My Garden and Other Animals

My Garden and Other Animals Mike Dilger Christina Holvey After the best part of forty years spent either living under his parents’ roof, in the tropical rainforests of three continents, a vast array of student digs or most recently a one-bedroom flat, The One Show’s Mike Dilger has at last bought a house – and with it, a (potentially) glorious garden…‘Potential’ was definitely the word that sprang to mind the very first time Mike and his partner Christina viewed their new ‘house-and-garden-to-be’ in a small rural village some eight miles south of Bristol.And so begins their year-long journey to create their very own wildlife sanctuary. From otters to badgers, chickens to hedgehogs, an orchard, a pond and compost bins, to the best birdlife imaginable, what began as a straightforward mission soon became the adventure of a lifetime.Illustrated throughout with beautiful black-and-white line drawings by Christina Holvey, Mike Dilger’s partner-in-crime, this light-hearted nature tale with a twist will appeal to wildlife enthusiasts and keen gardeners alike. To the three women in my life: Christina, Mum and Hilary CONTENTS Cover (#u8222cc87-6267-5506-bcd1-cc7dceaa970c) Title Page (#u45d7cc9a-c8e3-594f-a4f6-597e3b596ac5) Dedication (#u9602fb11-441c-581b-86dc-19b3f1321c58) JANUARY – The Move (#u62c861ec-bc6b-5cb7-a99e-5fffab09c3fd) FEBRUARY – Settling In and Knuckling Down (#u3fd4dfb1-2352-58a3-a217-26921157adcb) MARCH – Springing into Action (#u28551c5d-45ee-5163-9cdd-2c6136e15f35) APRIL – If You Dig It, They Will Come (#uf9fae14f-7cb7-57d1-bb55-33e348370f35) MAY – More Wildlife than You Can Shake a Stick At (#litres_trial_promo) JUNE – Who Says Moths Are Boring? (#litres_trial_promo) JULY – Birds, Bats and Bugs by the Bucket-load (#litres_trial_promo) AUGUST – The Sun-seekers Take Centre Stage (#litres_trial_promo) SEPTEMBER – Harvesting the Fruits of our Labours (#litres_trial_promo) OCTOBER – Departures, Arrivals and Residents (#litres_trial_promo) NOVEMBER AND DECEMBER – The Temperature Drops but the Action Hots Up (#litres_trial_promo) JANUARY – A Box, within a Box, within a Garden (#litres_trial_promo) Acknowledgements (#litres_trial_promo) About the Author (#litres_trial_promo) Copyright (#litres_trial_promo) About the Publisher (#litres_trial_promo) JANUARY (#ulink_5f8ecc92-22dc-59fc-a5d9-265c0e2d36d7) THE MOVE (#ulink_5f8ecc92-22dc-59fc-a5d9-265c0e2d36d7) ‘Potential’ was definitely the word that sprang to mind the first time I clapped eyes on our new ‘house-and-garden-to-be’ in the small rural village of Chew Stoke, eight miles south of Bristol. On my partner Christina’s first viewing, the adjectives that sprung to her mind were ‘dilapidated’, ‘overpriced’ and ‘abandoned’. True, the unprepossessing semi we had just purchased was an ex-council property, hastily built in 1956 to house those displaced by the flooding of 1,200 acres of farmland that would ultimately form the Chew Valley Lake Reservoir. The house had also been sitting empty for the best part of a year, often not one of the best of signs. Don’t get me wrong, the property was more than habitable and according to our surveyor had been solidly built and was structurally sound, so at least it would be dry and warm. It was also a house perfectly designed with the phrase ‘bog-standard’ in mind, and certainly wouldn’t be the recipient of any architectural prizes. From the outside the pebble-dashed facade smeared over concrete-block walls bore more than a passing resemblance to the colour of boiled shite; and with a combination of pine-panelling, hideously dated wallpaper and marigold-coloured walls, the interior offered little improvement. Even though the house was of cheap construction and stuck in a 1970s time warp, we had always declared this to be of little concern, as the real reason behind making the huge financial leap of faith had been the bell-bottom-jeans-shaped garden at the rear. Surrounded on either side by mature gardens and playing fields, and book-ended with a small wooded bank leading to a stream that also represented the northern boundary of the property, the garden, whilst currently tired, unkempt and unloved, might just be in a position to offer huge promise under the right stewardship. Along one of the boundaries – which divided the garden from an adjacent playing field – a small peeled-up section of fence and digging-marks in the lawn were a sign of the active presence of badgers. Surely, too, the stream might just play host to passing kingfishers, and the mini-woodland would certainly act as the perfect wildlife corridor for the comings and goings of everything from grey squirrels to great tits. Who wouldn’t bet on deer, foxes and woodpeckers making an appearance at some point too? On our second viewing, endless possibilities as to how I could turn the garden into that mini nature reserve I yearned for began to run through my mind. My mouth followed suit, as I attempted to convince Christina of the simple, fun tasks we would be able to undertake to make the garden even more attractive to wildlife. ‘The bottom of the garden is where we should create the meadow, the pond would be next to the garage, we could then remove the alien species from the wooded bank and place the bug hotel in a quiet corner …’ I breathlessly declared in a soliloquy that would have left Hamlet short of a few words. Building up a head of steam, and getting even more carried away, I further stated that if we were successful in purchasing the property, I would personally take in hand the task of re-designing and re-wilding the garden, while maybe Christina could be persuaded to take on the slightly less glamorous task of redeveloping the house … Now I hate to characterise our relationship as that of a ‘building-castles-in-the-sky’ type pitted against a cautious pragmatist, but broadly speaking it’s true. So I was in no position to argue when Christina put down a few conditions as to how the division of labour would work even IF we were to make an offer. While on one hand she thought it churlish to ride roughshod over my naive optimism, she also felt compelled to point out the uncomfortable truth that I was not exactly the most practical of people, and so would have to give serious thought as to whether I would have the technical ‘know-how’ to carry out such ambitious plans. Not helping my argument was my track record; in my old communal garden in Bristol I had always tended to be a little work-shy when it came to any hard graft, and my ‘share’ of the gardening chores had usually consisted of little more than filling the bird-feeders. In response, I assured her in no uncertain terms that this time it would be different. Feeling like I was winning the argument, I also offered an additional sweetener by suggesting that I would of course seek advice immediately if I felt out of my depth and promised I wouldn’t attempt anything foolhardy. Still unsure as to whom I was trying most to convince – her or myself – Christina suddenly and uncharacteristically threw caution to the wind, catching me totally off guard, by boldly stating that we should put in an offer without further ado! I could have kissed her … and in fact I did! If anyone has ever tried to buy and sell property simultaneously they will understand why moving home is apparently right on the heels of death and divorce in that infamous list of ‘the most stressful things in life’. Once our offer was accepted the purchase moved through at double-quick time and moving day quickly followed. It’s quite humbling seeing your worldly possessions – which have taken the best part of four decades to accumulate – reduced to a pile of cardboard boxes. This meant that Bill and his removal boys made short work of the flat’s contents, as I watched my dwelling of the last ten years reduced to an empty shell in just a couple of hours. Stopping only briefly to help themselves to more tea and the last of the biscuits, they hopped in the van and headed for our new home, leaving Christina and me behind to take the opportunity to say goodbye to a flat that had treated us to so many happy memories, but which we had now also undoubtedly outgrown. Without looking back, we closed the front door on our old lives and headed off to the vendors’ estate agents in Chew Stoke for our prize of two small keys, purchased for the mind-boggling sum of ?220,000. We arrived at our new house just a couple of minutes after the removals lorry had pulled up on the drive – our drive. The ever-practical Christina proceeded to open up the house and take the lads on a guided tour, pointing out which boxes were to be deposited where, which gave me the chance to excuse myself from the hustle and bustle for just a moment so that I could take in the garden through an entirely new set of eyes. This time it was OUR garden! Passing through the crude, asbestos-covered outhouse adjoining the kitchen at the back of the property and out of the back door, the functional concrete patio funnelled down to a nondescript path, bisecting a lawn which had definitely seen better days. Dotted randomly around the lawn were a couple of long-neglected rose-standards, a sickly collection of random shrubs which had been planted in all the wrong places (and in the wrong soil type), two different-sized birch trees, two rowan trees positioned far too close together for either to flourish, and a majestic if slightly lop-sided