are old hazel coppices, native broadleaf trees, fallen and standing dead wood and open bridleways where the sunlight sweeps in and changes the nature of the space so that unexpected plants have seeded themselves.

Felted leaved Verbascum stand like interlopers at the top of a bank and coltsfoot cluster in the margins of a track behind which swathes of Euphorbia drift from the open sun to the edges of the canopy. Cowslips dot themselves along the paths with lady smock in the damper patches and unfurling ferns are beginning to show through the huge carpets of wild garlic, now studded with shiny white stars taking turns to cover the floor with the sky blue of the bluebells.

Always on the lookout for new and interesting plants, this week’s walk revealed herb paris in flower and toothwort flowers emerging from the base of an old sycamore. Many dog walkers would pass these treasures by without a second glance and perhaps that’s not a bad thing, it’s the lack of human interference which has allowed them to find a safe home, long may that continue in the wild wood.

A wilder way to garden

The first flowers of spring are beginning to bloom and with them insects appear as if by magic.

The drone of bees, not heard for months, is once more part of our gardens’ soundscape. The birds sing out to defend territory and find a mate, the next generation relies on them finding a safe place to nest and the ability to find enough food to raise a brood.

The more we become involved with the lives of the creatures with which we share our gardens, the more we learn about the relationships between the plants and animals in the wider landscape and how our own individual gardens fit into the bigger picture.

As biodiversity losses continue, rewilding has become a term we’ve all heard of, but how many of us understand what it means and how it can relate to our own gardens?

There’s a very good book called ‘Rewilding’ by Paul Jepson and Cain Blythe which explains the concept really clearly and after I’d read it one phrase stayed with me. Rewilding is ...‘the planned practise of restoring trophic complexity and natural dynamics to set ecosystems on a trajectory to recovery.’

As gardeners we’re unfamiliar with the technical terms, but we can see the basics of trophic complexity in our gardens every day. The top predators in my garden are the sparrowhawk and tawny owl, they prey on the smaller birds, mice, frogs etc which eat insects, caterpillars, beetles and worms which in turn will have munched on the plants.

Holes and jagged edges of leaves in our borders are not a cause for alarm, they are evidence of a functioning ecosystem where the sun’s energy is transformed by plants into the fabric of their stems, leaves and seeds which are then eaten by animals to build their own bodies and the bodies of the larger animals which in turn feed on them.

The average garden might not be particularly complex but we can improve that by allowing them to be more naturally dynamic. By watching and learning, accepting the fact that we don’t always know best, if plants want to pop up where we didn’t plant them, it means that they prefer it there. If the perfectly striped lawn of our imagination bears no relationship to our own grassy patch in which the dandelions and daisies flourish, rejoice in them, they feed the insects which the birds depend on.

There is a wilder way to garden, we just need to let it happen.

A little light relief

Cold grey days and long dark nights can easily lead to mid winter melancholy and I’m fortunate not to be affected by them as some are, the birds in my garden cheer me up during daylight hours, their songs may be all about territorial and breeding rights but to my human ears they are just joyful.

However it’s too cold to be out in my garden for hours at a time and the long evenings find me searching out tv programmes filmed in sunny parts of the world, particularly those involving flower filled landscapes. When I decide I can’t justify spending another hour watching Monty’s tour of Crete, lovely as it is, I turn to my own very amateur attempts to capture last summer’s flowers from my garden.

Every summer I spend some time trying to capture the essence of my garden, as a visual reminder of the intensity of light, vibrancy and range of colour and incredible growth of so many plants all thriving together. It’s a little light relief from the short dull days of winter and a reminder of the joys to come, just a few short months away.

Giving back


There’s a new diary on my desk, its months, weeks and days yet to be filled.

Our gardens follow nature’s calendar and that is full of a whole year’s worth of opportunities for us to help a struggling natural world, by giving back as much and as often as we can.

Indigenous peoples understand the reciprocal arrangement with nature which, over recent years, we have lost, and which our traditional farming methods used to follow. Leaving fields fallow to aid the soil’s recovery, putting sick animals in the ‘hospital’ field, full of medicinal herbs on which they grazed to aid their healing. Industrial farming, and the widespread use of herbicides, pesticides and fungicides in our fields and gardens, have, together with habitat loss, decimated once common species.

As regenerative farming becomes more accepted and hopefully more widespread, let’s embrace regenerative gardening too. The habitats we can restore individually, can together form wildlife corridors through which species can travel, between our gardens and on to larger areas of woodland, meadows and wetlands.

Leaving our lawns to grow long and the ‘weeds’ within them to flower, provides nectar and pollen to a wide range of insects which pollinate our fruit and vegetables and then themselves become food for birds. We save time, effort and carbon by not mowing and the grass roots probe deeper into the soil, creating better drainage and sequestering more carbon. We know trees are essential in our fight against climate change, so too are hedges and how much more they offer us than a boring fence.

The wildlife with which I share my garden gives me just as much pleasure as the plants themselves, and while many of these are quietly waiting out the winter below ground, some are at their beautiful best. Evergreen Mahonia with its lily of the valley scented flowers is the best source of nectar for any queen bumble bee brought out of hibernation by a mild spell. Hamamelis and Sarcococca have thin spidery flowers but they are surprisingly scented too. Viburnum tinus may be very ordinary most of the year, but is a mass of flower through the darkest days and as for Helleborus, there are few flowers more beautiful in any season.

