Читать книгу My Garden and Other Animals - Mike Dilger - Страница 8
Оглавление‘Quick Mike, there’s a badger in the garden!’ ‘What?’ ‘There’s a badger in the garden!’ With Christina up early ahead of a big day at work, while I would be working from home, it was one of those few mornings when she was up well before me. Dragging myself out of bed and half expecting it to be an April Fool’s joke, I stumbled down to the landing-hall window where only a minute before Christina had apparently just glimpsed the first views of a badger from the light cast by the kitchen. ‘I can’t see anything!’ I said, peering into the gloom of the garden and not sure, in view of the date, whether this was her version of an elaborate hoax. ‘I tell you it was right there on the path!’ she said, and as she seemed to be blissfully unaware of the date, it was obvious that she’d been telling the truth. The early bird had indeed got the worm – or in this case, the badger!
Whilst we already knew from the snuffling marks regularly encountered in the meadow that Britain’s largest terrestrial carnivore was a frequent after-hours visitor to our garden, incontrovertible proof, in the form of a sighting, was still exciting news. Putting my disappointment to one side that I hadn’t actually been there to share the moment, I was nevertheless thrilled for Christina, as my turn would surely come. I was tied to my office for the whole morning sorting out tedious paperwork, so it would not be until the afternoon that I was finally able properly to turn my attention to the garden, and, with the weekend just around the corner, what better time to set the ball in motion with two new fabulous projects? Of course, the initiation of any new project in our case inevitably involved the by now well-worn path to our local DIY store to purchase the necessary kit. But this time, buoyed by the unqualified success of the compost bins, I felt ready to tackle the biggest and most ambitious project yet: digging a wildlife pond!
From the moment our offer for the property had been accepted, we had decided that the addition of a pond was an essential prerequisite for any self-respecting back-garden nature reserve. In a nutshell, ponds are teeming with life, and in my opinion adding one to your property portfolio is the single quickest way of instantly making your garden more attractive to a massive range of wildlife. Garden ponds have also over the last few decades become an increasingly important habitat, as their countryside cousins have either been filled in or become so polluted from agricultural run-off or other pollutants that the life they are able to support has become minimal.
Having a pond in my own back garden is something I have intensely desired for as long as I can remember. One of my most vivid early childhood memories is of a brush with aquatic wildlife at the age of four or five, when I recall being entranced by dragonflies dashing around a pond on Cannock Chase in Staffordshire, and it’s fair comment to say I have been fascinated by them ever since. Of course, the presence of a pond will not only massively increase your chance of dragonflies making an appearance, but will also maximise the possibility of playing host to amphibians at some point during the year too. I can’t tell you how happy it would make me to be the proud owner of a clump of frogspawn – does that make me sound strange?
Of course, with ponds it’s not just about the charismatic mega-fauna of frogs and dragonflies, as any half-decent water feature should also provide a welcome home to pond skaters, water boatmen, pond snails, water beetles, water fleas, a whole array of different larvae and aquatic plants too. In fact the only group that most definitely would not be welcome in our pond-to-be would be fish. I’m afraid it’s a cold, hard fact that garden ponds with fish are much less diverse and interesting – unless of course you are only interested in fish – but I wanted a wildlife pond not an ornamental pond. While I’m the first to admit that koi carp or goldfish are a lovely addition to water features of posh stately homes, it must be remembered that these fish are also voracious introduced predators in what is effectively a closed system. In a zoo, for example, no one would ever do anything as stupid as to open all the cages to see what would happen, as the obvious answer would be a few fat lions. Likewise, non-native fish would quickly clear out the eggs and larvae of all the species that I was far more interested in. So, the nearest any fish would get to my pond would be the ones swimming past in the brook at the bottom of the garden!
The other task that Christina and I would be tackling this month would be the building of a small raised vegetable bed. Although not as critical a feature of a wildlife garden as the pond, we knew that growing some produce would be desirable for a number of reasons. Firstly, there is something primeval and ‘deep-rooted’ in our souls about being able to support ourselves, even if only in a small way. Those who have tended and nurtured their own vegetables from seeds or seedlings to the final product will also vouch that they always taste better than anything bought in a supermarket. Finally, organically grown veg is undoubtedly more environmentally friendly than food that is mass-produced, as our planned patch, for example, would be pesticide-free and have a virtually nonexistent carbon footprint.
Importantly, it was only fair that as the garden was, let’s not forget, equally owned by Christina, we should incorporate her wish to at least have some element of it as a smallholding. This wasn’t for one minute an attempt to emulate the hilarious attempts at self-sufficiency by Tom and Barbara Good as seen in The Good Life, but the sacrifice of a small part of the garden to grow at least some of our own produce somehow also dove-tailed with the ‘nature reserve’ ethos that we were trying to create. With this in mind, the previous week we had hired a van to collect three old railway sleepers purchased from a huge reclamation yard in Wells. Our raised vegetable bed would be built with a rustic yet chunky design.
So in addition to buying a large piece of marine plywood to act as a simple lid for the compost bins, the shopping list at the DIY store also consisted of a bunch of canes and some spray paint to enable us to delineate exactly where the pond and the vegetable plot would go. Picking Christina up from work on the return journey, the longer spring evenings now meant that we would have at least a couple of hours in the garden to get some work done before bad light stopped play.
