Frog

Frog died suddenly of a heart attack at the age of 69 on 5 January this year. Today would have been his seventieth birthday.

When I first met him 44 years ago I knew that we’d been together in previous lives. All I can hope for now is that we will meet again and be together in a life or lives to come.

We had his cremation last week and Mark Gilborson, the Civil Celebrant, found this poem for me and read it out at the service. It is one of my lifebelts.

 

Death is nothing at all

 
Death is nothing at all.
I have only slipped away to the next room.
I am I and you are you.
Whatever we were to each other,
That, we are still.
 
Call me by my old familiar name.
Speak to me in the easy way
which you have always used.
Put no difference in your tone.
Wear no forced air of solemnity or sorrow.
 
Laugh as we always laughed
at the little jokes we enjoyed together.
Let my name be ever the household word
that it always was.
Let it be spoken without effect.
Without a trace of a shadow in it.
 
Life means all that it ever meant.
It is the same as it ever was;
There is unbroken continuity.
Why should I be out of mind
Because I am out of sight?
 
I am waiting for you, for an interval,
Somewhere very near, just around the corner.
 
All is well.
 
                    Henry Scott-Holland (1847-1918)

Frog at one of his favourites jobs:
clearing the drains in the road below the house so that it didn't flood

Frog in his den (a semi-underground music room)

Rewilding update

The tree people arrived in the middle of January: lovely Irish Ken Hogan (www.kenhogantreeservices.co.uk ) bringing with him a cake for me from his lovely wife ‘Mole’ together with an assortment of young lads.

They chainsawed the dreaded Leylandii which were blocking all the light at the bottom of our garden. They were able to leave stumps some four foot high as conifers don’t resprout like broadleaved trees do. These stumps will become covered in ivy, which provides food and cover for birds and insects in the winter.

A Leylandii stump (and my neighbour's house)

With a powered winch, they hauled out the remains of the field maples which had been taking up more and more space and obscuring our lovely views. They left these rooted stumps upside-down in piles as habitat for creatures of all shapes and sizes. These piles I discovered are called, unsurprisingly, ‘stumperies’.

Stumperies

They sliced the tops off the willows and elder that had grown unbelievably tall and spindly in order to compensate for the Leylandii. Although all looks bare now, these should bush out and give us much better screening than before while restoring our sight of the horizon and sunsets.

A once-leggy tree, ready to bush out

I called this ‘coppicing’ but Ken called it ‘pollarding’. Google says that ‘coppicing’ involves cutting trees back down to ground level, while pollarding means leaving them a few feet high, so Ken is right.

With a mammoth machine they shredded most of the piles of cuttings that Frog and I had made in the autumn when we started trimming everything, as well as all but the largest of what they had produced. This they chopped into logs for my neighbour who has a wood-burning stove (and has been supremely tolerant of all the work and told me to do what I liked).

They left some piles of wood around . . . 

A pile of wood (to the right) and my shadow

. . . as these host insects and fungi and rot down to nourish the soil, as well as making good hiding places for small mammals.

They also placed some of the cuttings in a line as a sort of hedge.

The row of cuttings. (The fence is there to stop Ellie racing into the road or into my neighbour's garden.)

This provides a structure for things to grow through and can be added to as cuttings become available. Again, it provides habitat for fauna and, I discovered, is called a ‘wind-row’, so I suppose it gives protection against wind (of which we get a lot).

They left the shreddings in a massive pile next to the house. Neighbours have been helping themselves to carloads of the stuff for use on muddy paths and I’ve been putting them in the deep holes left when the field-maple roots were pulled out as well as on my veg beds as feed and mulch. As you can see, however, there’s still quite a lot left.

A root-hole filled with shreddings

Shreddings mulching one of my veg beds

A beached whale of shreddings. As you can tell, this pile was once double in size and stretched out on to the grass. Thanks to my sister Anna who spent a long time scraping the chippings off the grass when she came to stay.

We’ve now discovered a whole new section of garden and have the makings of what I see as a ‘dappled dell’.

The dappled dell

Already snowdrops and other bulbs that I never knew existed are pushing their way through.

Snowdrops which have appeared by magic in a part of the garden once dark and dead.

In due course, I might plant one or two small trees with blossom and food for birds, such as crab-apple or hawthorn, but I’m not in any hurry. I shall see what happens naturally first.

Meanwhile, I’ve had to completely rearrange the sitting-room so that we can sit on the sofa and take in the glorious views. And when the weather’s better I might even manage to take a picture of what we can see.

Once, we cowered in the middle of a wood. Now, we live on a mountain-top.

Thanks once again to my lovely nieces and nephews who’ve shown such interest in my rewilding project, not least Mark who's just started a business https://www.aklimate.co.uk/   helping organisations to be carbon neutral.