beech tree. The centre of the garden featured a huge and monumentally ugly wooden pergola that had been built in the form of an archway and which quite possibly could have been the only other man-made structure, apart from the Great Wall of China, viewable from outer space. As I took in the view from the patio, our patio, the left-hand boundary was split between next door’s mature garden, with the further half running adjacent to a council playing field consisting of a goal post and a small playground for infants. Following down the right-hand side, the small creaky and rusting garden gate, which gave access to the drive at the side of the house, was attached to a short breeze-block wall, which in turn was adjoined to a great, hulking garage, shared with our neighbours. Finally, at the rear of the garage a panelled fence delineated the boundary between our property and that of next door’s, giving our garden privacy if nothing else. Pacing down the garden, the lawn ran in a fairly regimented fashion for some 25 yards in a northwesterly direction, increasing in width from the patio (or hips) down to a tree-covered shady bank (or the ankles), revealing at its base the aforementioned water feature poking out of the bottom of the flares like a pair of grubby feet. From our very first visit, I had envisaged the water course, with the remarkably unprepossessing name of Strode Brook, as the ace in our deck of wildlife cards. Our section of the brook happened to join our property at the head of a large meander, meaning that the water met the garden at an angle before caressing the bank for a 10-yard stretch and retreating away again at a tangent. Inside the bend on the opposite bank was an area that looked like it was attached to a much larger and formal garden, but apart from a carefully mown strip that had been cut to allow access down to the brook, the rest of the land had obviously been left to glorious abandonment – making it great for nature. In addition to the more formal part of the garden, the bank on our side was in desperate need of attention. Being on the outer bend of the meander, the constant water flow had acted like a huge corrosive brillo pad, and had seriously undercut the bank to such an extent that the small, steep section closest to the playing field looked decidedly unstable. Additionally, the adjacent and much shallower middle section had previously been used as a dumping ground for garden waste, giving the bank more the look of a rubbish dump than a wooded glade. Dominating the air space above the bank were a sickly-looking and ivy-festooned oak, whose exposed roots crudely protruded out of the steep bank in the precipitous northwesterly corner, and a 60-foot-tall flagpole-straight ash in the centre. Both of these trees were surrounded by overgrown rank hazels and hawthorns, which hadn’t been touched for decades, and as a result had run amok in the understory, making an already dark north-facing slope look a Tolkienesque mini-Mirkwood. To put it bluntly, it was hard to see the wood for the trees! The wooded bank and brook were partitioned off from the rest of the garden by a 3-foot-high wooden fence, covered in chicken wire, meaning any entry to the wood could only be achieved via a straddle at the height which tends to be awkward for males. Apparently the reason for this fence lay in the fact that the house had belonged to a very senior gentleman by the name of Mr Gregory, who had lived and raised a family here for the best part of 50 years until he was removed against his will, but for his own safety, into an old folks’ home nearby. Once an extremely keen gardener, in his latter years he suffered dementia but was still prone to impromptu walkabouts. During one of his mini-excursions down to the river, Mr Gregory had apparently accidentally uncovered a wasps’ nest, resulting in him being stung numerous times before tumbling down the bank and into the brook. Unable to haul himself out, apparently Mr Gregory had lain dazed and confused in the water for several hours until his faint cries for help were heard by neighbours. As I wandered around the garden, with my chest puffed out and a heady mixture of excitement and trepidation welling up, little seemed to have changed since our last viewing, but in other ways everything had changed – the garden was now our responsibility! Contemplating the gravitas of what we had just taken on, my mood was instantly lightened as I spotted the first basal rosettes of primroses, pushing their way up exactly where I had planned the meadow to be! In little more than a month, their flowers would be providing the first boost of nectar for any emerging queen bumblebees that had successfully navigated the perils of hibernation. As I got to my feet, one of those unforgettable red-letter moments suddenly occurred as a bird began to sing – my first thrush song in 2011. To make the moment even more special, it was not only being sung by my favourite songbird, but the individual in question had decided to belt out its mellifluous, strident and instantly recognisable song from the top of the oak tree, our oak tree, making it our song thrush! When comparing birdsong, many say the nightingale is the finest songster in Britain, but I reckon in full swing the song thrush gives it a damn good run for its money. It’s difficult to explain with mere words the astonishing complexity, beauty and power of the song thrush’s song. Consisting of over a 100 exquisite, different musical phrases, each is repeated three or four times before the thrush draws breath in prelude to belting out another. It’s as though the gaps in between each phrase have evolved to give the song thrush a second to retrospectively admire his artistry. If so, he wasn’t the only one. As I stood there, listening to the virtuoso performance, it sounded like the bird was actually serenading me with a welcome song. The song thrush’s timing was impeccable, birdsong had never sounded sweeter and, more importantly, it made me feel that everything would be all right. Landing back on Planet Earth with a bump and suddenly painfully aware as to how much had to be done, I wandered back in to find Bill, the Bristolian born and bred removals gaffer, espousing his philosophy to Christina on everything from Formula 1 to the finer points of interior decoration. Despite his West Country chatter constantly reverberating around the bare walls of the house, giving the impression that there was rather more tea drinking going on than what we were actually paying them to do, both Bill and his two henchmen, Derek and, yes, Derek, made light work of unloading the van. Having distributed all the boxes, they paused only briefly to have one more round of tea and biscuits and receive their all-important tip for a job well done before hands were shaken and they were off, leaving us and our boxes to a new life in the country. The thing that instantly hit me, as I watched the removals van disappear from view, was the sound of silence – I could hear nothing. No trains or planes, no ambulances, no road-drills – nothing. It was a far cry from my old flat in central Bristol where the constant background hum of the city had been something I had taken for granted for far too long. Undoubtedly a townie born and bred, this would be my first attempt at living in the country. It would also be the first ever house I had lived in where I would be able to lie in bed and listen to the sounds of the dawn chorus. How exciting would that be?! My hypnotic trance of imagining how wonderful it would be to listen to blackcaps before breakfast was suddenly broken by the sight and sound of another van outside trying its best to squeeze past my hurriedly parked car on the pavement. It was only then that I realised in our rush to open up for the removals guys that we had partially blocked the entrance to next door’s drive, and the owners of the other half of our semi. Not a good start. Dashing out to both apologise profusely and greet in one fell swoop, I offered the hand of friendship to my new neighbour, a wiry chap in his late forties called Andy, for whom an apology was deemed totally unnecessary and who seemed delighted that the other half of his property would finally be occupied. With big, bucket hands the texture of sandpaper, Andy was patently not someone who whiled away his professional life shuffling papers behind a desk; this was a man with a van, a man with technical ability and therefore someone worth cultivating a friendship with! Despite being someone who crops up on telly on a regular basis to talk about everything from bumblebees to basking sharks, I’m often genuinely surprised when people recognise me. I suppose it’s because I forget that people will make the connection between the similarity of the chap appearing on the goggle-box and the person in the flesh. And while it’s very rarely an unpleasant experience when people want to meet you purely because you make regular appearances in the corner of their sitting rooms, it is a feeling, that unless you’re Paul McCartney or David Beckham, you never really get used to. So adopting my usual tactic of quickly changing the subject from his opening gambit of ‘I saw you on the telly last week’, I was quickly able to find out that not only was Andy a married man with three kids but also jointly ran a small plumbing business – handy indeed! Apparently our arrival had been the talk of the street for the last couple of weeks, and whether this was down to my minor celebrity status or because anyone moving into a cul-de-sac in a small rural village would get the same level of scrutiny, I wasn’t sure. After pleasantries were exchanged, and as Andy patently seemed aware of my wildlife pedigree, he immediately implored me to come and see his garden, with which we shared a boundary for some 15 yards, so he could show me the array of feeders he had installed at various locations. Being a practical fellow, he had built a couple of lovely bespoke wooden feeding tables, rather than choosing the Dilger Way, which is usually to part with the cash at an inflated price instead. It being a cold, wintery day, the local bird community was indeed piling in to his refuelling stations, and even without my trusty binoculars, in the matter of just a couple of minutes I was able to point out the usual cast of characters including great tit, blue tit, chaffinch, robin and dunnock. What I didn’t expect, though, was to see the tell-tale flashing white outer tail feathers of an altogether more unusual garden bird coming down to Andy’s offerings. ‘Reed bunting!’ I suddenly blurted out like a Tourette’s Syndrome sufferer, crudely cutting right across the middle of an entirely different discussion about the impressive amount of building work Andy had done to their house. To be fair, Andy also genuinely seemed thrilled by this find, declaring that he had never seen one before, and for me, back once again on the more comfortable subject of garden bird ecology rather than the intricacies of building regulations, I was able to give Andy a brief, impromptu lecture on the life history of the reed bunting. Seemingly interested in my intricate knowledge of the bird’s ecology, and warming to the theme, Andy pointed out where they fed the local fox and then showed me another wildlife feature in their garden, which up until that point I hadn’t even noticed. Nestling behind an ugly leylandii and no more than two yards from our communal fence I was delighted to be shown a pond that Andy’s wife Lorraine, who apparently adores frogs, had cajoled her husband into digging back in 2007. Despite the feature looking like it needed a clear-out, as I could barely see any standing water for plants, Andy informed me, with immense pride, that both he and Lorraine regularly came down with a cuppa to watch both frogs and newts surfacing for a gulp of air before disappearing back down below to carry on with their aquatic shenanigans. The reason for my delight at this news was twofold. Firstly it was wonderful that we had neighbours who were singing from the same song-sheet as us, in being keen to embrace the wildlife coming into their garden, rather than doing their level best to shut it out in favour of a sterile and – in my opinion – utterly soulless garden. Secondly, enticing frogs and newts into both our garden and the pond I would be creating later would surely be much easier if they only needed to travel a matter of a few yards across herbaceous border, rather than risk the perilous journey across acres of concrete and decking under the watchful eye of any number of predators. Thanking Andy for the impromptu tour, and having had my offer of a glass of wine over the next couple of weeks accepted, I took my leave with the perfectly reasonable excuse that I had a house to unpack and shouldn’t be giving Christina the impression that I was purposefully shirking my box-emptying duties. I barely had one foot through the door when I heard a small voice behind me. Marjory, as her name turned out, was our neighbour on the other side, and the lady with whom we had joint custody over the drive, although we didn’t have a wall in common. Looking, to be honest, a touch unwell, Marjory must have been in her early fifties and was married to a chap called Dennis, who wouldn’t be popping out to say hello as he was unwell and vulnerable to the sharp winter chill. It turned out that Marjory was also fighting her own battles with illness and was not keen to linger too long on the doorstep either, so she offered a brief but warm welcome to the street. I prepared to attack the boxes with gusto, but only after one vital task was carried out. I had to get my priorities right and so immediately put up a couple of my feeders from my old flat into our new garden – we wanted reed buntings too! As the day-to-day living essentials slowly began to be unpacked we at last began to make some progress in turning the house from a warehouse into some kind of home. Concentrating on the kitchen, so that we would at least be able to eat, and the bedroom, so that we could at least sleep, pots were placed in bare cupboards, cutlery located in empty drawers and the bed reassembled before being made. Pausing only for a cup of tea, poured out of the newly located teapot, our conversation was cut short by a knock at the door. Having arrived back from work, Andy’s wife Lorraine’s curiosity had obviously got the better of her as she decided that meeting her new neighbours was something that couldn’t wait until the following day. Talking in a thick Bristolian accent, which I have come to adore since moving to this part of the world, this blonde, super-slim mum of three was someone for whom talking was obviously a passion – what a chatterbox! In no time at all, we were all getting on like we had been friends for years, and very kindly she had no qualms in instantly offering her husband’s services on hearing our most pressing domestic concern as to why we had no water coming out of any of the hot taps. With hungry adolescents to feed next door, Lorraine bid us goodnight, and barely had we closed the door when the third neighbour of the day came knocking, also keen to welcome us to the street. Pausing only briefly to contemplate the difference between our warm reception in Chew Stoke and the decidedly chillier welcome I had received on purchasing my previous flat in Bristol, when it had taken weeks for my neighbours just to acknowledge my existence, I invited Stuart in to find a seat amongst the boxes. Stuart, it has to be said, was someone I already knew well, as until recently he had been a TV editor. Hailing from the West Midlands town of Stafford, I had always felt a kindred spirit with Stuart’s Black Country roots and especially after we had discovered during one previous discourse on football that we must have coincidentally been at a number of the same Wolverhampton Wanderers matches as kids. Whilst helping us drain the rest of a bottle of champagne we had brought with us to celebrate the move, Stu regaled us with all the gossip about those neighbours we hadn’t yet had the pleasure of meeting and declared how wonderful it was going to be to have a drinking partner on hand, who was, firstly, not a southerner, secondly, liked talking endlessly about football and, last but not least, was willing to neck a couple of pints every now and then. Seeing we were visibly tiring from the physical and emotional exertions of the day – and perhaps more pertinently noting the last of the champagne had been drained and we couldn’t immediately locate any more alcohol without emptying 15 boxes, Stu left for a nightcap at his own home some 50 yards up the road, but not before giving both of us one more of his ‘welcome to the street’ hugs. With a slightly bizarre and utterly forgettable first meal in our new house of grilled sausages and steamed vegetables, and unable to watch TV because it hadn’t yet been unpacked, we watched a DVD on my laptop, before going up to bed. Yes, we had finally moved out of a flat, and now, being in a proper grown-up house, we had stairs … and did I also mention we had a garden as well?! FEBRUARY (#ulink_cc5aeafe-1e40-5110-b9c4-df7e3bdbd93c) SETTLING IN AND KNUCKLING DOWN (#ulink_cc5aeafe-1e40-5110-b9c4-df7e3bdbd93c) For the entire first week in our new house I’m not afraid to admit that the garden hardly got a look-in. Anyone who has ever moved house knows that the list of jobs needing to be done in order to get services up and running can seem endless. In fact, most of the week was spent waiting in various electronic queuing systems as I attempted to persuade everyone from internet providers to satellite installers to actually do what they were supposedly paid to do – help me out! Having moved in on Monday 31 January, it was the following weekend before we were even able to surface for air and actually carve out some garden time. Finally, as our first Sunday in the house arrived, we hurriedly showered, dressed, excitedly gulped down our porridge and donned warm clothes. At last, a garden day! Equipped with notebooks, we had decided that the wisest use of time would be to take both a full stock-take of what we actually had in the garden and, importantly, what state it was in, before brutal decisions were to be made as to what was for the chop. To say that in many ways we were starting with a blank slate would have been an understatement. From even the most cursory of glances around the garden it was obvious that many of the shrubs and trees had been neglected for so long they had become so malformed and twisted that to put them out of their misery might be the kindest course of action. First to come under our scrutiny was a mature but hideously deformed wisteria, sprawled across the central half of the garage wall. The climber gave the