As Christina had by now finally relented to my request that the pond would indeed be located in the more formal section of the garden, close to the communal fence with Andy and Lorraine, we set about sticking canes into the lawn to experiment with different shapes and designs. The advantage of using canes meant that when we ran some twine around the outside of these markers, like a cat’s cradle, it gave an immediate impression of how the finished pond would look. The pond’s location had been chosen both because it was a sunny spot, with the resultant warmth helping to encourage an even greater diversity of wildlife, and also crucially because it was far enough away from any mature trees whose leaves would constantly clog the pond each autumn and block out all-important light. The hope was that we would then surround the pond along the shared fence line and around the rear with a sumptuous herbaceous border, full of places for dragonflies to perch, butterflies to sunbathe and amphibians to hide – or this was the idea.
While we wanted a pond of a reasonable size, we did have to bear in mind that the garden wasn’t exactly huge, and so something the size of a small swimming pool would, frankly, have looked ridiculous. Moving the sticks in or out eventually resulted in a shape and size that we were both happy with and which vaguely seemed to resemble a 10- by 12-foot kidney bean. We marked out our agreed outline with yellow spray paint, and then removed the sticks to admire our work. True, at present it looked more like the crime scene where Mr Blobby had been killed in cold blood, but with time and skill levels permitting it would be transformed into the garden’s star feature, to which the wildlife would come flocking!
Situated no more than a couple of large strides from the scene of the crime and butting up to the cherry-tree bird table sculpted by tree surgeon Rob, the water butt and the corner of the garage, would be the location of the raised vegetable bed. The overall plan was to funnel garden visitors down in between the pond and the raised bed, where they would then be confronted by the screen of apple trees, and through which they would pass to reach the meadow, the wooded bank and finally the brook. Measuring a standard railway sleeper length of 8 feet 6 inches, we planned for two of the pre-purchased sleepers to represent the longer sides, while the third one, which had already been cut in half, would complete the rectangle at either end. A total surface area of 40 square feet would hardly provide enough room to keep us in vegetables all winter, but with so many other features competing for space, we would have to cut our cap according to our cloth.
Sharp-eyed as ever, while I was busily marking out the raised bed with the canes, Christina had spotted a dunnock carrying what looked like moss back to one of the small ornamental leylandii cypresses which were within Andy and Lorraine’s garden, but whose foliage spilled over the fence into our garden – making it just as much our nest as theirs! If we also factored in that the dunnocks seemed to spend most of their time in our garden, hoovering up any scraps dropped from the birds messily eating from the feeders above their heads, then I felt quite justifiably that we could count this as our first proper nest – apart from the jackdaw nest that we didn’t talk about anymore!
To say that the dunnock is an unspectacular-looking bird would be an understatement, as plumage-wise the bird is utterly forgettable, but underneath that plain exterior is a bird with quite possibly the most complex sex life of any known in the UK. Put simply, in the world of the dunnock anything goes; whilst some pairings do persist with the typical male to female ratio of one to one, some males will have two females, with other females opting for two or more males. However, other individuals’ relationships can be even more intriguing, and in some cases several males share several females. While the dunnock’s sexual relations could in essence be described as being more akin to either a 1970s hippy commune or a more thoroughly modern swingers’ party, it is always still the female who has the task of both building the nest and incubating the eggs, before either her one partner or the extended parental family chip in to help raise the brood.
With some light left before dusk drew a veil over the day and prevented further work, there was still the opportunity to get a few of the herbaceous perennials we had been steadily accumulating into the new garage border that Christina had so diligently and single-handedly created. So alongside the rejuvenated wisteria and clematis, in quick succession we were able to plant out all of Mark’s recent donations plus a climbing rose and some bearded irises. Hopefully with the addition of a few more key plants, this bed would be a riot of colour in just a couple of months.
With Christina off to spend the Saturday morning catching up with family, this gave me the perfect opportunity to prepare the ground for the raised bed. Christina’s brilliant idea at dinner the night before had been to get the sleepers in position before starting work on the pond. This meant the empty bed would be the perfect receptacle for absorbing most of the soil generated from digging the pond only a couple of yards away. It was so devastatingly simple, the only thing I wanted to know was why I hadn’t thought of it.
I was acutely aware that I had slightly spoilt the final presentation of the compost bins by not having levelled the ground properly before positioning them, so this time I would be checking everything meticulously with a spirit level. Unlike the bins, tucked away out of sight behind the garage, the raised bed would be constantly on full show and therefore required a more exacting level of care and attention. Unfortunately the projected location of the raised bed would also be cutting across part of the concrete path which ran like a backbone down the centre of the garden, so before the sleepers were lifted into place this would have to be broken up. The concrete was initially laid down when the house had first been built, and it must have been at least a couple of inches thick. As my armoury didn’t possess a pneumatic drill this meant I would have to do it the old-fashioned way, with a sledgehammer, a pick-axe borrowed from, you’ve guessed it, Marjory and Dennis, and brute force. For a job like this, a pair of eye goggles that I had just purchased would be essential, as doubtless small pieces would be flying all over the place. And with so much work to do, the last thing I wanted was to waste three hours down at Accident and Emergency having my eyes checked.
