Rewilding the garden

As Exeter expands ever closer, as my walks are increasingly restricted by barbed wire, impenetrable fences and ‘Private’ signs, and as fields and hedges are tidied and tamed, I’ve decided to create my own patch of wild nature by doing everything I can, with Frog’s help, to encourage it into our garden. Here’s how we’re doing it.

During the summer, except for the bit near the house where we sit, we let the lawn grow. Ox-eye daisies and Meadow cranesbill, that once upon a time I planted in the flower-beds, escaped to bloom in profusion, and all the low plants like self-heal, that usually never got much of a chance, spread beneath them in a carpet of colour and bees. It all looked and sounded gorgeous and lifted my heart every day. (Unfortunately I wasn’t taking photographs at the time so can’t share it with you.) I was astonished how much could happen in such a short time

In September (I think), after the flowers had set seed, we cut and raked the area. (It’s important not to leave the cuttings as they fertilise the soil, and wildflowers do best on poor soil.)

In October, with professional help, we dug a pond and semi-planted it with appropriate wild flowers. I didn’t want to cram it with plants as I’m keen to see what arrives of its own accord. Apart from anything else, these plants are what will do best. Also, I need to see how much of the bank stays damp in the summer – ie how much the liner intrudes. 

The new pond
(The fence is there to stop us and The Dog churning up the mud.)

Already, birds are using the pond for paddling and drinking. A few weeks ago it froze over, but the middle is very deep (3-4 foot?) so creatures like dragonfly larvae will be able to survive.

The plants are in sacks of soil around the edge, not plastic pots.

The sacks of soil around the edge of the pond, with some planting

There is a good shallow area, as this is where the water is warmest and tadpoles thrive, and an extensive beach so that amphibians and other creatures can get out.

The pond's shallow margin and beach

To one side of the pond with some second-hand bricks we'd acquired, the pond people created a bug hotel. I’m not sure about it as our banks are full of holes anyway, with bees going in and out of them, and I prefer to keep things as natural as possible. Maybe its position next to the pond is the important factor. I shall monitor it.

The bug hotel

They also created this formal log-pile next to the pond as shelter for amphibians and small mammals, which again I’m not sure of as we already have plenty of untidy piles of logs. We shall see.

The tidy log-pile

With the pond, we viewed our garden in a whole new way. We saw how dense the trees at the bottom of the garden had become, how much they obscured our lovely views and how much shade they cast, particularly over the pond. We did a lot of clearing.

A cleared area

The stumps you can see in the picture above will be dug out. They are mostly Field maple which grows fast and big and can't be laid as it's too brittle. It was a bit of a nuisance actually.

We finally got round after 41 years to arranging for these Leylandii to be removed (in January before the nesting season) as they’re not native and everything around them was dark and dead.

The Leylandii (in the background)

As firs don’t re-sprout like broadleaved trees do, we’ll be able to leave a good stump. This should be colonised by ivy, valuable cover for wildlife and a source of nectar and berries in autumn and winter when there’s not much else around.

At the same time these Willow (I think) trees, grown tall and spindly in their efforts to reach the light, will be coppiced so that they bush out. That way they’ll provide thicker, safer places for birds to nest and roost, be a better screen between us and our neighbours, and return to us our view of the horizon.

Trees for coppicing

I envisage the area as a small dappled wood as it already has Holly, Elder, Blackthorn and Wild cherry. I’ll see how these trees change with the increased light and space and if necessary, after I’ve watched the spot for a year or so, I may plant one or two more trees. We had an enormous flock of fieldfares (refugees from the cold further north) scoping our garden for a week in November and I felt awful that we didn’t have any food for them as the few berries we do have were all gone. A hawthorn or a crab-apple might help.

Fired with enthusiasm and while the digger was on site, we cleared the shrub bed next to our terrace. Not only were the shrubs non-native, but they stopped us seeing our new wildflower meadow. We seeded it with a (native) wildflower-meadow mix which included a plant called Yellow rattle. This steals nutrition from grass, thus deterring the grass and allowing wildflowers to thrive, and is a vital ingredient of wildflower meadows. I’m hoping the Yellow rattle will spread to the bits that were once lawn.

The ex-shrubbery, soon to be a wildflower meadow.
(The pole is one of three that hold up our shade-sail in the summer.)

We also sowed wildflower-meadow seed on all the muddy patches around the pond and on the bald patches that had arisen in the rest of the garden because of the traffic to and fro.

Scrub (shrubs) is an important wildlife habitat so we’ve left our other shrubbery, even though it’s non-native and a bit of a disaster by conventional standards (overgrown with brambles and nettles, part dead, mis-shapen etc etc). I’ll work out what to do with it in due course.

The overgrown shrubbery (with cuttings in the foreground)

Because of all our efforts we now have piles of cuttings and logs all over the garden.