impression more of a mangy dog tied to a rusty fence than the stately and regal vine we know it to be when given proper care and attention. Hanging by its own weight a couple of yards away from the wall in some places and virtually nailed to it elsewhere, I don’t think I’ve ever seen a plant more in need of a bit of TLC. After much debate we decided that it might not be a lost cause, but would need a ferocious short back-and-sides and total retraining to be given a fighting chance of making the grade. The same, however, couldn’t be said for two small cherry trees behind the garage, which had been so brutally disfigured by the seemingly totally random action of lopping off of various limbs, and were in such poor condition that they looked half dead. After somewhat less of a debate we decided the best option here would be to remove them entirely and replace them with some healthy new fruit trees. Another plant that we also had to give the Caligula-style thumbs down was the middle rowan tree, which, sandwiched between another similar-sized rowan and a big beech tree, had, in truth, never really been given enough room to flourish, making it look like the arboreal runt of the litter. Additionally, having been planted right in the middle of the bottom part of the lawn, its foliage would undoubtedly cast a huge shadow over the area I had set aside for the meadow, which as a habitat needed to be both light and airy for the flowers to flourish. Still, cutting down a mature tree is a decision that should never be taken lightly, as the nineteenth-century parson and gardener Canon Henry Ellacombe famously once said, ‘A garden without trees scarcely deserves to be called a garden.’ As we were keen to try and make our decisions based on what we thought would best suit the birds and the bees (amongst other groups), we were also mindful of the fact that surely the single most important way to make a garden more wildlife-friendly is to plant a tree. As stated by Ken Thompson in his wonderful wildlife gardening book, No Nettles Required, the more trees gardens have, the more beetles, bugs, snails, slugs, woodlice, social wasps, leaf-mining insects and moths will be attracted to use them for bed and breakfast, which in turn will prove a magnet for animals from higher up the food chain, such as birds and mammals. In addition, trees provide an extra dimension to gardens, enabling them to house more wildlife, just like we would now be in a position to fit more stuff into our new two-floored/three-bedroom house than in my previous single-bedroom flat. However, taking everything into consideration, and with heavy hearts, we agreed that the garden would be better served in the long term if the rowan were removed. This same decision was also unfortunately extended to a small, sickly birch tree cowering in the shadow of a much larger and beautifully symmetrical birch adjacent to the playing field. A couple of small, nasty alien conifers on the wooded bank would also be for the chop, but these wouldn’t be missed for a second. With other plants, though, our concord would be severely tested. Dotted along the border of the wood, for example, were three or four random shrubs, which in their winter plumage neither of us recognised. Early on in this process, Christina declared herself to be in the ‘if in doubt, chop it out’ camp, whilst I was a follower of the ‘cut in haste, repent at leisure’ school of thought, meaning I inevitably took on the roll of defence counsel, arguing that the shrubs should receive a stay of execution until we found out what they were. After much cross-examination, however, the prosecution (Christina) eventually relented and agreed to wait and see how they turned out before making any decisions about their future. I couldn’t help feeling, though, that this was just the first of many such battles of wills and that our strong-minded obstinacies would be tested on many more occasions over the next few months. However, one job we were both keen to see achieved as soon as possible was the removal of Mr Gregory’s fence, which stood out as an ugly junction between garden and wooded bank, in contradiction to our preferred natural blending of all the habitats from back door to brook. Another undertaking we instantly agreed upon would be to clear as much ivy as possible from the oak tree in the northwest corner. On the very first occasion I had viewed the property, I remember being utterly thrilled to find that a mature oak tree was part and parcel of the garden. However, with many of the tree’s roots exposed due to the undercutting nature of the brook, the fact that it was festooned from head to toe with ivy and the sheer amount of standing dead wood present, all seemed clearly to indicate that the tree had been struggling for some time. In terms of an ability to attract wildlife to your garden, no one species can come even close to an English or pedunculate oak, with some naturalists having even likened an individual tree to the status of a nature reserve in its own right. With a staggering 284 different invertebrate species having been identified as living on oak trees, a diverse array of birds and mammals reliant on their acorns, a number of bat species roosting in the hollows and crevices, and great-spotted woodpeckers, nuthatches and treecreepers scouring the wood for food and nesting holes, it’s no surprise that even a struggling oak would be one of the garden’s real crown jewels. The other side of the coin, of course, is that ivy has pretty good wildlife credentials too! Not only is ivy our only native, evergreen climber but it also provides the most wonderful late flourish of nectar in November and a ready supply of berries for our winter thrushes too. The latticework that forms as ivy crawls like a malevolent scaffold over other plants can also provide the perfect nooks and crannies for anything from hunting spiders to nesting spotted flycatchers. On this occasion, though, due to the abundance of ivy elsewhere on the bank, and particularly in amongst the hazels, it would have to give way to our not so mighty oak. Feeling satisfied that we now had a healthy to-do list of hard and soft landscaping tasks, the only other pressing concern would be when to carry out the work. With spring only just around the corner, the time available to carry out tree surgery tasks, which should only really be done during the dormant winter period, was rapidly disappearing. On our walk round, we had already been delighted to spot the first snowdrop shoots emerging, and so the last thing we wanted would be for the sensitive woodland flora and meadow plants to be trampled underfoot at such a vulnerable time. In other words, I would need to find a tree surgeon on Monday morning! Taking a break from arduous life and death decisions, we were delighted to invite our first non-familial visitors over in the afternoon. Nigel and his wife Cheryle are old friends I originally met through the annual birding fest that is the Rutland Birdfair. Nige, although he is far too modest to admit it, is one of Britain’s finest birders and has probably forgotten more about our feathered friends than I will ever know, whilst Cheryle, who claims to be a birding widow, also happens to be much more interested and knowledgeable than she lets on. Much more pertinent to this book, they are also the most wonderful gardeners and Christina and I were both keen to try and emulate elements of what they had managed to achieve in their own gorgeous Sussex garden over the last decade. Arriving with a house-warming present in the form of a basket of native primroses, we were secretly hoping that rather than coming up with specific suggestions as to what we could put where, they would think it more useful to not allow us to become daunted by the enormous amount of work ahead of us but instead to be encouraging and supportive of our vision … and they didn’t disappoint. The party of four almost instantly split, so while Cheryle and Christina wandered around the garden excitedly chattering away about building flower-rich herbaceous borders, Nigel and I scrambled around the wooded bank, indulging in one of every birder’s favourite games: guessing which birds we could expect to record in the garden over the next year. Kingfishers, grey wagtails and bullfinches were all excitedly discussed in turn as I proudly took Nigel on the first proper guided tour of our soon to be back-garden nature reserve. Our guests couldn’t have been better first visitors as they faithfully dished out encouraging words and inspiration in huge dollops. Being a couple that have to work for a living, it would not be until the following weekend that we would have any opportunity to get stuck into our urgent ‘to-do’ list, as the evenings were still far too dark to carry out anything meaningful outside after work. However, during this downtime Christina was also able to put her artistic bent to good use by drawing a few basic sketches of the current layout of the garden in her notebook. Onto this plan we were then able to insert potential locations for the various wildlife-friendly features we planned to install later in the year. This enabled us, for example, to trial on paper the best places to dig the herbaceous borders and the pond – two essential components of any self-respecting wildlife garden, and features that would also be added to our garden, hopefully sooner rather