There is something incredibly satisfying about intense physical labour that makes you feel alive, and in no time, despite the cold, cloudy start to the day, I was soon peeling off layers. After trialling different methods, I soon found that the technique that worked the best involved initially swinging the sledgehammer with blunt blows to fracture the concrete, and then changing to the pick-axe to lever out the broken chunks. After an hour’s solid graft, during which, quite frankly, I looked more like the missing link in a chain gang than a respected naturalist, I had completely cleared a two-yard section of the path and replaced it with a sunken mud pit. Ninety per cent of any hard landscaping job seems to involve making a mess and then having to tidy it up again, and having already ordered a skip to be delivered the following week, in a rare moment of forethought, the concrete could be piled up to one side in the full knowledge that the usual disposal issues wouldn’t in this case be a problem.
With the weather suddenly beginning to clear and my first task completed ahead of schedule, it gave me a free hour to enjoy the garden before Christina came back to instigate a whole new raft of jobs. Taking a tour around the meadow, the primroses and lesser celandines were looking pristine and had just been joined by another top-notch plant which we had both been delighted to have discovered emerging in a couple of discrete clusters a fortnight ago. Surely there can be few flowers more charismatic or enigmatic in the whole of the British Isles than the snake’s head fritillary. Largely confined in the wild to just a few winter-flooded hay meadows along the greater Thames Valley, of which the famous site is North Meadow at Cricklade in Wiltshire, the snake’s head has now become an exceptionally rare plant. So while there was no doubting that the plants currently flowering in our meadow would have been introductions, their origin did little to detract from their beauty. And as I watched a queen bumblebee disappearing into the bell of one of the flowers in front of me, it was patently not only me who was enjoying them.
The snake’s head fritillary’s name is particularly interesting and is thought to emanate from both the pattern on the flowers, where the chequered design of purple and lilac seems to overlap like reptilian scales, and the long slender stem and nodding bell, which from certain angles bears more than a passing resemblance to the body and head of a snake rearing up to strike. While also a plant that can be quite easily purchased in cultivated form from many garden centres around Easter, when it tends to be at its blooming best, I have known a number of very technically proficient gardeners, including my esteemed friend Mr Flowers, who have attempted to plant them in their own garden but somehow failed to replicate their fastidious requirements, resulting in their time and money being wasted. Here, though, probably more by luck than judgement, they looked as much a natural component of the flora as all the dandelions, whose bright, brash flowers were beginning to crop up en masse in the main body of the meadow.
In addition to the bumblebee still systematically working the fritillaries, a couple more bee-flies had also been enticed out by the lovely weather and were doing their rounds of the primroses, and with the additional appearance of a number of hoverflies, they suddenly gave the garden an entomological gloss I hadn’t up to that point seen. This was all hugely exciting as even the most basic student of ecology knows that most invertebrates are at the base of most biological food chains; in other words, if I was attracting six-legged creatures in healthy numbers then surely the four-legged and two-legged creatures would follow.
Christina arrived back, and she joined me in the garden. Almost instantly her presence brought out the star insect of the day, my first orange-tip butterfly of both the year and the garden too. I’m well aware that I keep going on about how I have favourite birds, plants, mammals and insects, but I think why I favour certain species more than others is because of what they represent, and in the case of a stunning male orange-tip, its arrival encapsulated, at the micro level, a lovely day (otherwise he wouldn’t have been flying), and, at the macro-level, surely the most exciting time of year for wildlife.
Having spent close to the last nine months in chrysalis form, whereby, through the miracle that is metamorphosis, the caterpillar somehow manages to reconstitute its bodily ingredients into that of an adult butterfly, he then emerges into the world with just one mission, or his life will have been wasted. The male orange-tip’s sole raison d’être is to pass on his genes by tracking down as many virgin females to mate with, before all his exertions catch up with him after a couple of weeks and he dies alone, a spent force. This explanation should hopefully go at least some way to explaining why I was jumping around for joy like a demented idiot – the orange-tips were back; the world was still turning.
Determined not to be left out of the action, the birds also belatedly began to find their voice. The chiffchaff is one of the earliest migrants back to the UK after a winter spent either in the Mediterranean or West Africa, and whose name is a perfect onomatopoeia of its repetitive and monosyllabic call. It is almost identical in looks to another closely related migrant, the willow warbler. When I was working as a warden at the RSPB’s Minsmere Reserve after graduating from university, I remember eavesdropping on an elderly couple’s conversation while taking a turn around one of the many footpaths. They had obviously taken up birdwatching as a retirement hobby, and while watching a bird singing away, I could clearly hear them debating long and hard as to whether the individual they were looking at was a chiffchaff or willow warbler, while the bird was actually busy trying to helping them out by handing out the biggest clue … ‘Chiff-chaff, chiff-chaff’! So, like the orange-tip, the first chiffchaff of spring is always an exciting moment, but this enthusiasm soon wanes; the call quickly loses its novelty status because the bird never shuts up!