A cuttings pile, one of several around the garden 

We won't burn the cuttings and add to the world's greenhouse gases. Instead, some of them will be shredded by the tree surgeon, and the shreddings/wood chips then spread on my veg beds where they quickly break down and nourish the soil, or used to firm up muddy paths (of which we have many).

Incidentally, a couple of years ago I had a pile of shreddings which I covered with a tarpaulin so that they didn't rot too much before I got a chance to use them. When I came to lift the tarpaulin a few months later there was at least one grass snake and one toad living there - which just proves that, given the habitat, wildlife will arrive, and the more untidy you leave your garden the better.

The rest of the cuttings we plan to leave unshredded and lay inside one of our boundary hedges as extra cover for wildlife.

This hedge has a double layer of trees, with a gap down the middle which
The Dog loves running along. We plan to spoil her fun by filling the gap with cuttings.

Frog and I are in the process of laying this hedge in order to both thicken it and retrieve some more view. Frog is good at wielding a chainsaw and has some training in the Devon laying technique and I’m a keen dragger and piler of bits as I love being outside and having a simple physical task. Whether we manage to complete that job this winter is debatable and in any case it’s probably best not to upset the wildlife too much all at once.

And before I forget to mention it, we’ve also removed as much fencing as we can around the outside of the garden as this might deter larger animals like foxes and badgers. We had to put it up to stop The Dog squeezing through the hedges, racing out into the road and chasing vehicles, but now she’s a sensible (?) eleven and a half years old we hope she’ll content herself with barking instead. (So far so good.)

This is a very long post. I was going to tell you about The Novel as well, but maybe that will have to wait for another day.

And I realise now that none of the pictures here, being mostly of mud, is very inspiring. I’ll try and post some more in the spring and summer as my vision becomes a reality.

 

This post was inspired by my lovely niece Lucy who showed an interest in what we’re doing in the garden and asked me to send her some pictures. Thank you Lucy!

Novel-writing and wildflowers

It’s over a month since I posted here and I wanted to explain why. You may not have noticed my absence, but I feel bad leaving without a word.

The reason I've been silent is that I've received a positive report on my novel (hooray!) with lots of helpful advice for improvements which I'm busy putting into effect.

I’ll try and keep you posted with any further progress.

In the meantime here are some photographs of wildflowers which have appeared recently – in spite of the rain, wind, frost, hail and sleet. 

First, Greater Stitchwort which I saw yesterday (Saturday). Unfortunately, it was hailing at the time, so I didn’t dare get my camera out, and these pictures are from my first sighting last year on 7 March (almost a week earlier).
I see a note in my wildflower book which says that in 2005 I saw it on 20 March, a week later than this year. 
I always rejoice to see it as it’s the first of the hedgerow plants to appear.
The flowers are about half an inch across.

 

 

Greater Stitchwort

Second, Marsh Marigold, which also goes by the lovely name Kingcup. I saw the first ones out the day before yesterday (Friday). It’s a giant fleshy buttercup that grows in boggy places like watermeadows or the edges of ponds. 

This picture is slightly lacklustre as I couldn’t get close, and only a few of the flowers were out as yet. If I get a better one, I’ll put it here instead. En masse they are a glorious sight.

Marsh Marigold (the small yellow blobs in the foreground)

Wildflower watch

It’s about this time that I start spotting wildflowers as they begin to appear and – in an anoraky way – making notes in my diary so that I can compare first-sightings over the years.

Primroses

All wildflowers now appear much earlier than they used to as a result no doubt of global warming. Primroses for instance, which I used to think of as a February flower, now appear before Christmas.

Here are some that I photographed today along the edge of our garden. (I do regret the fence, as it’s not good for wildlife, but it is essential at the moment to stop Ellie squeezing out through the hedge and chasing vehicles, the varmint.)

The flower won’t however come into its massed glory for a couple of months, such as these that I photographed in April 2017 along a nearby path.

 

I remember as a child going on primrose-picking picnics (try saying that a few times) with a friend and her mother, but I would never pick wildflowers now, not even if there appeared to be lots of them. They need all the help they can get, with habitat loss to my mind a far greater threat than rising temperatures.
 
As I said to Frog as we walked along the canal two days ago and I looked longingly at a scruffy and forgotten field-corner, ‘I just hope I live long enough to see large parts of the country rewilded.’
 
Scruffy and forgotten corners are all we have left of real nature - the rest is a green desert – and I can’t begin to count the number of scruffy and forgotten corners where I used to sit and dream that have since disappeared.
 
Europe is in part to blame because it rewards farmers for the amount of land they cultivate and, although I voted to stay in Europe, I may be changing my mind because the British government has plans to reward farmers for the good they do for the environment instead. God willing, those plans will come to fruition. (They could scrap the HS2 railway as well while they were about it.)