than later! The weekend duly arrived, with a promise of cold and clear weather, or, in other words, perfect conditions for our first practical day in the garden. Initially, prior to bowsaws and loppers being wielded, I wanted to ensure that sufficient numbers of ‘before’ photos were taken. These would then ensure that people visiting our beautiful swan of a garden would not only be able to marvel at the end product, but also be able to appreciate the full transformation from original ugly duckling too! Keen to ensure her secateurs saw some action immediately, Christina decided to begin work on our postage-stamp-sized front garden. Having already agreed that tackling both gardens in the first year would have been a bridge too far, we had decided that the much bigger job of the back garden would take priority. There were, however, simple measures that could be carried out in the front to make it look more presentable. So while I snapped away, Christina set to heavily pruning a couple of long-neglected roses and re-training a tired-looking Japanese quince. When I came round to the front I found Christina armed with secateurs and slowly disappearing behind a pile of severed branches. ‘It’s going to look a lot worse before it gets better’ was her pre-prepared answer to my tremulous question asking why she had really needed to remove so much. Pointing out that she had consulted none other than the mighty Bob Flowerdew, who had written a book on pruning which I had given to her for Christmas some six weeks earlier, I had to concede that on this occasion she knew better than me what she was doing. Tidying up after Christina is a technique at which admittedly I have had much practice over the last six years, and so while she stood back to admire her handiwork it was left to me to ferry her brash through to the designated dumping zone – a dark corner of the garden behind the garage. This done, I was then keen to encourage her to put those massacring skills to good use in the back garden – we still had a ‘to-do’ list as long as my arm! We had decided that, wherever possible, the wooded bank should mostly consist of native species, with the only exceptions being those ornamental aliens that had significant wildlife value. This meant that the two small confers, a leylandii cypress (my least favourite garden plant by some distance, for obvious reasons) and a stunted variegated male holly bush, were soon made short change of as I felled them with a bowsaw and Christina lopped the offending articles into more portable pieces. We then combined forces to drag the material over the fence and across to the dumping pile, which was now assuming ever-larger proportions. After all the talking and planning it felt great to at last get physical and stuck in, and the work was made even more enjoyable by the fact that the weather was so cold. As we grafted away whilst building up a sweat in the process we could see our own breath condensing in the cold air right in front of us. Christina truly had the bit between her teeth, and, having seen off the aliens in a frenzy of lopping, wanted to turn her attentions to the ash tree in the centre of the bank, which she thought made the area look dark and dingy. Having already agreed that the rowan should be removed, to say I was incredibly reluctant to remove another mature native tree would have been an understatement. As the conversation tipped over from a robust difference of opinion into raised voices and then a full-blown argument, the crux became clear. Put simply, the subtext of the disagreement was about nothing less than the future direction of the garden; with Christina in one corner wanting primarily a garden while I wanted it to go down the Nature Reserve route. The main battle line was going to be the wooded bank, with Christina maintaining it was too messy, and so by removing more vegetation and tidying it up, this would create more light in a dark corner of the garden. I countered that of course woodlands were often a bit dark and messy by their very nature, and therefore it would be better for the wildlife if the bank were to remain largely wild and woolly. I then hammered home my point by arguing that removing the ash tree would break a vital link in the chain, meaning that the continued canopy cover across the bottom of the garden would disappear. This would have the knock-on effect of denying lots of shy woodland birds and mammals the wildlife corridor they needed to move between the gardens. Building up another head of steam, I pointed out that in no way were we in any position to safely remove a mature tree with the tools and experience we had, so it would have to stay. But ever the conciliator, I offered as a compromise my promise that the more formal part of the garden, closer to the house, would be much more manicured and tidy. While I would define my relationship with Christina as one consisting of reasonably regular arguments, we do make up soon after, and we were both in the act of apologising when interrupted by the sound of Lorraine’s voice next door, keen to hear how our first practical morning in the garden was going. Pleased that our neighbours wanted to take such an interest in our plot, we filled them in on our rationale behind removing the aliens in order both to give more space to the (more cherished) native species and to attempt to open up the woodland a touch more to enable better views of the brook. On hearing the water mentioned, Lorraine’s eyes twinkled as she declared how her and Andy had always coveted our river frontage, and then surprised us by revealing that they had previously entertained the idea of trying to purchase the bottom of our garden after Mr Gregory had moved out. Privately of course both Christina and I had ‘too late now!’ thoughts; but ever the generous souls, I was quick to suggest that any time either needed a watery fix, they both had carte blanche to hop over the fence whenever they felt like it! Lorraine also hilariously accused us of attempting to steal her garden birds with our now extensive offerings in the form of a stand-up bird table, a sunflower hearts feeder, a Niger feeder and a fat-ball dispenser. It was probably true that in the space of barely a week, and given the superior feed on offer in our garden, many of the birds had already swapped their notoriously fickle allegiances and were now choosing to spend most of their time emptying our feeders rather than theirs. But joking aside, with our feeders in the centre, Andy and Lorraine’s to the left and a small feeding station in Dennis and Marjory’s garden immediately to our right, the local resident birds must surely have been some of the best fed in the southwest. Also, in the space of just a couple of weeks since we had moved in, it was not only astonishing how quickly the birds had found the food, but noticeable that we had already recorded a wider range of species at our feeders here than in the previous 10 years at our old garden flat in Bristol. Interestingly, the sheer quantity of birds was also much higher; it was not uncommon for us to peer out of the kitchen window to observe not only that every single perch was taken on all the feeders, but that queuing systems had often formed on the nearby bushes as well. The garden was quite literally alive with birds! This rich variety and abundance instantly brought two thoughts to my mind: firstly, what fun it would be compiling a garden bird list; and secondly, that it wouldn’t be too long before this huge concentration of small birds would register on a sparrowhawk’s radar! With Christina away visiting friends overnight, I dragged myself out of bed the following morning for a spot of garden birdwatching, only momentarily undeterred by the miserable weather. One of the slight peculiarities, and immense irritations, of the house meant that there were comparatively few good vantage points from which to actually properly enjoy the garden, a fact we would rectify when we had sufficient cash to build the much-planned rear extension. In the meantime, the current best seat, or stand, in the house was from the landing window, halfway up the stairs. Looking down, fully expecting a tit and finch-fest, I was aghast to see not a single bird on any of the feeders due to the dominating presence of a whole bunch of greedy grey squirrels. Four of these invaders could be counted, dotted across the garden and monopolising each feeder whilst the birds looked on helplessly from the nearby bushes, too intimidated to compete. The grey squirrel is an animal that as a naturalist fills me with a whole range of mixed emotions. Brought over from the eastern side of North America and deliberately introduced on some twenty occasions between the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, their rapid spread throughout England and Wales has proved the stuff of ecological nightmares. Now numbering as many as 2.5 million, this adaptable and hardy animal has become so widespread in our parks, gardens and woodlands that it is now quite probably the most commonly seen mammal in Britain, and as such is accepted by many as a wholly natural part of our wildlife. To the neutral, the greys have obvious charm and appeal, and it has to be stated that they didn’t actually ask to be brought over to the UK and then become so vilified just for making an unqualified success of their new home. Unfortunately, the cold fact