The photographs decorating my diary show me what will be in flower each month of the coming year and by them I will write a note to myself, to reciprocate, say thank you and give back to nature in any way I can.


Looking forward to next year already

We marked the seasonal change into autumn in the small hours of this morning, by putting our clocks back. Nature does things its own way and each species in our gardens reacts in their own time to the falling light levels and colder night temperatures.

The trees bearing berries time them perfectly to be ripe and ready for the migrating birds as well as our resident ones, and while some plants may be showing only slight changes to the colour of their leaves, there are ornamental grasses at their very best, flowering beautifully, as if they had all the time in the world to set seed.

In my garden the stag’s horn sumach takes centre stage, it’s angular branches of flaming leaves, just like the antlers of its name sakes, soon to be strutting their stuff and impressing the hinds in the forest over the river.

We gardeners might see this time of year as one of decay, the falling away of life, nature in the garden hunkering down to brave out the cold dark winter. But just like the stag giving his all to pass on his genes, our garden plants, from the most exuberant and showy ornamental ones to the humble hawthorn in the hedge, are all doing the same. They are spreading their seeds, not just by feeding the birds but having them flown elsewhere, to germinate in new territory, along with their own little dose of fertilizer.

Isn’t nature wonderful, and even on a wet and windy day like today, just look out of the window at the garden and look forward to next year, your garden’s plants already have!

First thing in the morning

I’m so looking forward to my first cuppa of the day out in my garden this week, very unusually for me, I’m getting up early to spend longer with the birds and bees, enjoy the morning with them and share the beginning of the day nature’s way.

I place my chair facing east and as the sun rises through the filter of the birch tree branches, the strands of mist lying along the valley slowly evaporate, and the dew clinging to every leaf, flower and orb spider’s web magically disappears as the day begins to warm. The honey bees make the most of the Persicaria, so full of nectar early in the day that there are dozens of them moving methodically from flower to flower, no time to waste in gathering as much food as possible for the hive. They must know, as I do, that this last blast of summer can’t possibly last and we must all take pleasure in it while we can.

Autumn has been dropping heavy hints that despite the sun’s heat, it is here. The plums that ripened in august are frozen or made into jelly, the apples are beginning to fall now and most of my meadow lawn has been cut, but I’m hanging on to a small area as long as the weather holds before taking away the last refuge of the grasshoppers. There are the first signs of leaves turning and the grasses are coming into their own, their flower heads are spectacular, and as I’m learning this week, especially so first thing in the morning.

'Scentsational'

As mid summer approaches I keep watch for the flowers to open on a honeysuckle which weaves through and over the beech hedge just outside the back door. It’s not as pretty as many, with egg yellow flowers turning to white, but the scent is a lingering mix of coconut and mango, exotic, sweet and intoxicating.

So many plants in our gardens are scented, not intended for our enjoyment at all, but for very practical reasons. The scent of flowers is produced by aromatic oils evaporating as they are warmed by the sun with the purpose of attracting pollinating insects. Leaves may be scented as a defense mechanism against sap sucking insects or herbivores, but we interpret and enjoy them in our own way.

The Philadlephus in my garden is too sweet and floral for me to be reminded of oranges, which its common name of mock orange would have me think, but there is a thyme in a pot by a bench which is at a perfect height for running my hand through to pick up the strongest scent of sweet oranges. The roses have a wide range of aromas, from the sharpness of sherbet lemons through old fashioned face powder to very disappointingly non-existent.

The most unusual scent in my garden this summer is from a night scented stock, the seeds of which I grew from a packet free with a magazine. By day it has no smell at all but as the light fades it fills the evening air around it with warm cinnamon and cloves. Nearby I can smell aniseed from the fennel and the rich and complex aroma of a good curry from Helichrysum, from which it gets its common name of curry plant,. The unexpectedly rich and spicy scented Buddleia we all know to be brilliant for nectar feeding butterflies, but it must be full of pollen too, a good deep sniff of it is guaranteed to make me sneeze, and then there is the lavender, well known for the many properties of its scent and loved by almost everyone, even those whose gardens are totally unsuitable for it.

From the fruit bowl to the spice rack and childhood memories of granny’s Eau de Cologne, the scents of our garden plants can take us around the world and back again. Simply scentsational.

Wild at heart

The longer I live with my garden the more I appreciate how very important it is that I just leave it to carry on living its best life without my interference. Apart from the catmint which is a wonderful bee magnet, all the bumblebee activity is centred on the plants which have self sown and made themselves at home here. Bush vetch, red valerian and aquilegia romp around the place as if they own it and the bees flock to them. Ivy creeps around softening the bare legs of the hedge and gently enveloping my sleeping fox. The wild and rudely named stinking Iris, is far from smelly to me and is perfect in form and colour and the oxe eye daisies, bigger versions of everyone's favourite diminutive lawn weed, turn my lawn into a meadow.

My garden has a wild heart and I love it all the more for that.