Wild Daffodils

Wild daffodils are a case in point. Back in the 1980s I used to see fields of them but those fields have gone, no doubt ploughed up and ‘improved’. The only ones I see now are these that I planted myself at the entrance to our house, which have been flowering for nearly a week and bringing joy to my heart every time I pass them.

They’re not the same as the cultivated daffodils which have ‘escaped’ to live wild, being smaller and paler. They come out earlier too. My wildflower books say March but I made a note in 2005 that they’d come out on 1 February, so even sixteen years ago their season had shifted by a whole month. They are the daffodils that Wordsworth saw and wrote about.

 

Snowdrops

Snowdrops on the other hand have been late this year, perhaps because it’s been a cold winter. I usually see them at Christmas in a small bed outside our back door but my first sighting this year was in the wilds of Mid Devon on 22 January on a freezing and wet day. It was so dark that my camera flashed as I took the picture.

Snowdrops are probably not native, as they weren’t recorded growing wild in this country until the 1770s, but they certainly look at home now, growing in swathes through woods, and here at the bottom of our garden (photographed a few days ago).

I seem to remember at one time that when you were buying snowdrop bulbs you had to be sure they came from a reputable source and hadn’t been lifted from the wild, but I can’t find anything about that now so perhaps it was a different plant. (Incidentally, it’s illegal to dig up any wild plant except on your own land or with the landowner’s permission.)
  

(Lesser) Celandine

This for me is the real harbinger of spring. Its flowers are like miniature suns, gleaming out of bedraggled hedgerows. One day they’re not there, and the next they’re everywhere. This year that day was Tuesday (2 February), again a month earlier than The Books say.
 
 

 
I love their perfect trowel-shaped leaves.

I may continue with this wildflower watch as spring unfolds. I keep looking for my blog’s raison d’être, or USP (unique selling point) as Frog would say, and wildflowers are as good as anything. After all, as I’ve said before (and will say again), no one else in the media seems to care about them. Do please feel free to contribute your own sightings and experiences. I'd like to know about them.

A day of magic

A few miles away from us on top of a hill is something marked on the map as ‘fort’. I was vaguely aware that it was something prehistoric but in all my forty years of living in this part of the world had never visited it. Frog hadn’t either and he loves things prehistoric. So yesterday, in line with our new policy of avoiding all beauty spots (and as per local Lockdown guidelines) and instead exploring Devon's unknown hinterland, we set off to climb it.

It was a short drive cross-country on icy back roads, so we took it carefully, only for me to nearly lose my footing on sheet ice as I climbed out of the car.

 

 
Frog then spent a long time deciding where best to park so as to keep out of the way, eventually backing uphill on to a grassy verge opposite the church. 

He had to crawl into the passenger seat to get out of car, which he did head first, falling into the frosty grass, while the dog watched, puzzled. Parking is always a problem when you venture where others don’t.

There were only a few scattered houses – no village - but the church was huge.

 

We made our way down the lane to the start of the footpath, me hanging on to the dog lead and trying not to slip as Ellie surged forward, panting with excitement. It’s always surprising how strong she is.
 
Most of the path was uphill through trees where the mud was frozen into ruts and snow lingered. It was the first snow we’d seen as ours at home hadn’t settled. I began to feel excited. I love snow (unlike Frog).

I’d done some research and discovered that ‘hill forts’ are Iron Age villages protected by ditches and banks, but I didn’t hold out much hope for this one as any I’d seen before were hidden in undergrowth and more imaginary than real.
 
We came out into the open. The sun blazed down, and ahead of us was the unmistakable outline of something.

As we came nearer, we could see massive banks and massive ditches.

 

We went through a massive opening . . .

 
. . . into an enormous arena whose ramparts were almost completely intact, stretching all the way round in a circle.

It was extraordinary, perfect. Like Avebury without the stones. I was gobsmacked. How come I never knew?
 
The dog was, if anything, even more intoxicated by the place and the snow than I was. She threw herself on to her back and wriggled in ecstasy, pedalling her legs like an upturned beetle.

She then sicked up her breakfast next to the sign board. Oh dear.

The views were 360 degree, with a snowy Dartmoor to the south-west and a snowy Exmoor to the north. It was stunning. There was no one there but us.

 
I followed Ellie to have a look at a snowperson someone had built, only to realise afterwards, when I downloaded the photo, that my shadow – and the snowperson - and the fort’s northern gateway - were in a line and that I’d probably taken the picture at about midday. Spooky. And I normally try not to have shadows in photos so how this one got there, I don't know. 

It made me wonder whether, like Avebury, the site dated back to the Stone Age when people erected stones in circles - and rows and singly - related to the movements of the sun and/or for spiritual purposes (or at least that's what we think they're for. We can never know for sure. I find that tantalising). That would make the site thousands of years older than the 500 BC to which the Iron Age village was said to date. It certainly felt like it. 