of the matter is that they have undoubtedly had a major impact on our native flora and fauna, which are poorly adapted to withstand their presence. Most well known is the contribution of the grey squirrel to the catastrophic decline of our native red squirrel, so much so that the red squirrel now only flourishes either in large parts of Scotland where the greys are still mostly absent, in a few grey-squirrel-free offshore islands or in large conifer belts ill-suited to the Yankee invader. Perhaps less understood by the public, though, are both the immense damage that grey squirrels cause to trees and the serious impact on many of our native, breeding woodland birds. Though many have called for their total extermination, this is totally impracticable, and, I’m afraid, irrespective of how we feel about the animal, they are definitely here to stay. While a small part of me admired their brazen attitude as they reached across from the pergola, like supple athletes, to empty my feeders in double-quick time, the larger part of me was so indignant that I instinctively ran downstairs to shoo them out of the garden, momentarily forgetting I was in little more than my underpants. On seeing my naked flesh and hearing my accompanying ‘get out of it!’ they hurriedly spun round on their heels and triple-jumped their way back into the woodland at the bottom of the garden, disappearing in a matter of seconds. I knew that with such a major food source on offer they would be back as soon as the coast was clear. So for the next hour I played a cat-and-mouse game with them, as I watched them quietly creep back into the garden and onto the feeders only for me to rush out and scare them off again (having got dressed in the meantime – of course!). After a while they either got the message that they were not welcome or had had their fill anyway, but no one was more aware than I was that this was little more than tokenism, and that I would ultimately have to adopt some serious anti-squirrel technologies if I didn’t want to spend the equivalent of the Greek national debt on bird food. So the ‘tree rats’ should enjoy the free handouts while they still could! With the squirrels at least temporarily pushed back, this at last gave me my first opportunity to watch the feeders being used by the animals they were designed for. As the birds slowly returned, I delighted in the most wonderful hour watching blue tits, great tits, robins, chaffinches and greenfinches pile in despite the still awful weather. It’s been well known for at least a couple of decades that living with pets can lower blood pressure, lessen anxiety and boost our immunity, but because I can’t commit to owning a pet, due to the fact that I’m often away filming, I have to say that watching garden birds comes a very close second. It’s hard to explain the level of happiness I gain from watching the birds go about their daily business, but for someone who often spends his life dashing around at 70mph, it was important to take some time out on the hard shoulder every now and again. I don’t claim to have been the only person to have uncovered this elixir of life, as the RSPB recently revealed the astonishing statistic that as many as 40 per cent of British households will feed their garden birds at some point during the year – more evidence of the power of wildlife as one of the best natural anti-depressants on the market. The rain eventually receded and Christina returned, so we began to make preparations to launch ourselves into the garden for the afternoon’s activity: Operation Fence Dismantle. Earlier in the week I had sneakily taken a peek into next door’s garage, while they were putting out their recycling, and had noted a far more impressive collection of gardening tools and implements than we had yet been able to muster. Having made a mental note that some of these might come in handy at some point, barely a few days later I was now hoping they could be persuaded to lend us one of their crowbars. Knocking on the door, I fully expected it to be answered by Marjory and so was surprised to meet the tall, gaunt figure of Dennis, the Great Gatsby of our street, and the last of our immediate neighbours I had not yet met. Though undeniably unwell, in addition to being both an ex-policeman and an utterly charming chap, Dennis also confirmed that he would be more than happy to lend us any of the tools we might need. Because his illness seriously affected his ability to undertake anything but the lightest of duties, he explained that he wasn’t in any position to wield tools, and so would be pleased to see them put to good use. Since Dennis had lived in the house for the best part of 20 years, I was also to discover that he was the most enormous fountain of knowledge about both his and our garden and the adjacent brook. Both keen gardeners themselves, Dennis and Marjory regularly saw kingfishers whizzing up and down the brook, and in addition to seeing pheasants in the garden had even recorded roe deer on a couple of occasions too! He also tantalisingly revealed that whilst brown trout used to be commonplace in the brook, he hadn’t seen them for several years, possibly due to a combination of a couple of unfortunate pollution incidents upstream and a silting up of the stream bed. Trying, in part, to rectify the silt issue, he had even put a few heavy blocks in the water at the bottom of his garden to break up the water flow and perturb the bed, but this was in reality little more than piecemeal and had had little effect. As the discussion turned to our garden, I excitedly gabbled about both the grand plans and the impressive list of birds we had already attracted to our feeders in the short time since moving in, before turning to the subject of how frustrated I was beginning to get with the bullying tactics of the squirrels. Dennis and Marjory had themselves encountered the same problems, until they had invested in special cage feeders designed to keep the squirrels at bay, and which had seemingly nipped the problem in the bud. Having not encountered anywhere near this level of mammalian feeder disturbance in Bristol, where the squirrels’ appearances were usually more novelty than irritation, it was obvious that my old feeders were now patently not up to the job and I would have to invest in some more! Apparently I was not the first of Dennis’s next-door neighbours to have had this issue and he asked if I had heard about Mr Gregory’s battle with squirrels. Realising from my quizzical face that patently I hadn’t, he recounted how Mr Gregory had so detested their aggressive and domineering tactics that he had taken it upon himself to initiate a shooting and trapping campaign during his last few years in the house, claiming in the process a grand total of 212 squirrel scalps! What made the anecdote even more hilarious was that Lorraine (the neighbour to our other side) positively encouraged the squirrels into her garden and so was mortified to find her furry friends being so ruthlessly wiped out just over the garden fence. This meant that in order not to fall out with his neighbour, Mr Gregory had limited his operation to either night-time or when Lorraine was out at work – what a character! Armed with all the correct tools, Christina and I quickly made short work of the fence line, as we firstly removed the wire rabbit-guard stapled to the front, then prised away the wooden rails with the borrowed crowbar and finally wiggled the posts free of their concrete footings. Standing back to admire our handiwork, the garden looked a touch strange without the one obstacle that had prevented the wildlife wandering freely between the wooded bank and the rest of the garden. Importantly, though, the garden and brook had now become one, and it was one more job off the list, too! Stacking the wood behind the garage, we retreated to the kitchen for Christina to make a quick cuppa and for me to quickly catch up with how the English rugby team was doing against Italy. I had scarcely been given the chance to find out the score before hearing Christina’s urgent, shrill voice imploring me to come quickly to the kitchen. Seeing her nose pressed up against the window I followed suit, and was utterly astonished to see a male pheasant strutting around the garden as he cleared up the seed debris dropped by the tits and finches from the feeders, having obviously just strolled in via the new 15-yard wildlife entrance to the garden. The pheasant is an introduced, and therefore in many purists’ eyes, a lesser species. Originally hailing from southeast Russia and Asia, it is thought to have been brought over to Britain by the Normans, and over time has become part and parcel of the British countryside and, in my considered opinion, a wonderful addition to our fauna too. The pheasant is also one of those species characterised by sexual dimorphism, which means that the sexes look completely different. The female pheasants often tend to be smaller, yellowy-brown and with marked flecking; colours and patterns which enable them to quickly melt into the background when incubating their clutch in spring; while the male, with his iridescent copper-coloured body, metallic green head, red facial wattles and ear tufts, could be described as a dandy with an attitude. Fatherhood is seemingly an alien concept for the male pheasant, as he plays little or no part in the rearing of his chicks. The