 
Frog needed his lunch, so we propped ourselves on a section of bank, Frog at the top in the wind and Ellie and me hunkered further down in shelter.

 

I think that’s a fox earth next to us. I hope we didn’t disturb the occupant.

Incidentally, there should be a line of snowy hills on the horizon in most of these pictures, but it hasn't come out. Pity.
 
A family appeared in the circle and Ellie raced off to say hello to the child who squealed in terror. She wouldn’t come back when we called and we felt very bad although the child’s mother and grandmother told us not to worry.
 
We retreated to the snowy north ditch with the miscreant.

There was no round walk so we had to retrace our footsteps. Back at the car, while Frog changed his walking boots for shoes he could drive in, Ellie and I toured the graveyard with its snowdrops.

Many of the stones bore the name of the family who owned the nearby historic house – somewhere else I’d never visited. Another day perhaps (not that I’m that keen on historic houses) as Frog wanted to go home. He’d had enough trauma for one day, what with the ice and the snow, the worry about where to leave the car, a new walk where we might have got lost, and the dog. He’d shouldered it all, while I’d had a day of magic. Thank you Frog.

New moon, new broom

At 4.44pm on Wednesday the 13^th, the moon was new. I know this because of our moon calendar.

I get one every year by post from Mystery Arts in Brighton. It’s lovely to look at and, as well as keeping us up to date with what the moon is doing and telling us about eclipses and astrological signs, it helps me with my veg garden. I sew and plant out when the moon is new and waxing. This does make a difference. They’ve proved it on ‘Gardeners’ World’! (For more on this fascinating subject, you could do worse than investigate ‘biodynamic agriculture’.)

 
And if the moon affects plants, it might also affect us, which might account for my recent flurry of cleaning and gardening. Other factors of course are the new year, the lockdown, a few fine days and the fact that I don’t have a big writing project on at the moment (for various reasons which I might go into another time) and so am twiddling my thumbs looking for things to do.
 
First up (as they say) was my workroom. I can’t remember when I last cleaned it and the floor was beginning to scrunch underfoot with a mixture of shredded paper, sewing debris and dead flies.

Dust covered the surfaces.

Ropes of cobwebs decorated the ceiling.

The filing tray overflowed and the storage system under my desk had descended into chaos.

The only neat area was my collection of reference books.

Two bin bags of paper for recycling, several buckets of dirty water, a rattling vacuum cleaner, one visit to the tip and three days later and my room shone with order and cleanliness.

 

Next on the list was the garden. I tore Frog away from the Mini kit car he’s rebuilding (also another story) . . .

Frog's 'Hustler' in 1985 decorated with records for Exeter University Rag Week

 
. . . and we tackled what we call ‘the big bed’, a shrubbery which had become infested with brambles  and grown so tall it obscured our view. (There were no blackberries left so it was a good time to make some changes: we wouldn't be depriving the birds.) Frog wielded chain-saw and bill-hook and I pulled with my new bramble-proof gloves. Two days' work later and we had three large piles on the lawn.

What we do with them now we haven’t yet decided. The birds are loving them, using them as a waiting area for the bird table and investigating them as sources of nest material.

We can now see what we actually have left in the bed and through to slices of our lovely view. . . 

 
We left this leggy mahonia . . .

. . . because the flowers were turning into berries and apparently (I checked) the birds love them. (Humans can eat mahonia berries too, but I’m not sure I’ll try.)

 
Likewise this ivy on a dead apple tree (left).

The spindly trees you can see in the centre of the picture above and in this one below . . .

. . . are elms, which have grown as suckers from a tree which used to live here until it got too tall, contracted Dutch elm disease and died (the beetle which spreads the disease only flying above a certain height). We've since cut their tops off, both so that they survive and in the hope that they will bush out and help fill our now rather sparse shrubbery. I'm all for native species.*

 
I wanted to do this post last weekend for Kate’s blog link-up party on the theme of ‘new’ but it wasn’t ready. Instead I’m doing it in advance for this weekend's (22nd to 24th) on the theme ‘moon’, and sneaking in the ‘newness’ that should have been there last week. Do take a look the party and maybe even upload something of your own - it's very easy.

*I had a feeling elm wasn't native so I checked and here's what I discovered (from various sources). There are two sorts of elm - Wych elm and English elm. Wych elm is the only true native, but grows naturally only in the northern half of the UK. The English elm is thought to have been introduced by Bronze Age people from southern Europe, and this is the version in our garden. I find these elms easy to distinguish from other trees by their ultra-knobbly bark and the strange thickness at the bottom of small branches. (Wych elms on the other hand have smooth bark.)

The ultra-knobbly bark of English elm

The strange branches of English elm