males are more of the love ’em and leave ’em type, their sole aim being to assemble a harem of two or more females, which they will defend at all costs from other marauding males keen to chance their arm. Until they have been mated, that is, after which the males thoughtlessly abandon the females to their fate. In our previous Bristol garden I would never have expected to see a pheasant, and even in our new garden I wouldn’t have shortened the odds that much at the chance of adding the species to my garden list. With a moment’s reflection, though, maybe its appearance shouldn’t have been that much of a surprise. For starters, Chew Stoke is a small, rural village set in the countryside, and due to our street being tucked away in the southeastern corner, as the pheasant walks our garden was probably no more than a couple of hundred yards from the nearest arable fields. Hadn’t Dennis also said only a couple of hours previously that they did occasionally turn up in his garden too? I have watched pheasants in the British countryside on thousands of occasions, so what we were looking at, in isolation, wasn’t a particularly rare sighting. But watching one on our own lawn, I can officially confirm, was a hundred times better, because it was the most glorious vindication of our policy to break down one of the main barriers to our garden. By making our border porous, the effect had been the equivalent of laying down a green carpet of invitation – with the pheasant, hopefully, being the first of many more animals to accept! True to my word that I would seek out help for those jobs technically out of my depth, and with time of the essence before spring would be upon us, I had arranged for a tree surgeon to come around and cost up some of the urgent work Christina and I had highlighted on our initial walk around. Rob was a tree surgeon of some repute in the southwest and was proud to report a wide and varied client list, which included our future monarch at his huge Tetbury estate in South Gloucestershire. If he was considered trustworthy enough for Prince Charles’s trees then he would certainly suffice for ours! What sold Rob’s services to me even more than his royal connections was the fact that Rob was not only born and bred in Chew Stoke, but by an amazing coincidence his parents still lived just around the corner. It was always good, wherever possible, to minimise the carbon footprint by keeping it local! As his hulking old-school Land-Rover pulled on to the drive, (surely every tree surgeon’s chariot of choice), I was unsurprised to see a stocky chap emerging with legs only marginally slimmer than the sizes of mature tree trunks, who offered a handshake that was like having your hand placed in one of those bench-top vice-clamps – and then tightened to an uncomfortable level. While I waited for the blood to return to my hand, we moved straight into the garden, with Rob immediately proving charming and immensely knowledgeable in equal measure as he wandered around our mini-arboretum dispensing pearls of wisdom Looking at the garden with fresh eyes, it was astonishing to see how in the space of just two short weeks, the garden had well and truly turned its head towards spring. While the male hazel catkins had been out for a while, it was only now that they had matured sufficiently to unleash their smoke-like sprinkles of pollen into the air at the slightest breeze. Some of these tiny packets of genetic material would then be ensured successful pollination by being intercepted in mid-drift by the bright-red erect styles of the tiny female flowers, arising like mini-phoenixes out of the otherwise naked hazel twigs. Daffodil leaves had also begun to emerge from a bewildering variety of locations around the garden, using the early spring rays to ensure sufficient food would be produced, via the miracle of photosynthesis, to produce a flower spike later that season. But botanical pride of place on the walk round easily went to the mini drifts of snowdrops which were scattered along the wooded bank in discrete pearly-white clusters. The snowdrop curiously is also a plant with a whole host of synonyms, such as ‘February fairmaids’ or, according to the eighteenth-century poet Thomas Tickell, the wonderfully evocative name of ‘vegetable snow’. I personally think that the most intriguing name is ‘snow piercer’, so named because of the plant’s specially hardened leaf-tips, which have evolved to break through frozen ground. Despite some botanists harbouring doubts as to whether the snowdrop is indeed a native British flower, since many seemingly wild colonies may well have begun as garden escapes, what is without doubt is that as the austerity of winter comes to an end, the plant in full bloom is a welcome sign that many more floral delights are only just around the corner. Looking up at the oak, and contrary to my thinking that the tree was on its last legs, Rob suggested that it would in all probability still outlive me! Having said that, he thought removing the ivy would certainly lighten the load and enable the tree to photosynthesise more easily, giving it a new lease of life. Whilst the beech tree would need no more than a few branches to be removed for safety and aesthetics, he also pointed out considerable damage to one of the main branches that I hadn’t previously spotted, which had been caused by those naughty grey squirrels’ unfortunate habit of bark-stripping. Agreeing that the central rowan had always had insufficient space to flourish and did look in poor condition, Rob said that he would do his best to avoid too much damage to my newly demarked meadow whilst bringing it down. His chainsaw, we agreed, would also be taken to the huge rotten pergola in the centre of the lawn, which would have the dual benefit of both removing the garden’s biggest eyesore and opening up the meadow to a splash more of sunshine. I love it when a plan comes together! As I was spending the following week away filming in Scotland, Christina had agreed to take a day’s holiday on the Friday to be both tea provider and photographer when Rob returned, this time with both chainsaw and colleagues to carry out the work. Catching the last flight back to Bristol, I arrived too late to see all the changes before nightfall and so had a frustrating wait until the following day before I was able to assess their handiwork. Rushing out at first light with a coffee to inspect their efforts, I was flabbergasted at the difference. Just the removal of the rowan and the pergola alone had transformed the would-be meadow into one where light could penetrate. Apparently working from the top down to minimise damage to the ground flora, the rowan had been dismantled in less than an hour and had transmogrified into a neat pile of logs. Likewise the monstrous carbuncle that was the pergola had been turned into a neatly stacked pile of weathered timber – surely I would be able to find a multitude of uses for all that lovely wood? Other features permanently erased from the garden included the small birch tree cowering behind its bigger brother in the corner by the playing field and one of the two terribly disfigured cherry trees. Showing some artistic licence with the chainsaw, the other cherry tree had been thoughtfully converted to a bird table, with the table top having been fashioned out of a spliced section of the rowan’s trunk. By systematically severing all the huge climbing stems and stripping the majority of the foliage out of the canopy, the oak was finally free of the ivy’s suffocating grip, and looked like it would now be able to breathe properly for the first time in a couple of decades. The beech had also been carefully pruned to both give it a good shape and to ensure not too many branches would fall into Marjory and Dennis’s garden. Finally, Rob had made sure that, wherever possible, trampling of all the lovely spring bulbs had been kept to a minimum – spring could now commence! One of the little treats that we had long been planning, but until now had not found the time to carry out, was a mini-investigation of the surrounding land both upstream and downstream of our section of the brook. So, donning our wellingtons, Christina and I slithered down the bank and into the water for our very first exploratory paddle. As the water tinkled around our boots at a depth of no more than six inches, the first impression we were able to gain from this totally different perspective was how much lower the level of the water actually was below the bottom of the garden. Being a full three yards below the meadow meant that a storm of biblical proportions would have to occur before our property was in any danger of flooding. The downside of this disparity in height, however, also meant that, as the bank faced north, natural light would always be thin on the ground. It wasn’t until we were able to stand back and inspect the bank from this hitherto unseen angle that we realised how dark and dingy our little wood really was. In fact, so dark was the steepest section of the bank below the oak tree that the only vibrant sign of life emanating from the gloom was provided by discrete clusters of the shade-loving hart’s-tongue fern, arising out of the bare earth like resplendent green shuttlecocks. With their strap-shaped leaves, which supposedly resemble a female deer’s tongue, this perennial evergreen is one of those plants that is always capable of brightening up the shadiest of woodland floors, so we were delighted it had chosen to take up residence on our bank too. Being south-facing, the opposite bank, albeit distinctly shaded by the trees and shrubs from our bank, inevitably had more floral potential. In addition to the hart’s-tongue fern and the ubiquitous groundcover of ivy, I was a touch envious to encounter the first leaves of ramsons, or wild garlic, beginning to emerge above ground. Immediately recognisable in early spring by the sweet-and-sour cloying smell of its leaves and then later in the season by the drifts of white flowers as the plant monopolises huge areas, this was one woodland specialist I was hoping would also grace our side of the bank too. Electing to explore downstream first, we had barely walked past the bottom of Marjory and Dennis’s garden before we heard a bird call we knew instantly. ‘Kingfisher!’ we both shouted in unison, as our ears caught its shrill characteristic whistle. Aware of my interest in birds, I have lost track of the number of times that novice birdwatchers have asked me for any tips or advice as to how they might finally track down a sighting of a kingfisher. My response to this question is always the same; learning and recognising the call of this noisy and pugnacious little bird means it will often telegraph its arrival, giving you a moment’s preparation time to catch a glimpse as it whizzes past. Sure enough, no more than a second after hearing the call, Christina spotted a blue bullet powering upstream towards us. Shocked at seeing our two huge looming presences standing in the middle of the brook, or its flight path, the bird veered away and took a short cut across the inner bend of the meander. Going at such speed, the kingfisher had to bank to make the turning, meaning we were treated to the most wonderful sighting of its orange underside before it righted itself and joined the brook again some 10 yards further upstream. It was a thrilling encounter and an exciting moment as we realised that not only could we add kingfisher to our garden list, but having survived the harsh winter it might well be here all season. Breeding kingfishers at the bottom of our ex-council house garden – how good did that sound? I don’t mind telling you that at that moment I also performed a little spontaneous and aquatic jig of delight! Buoyed by this wonderful find, we were soon brought back down to earth further downstream by the realisation that the brook, in addition to great wildlife, contained a disturbingly large amount of rubbish, both snagged in the water and littering the banks. Everything from plastic bottles to a fly-tipped pram and a bus-stop sign had somehow managed to find their way into the brook. Another job had just been added to our to-do list. In some spots the brook was much more sluggish and deeper than at the bottom of our garden and so we had to either take a detour along the bank or move through the water very slowly to ensure it didn’t breach our wellington tops. Large sections of both banks seemed to be either attached to gardens or were just a tangled mess without an immediately identifiable owner. Scrambling up one area of bank, no more than a hundred yards from our garden, was a section dominated by alder trees at the water’s edge, where we were delighted to find a large and obviously very active badger sett. Occupying a little ridge which ran parallel with the stream, the sett consisted of at least half a dozen entrances, most of which were devoid of leaf litter, a sure-fire sign of recent use. Additionally, two of these entrances were so large that Christina could probably have joined the badgers down below, had she felt that way inclined, and there was evidence of fresh digging within the last 24 hours. Obviously the incumbents had just carried out their spring clean! Retracing our steps back to the house and following the brook upstream, the bank on the south side soon flattened out to a small, wooded plateau littered with beer cans. Wondering how these had found their way here, it was not until a quick scout around that we realised that the playing field, which partly ran adjacent to our garden, also had a gate in the 6-foot-high fence, giving quick and easy access to the river bank – so this was where the local adolescents came for a clandestine lager or two! On the opposite side of the brook, the water had gouged out a steep sandy bank some 6 feet high, which seemed perfect for a nesting kingfisher. On closer inspection, my instinct had patently been right as we soon uncovered a couple of long-discarded and now partially collapsed holes that were probably indicative of breeding attempts from previous seasons. I made a mental note that I simply had to bring a four-pack back down here later in the year to spend an evening watching the kingfishers – if we were lucky enough to have them breed in the same bank again. With many other gardens backing onto the brook, it also gave us the perfect opportunity for a nose around, or a kingfisher’s-eye view, of all of our waterside neighbours. As you would expect, the gardens were a mixed bunch, with some beautifully laid-out, whilst others were in a ramshackle state and obviously hadn’t been touched for years. Peering over the bank, we were amazed to see one large garden with a model railway running the whole way around its perimeter – how utterly bizarre! With March rapidly approaching, the next urgent job on the ever-growing to-do list was to get some nest boxes in the garden, as the resident blue tits, great tits and robins would probably already have begun prospecting potential nest sites for the oncoming breeding season. If I were to collect house points for effort in attracting birds to our garden, then I would be awarded one point for every different species spotted actually feeding in the garden, but would be granted an immediate 10 house points for every pair which successfully raises a brood. For any self-respecting garden naturalist, playing host to nesting birds in your garden should really be the greatest accolade, as it says that you are getting much more right than wrong in your attempt to make your garden the ultimate wildlife-friendly destination. In an ideal world, I would love to have handmade all my own nest boxes, as it is incredibly easy and instructions can be found on the internet. However, as time was of the essence, we decided that we would have to splash the cash. Anyone who has ever purchased a nest box knows that they come in innumerable shapes and sizes, so after much debate down at our local garden centre about the merits of each design, we went for four of the classic boxes as favoured by blue and great tits, three open nest boxes as preferred by robins and spotted flycatchers, and a large box fraternised by jackdaws or tawny owls. On reaching the tills with our trolley full to the brim, I was left with the distinct feeling that creating this haven of wildlife – if done properly – would not only need time and effort but possibly a large proportion of our expendable income too! With the sun streaming through our bedroom window, it was obvious that the morning after our mercy dash to the garden centre would be beautifully cold and crisp – in fact the perfect day for putting up nest boxes. Having run out of milk for our ‘pre-erecting nest boxes coffee’, I offered to walk round to the local store to grab a couple of pints whilst Christina sorted out breakfast. Enjoying the warming effect of the low winter sun on my face, I must have gone no more than 50 yards from the house when I heard the unmistakable sound of a male chaffinch belting out his mating song – which in an instant signalled the immediate cessation of winter and beginning of spring. My RSPB Handbook of British Birds describes the chaffinch’s song as ‘a short, fast and rather dry descending series of trills that accelerates and ends with a flourish’, which I suppose is a reasonable interpretation of an unremarkable song. But the description does nothing to explain the huge symbolism of what the song represents, as I always look upon it as signifying the gateway to my favourite season. The song operates like a drum-roll for spring to let us know that the bumblebees and butterflies are about to emerge, bud burst will begin and the breeding season can swing into action. We had decided that the first place to erect one of the boxes would be on the oak trunk, which had just been liberated from its ivy stranglehold. Marking the northwest boundary of our property, the previous owners had erected a steel fence which butted up to the tree and then topped it off with a barbed-wire strand which had been crudely nailed straight into the oak’s trunk. Keen to remove this impediment to the tree’s health before we put up the nest box, I attacked the fencing staples with my pliers, momentarily forgetting that I was right on the edge of the precipice created by the brook. As I reached round to remove the last staple, my foot slipped on the mud, causing me to lose my balance, and a split-second later I was careering off the edge bound for the water below – and to think, I’m ashamed to admit, that I had stifled a laugh when I heard about Mr Gregory’s unscheduled visit to the same brook a few years earlier! Also aware of the fact that my ridiculously expensive camera was still around my shoulder, I closed my eyes and prepared for a big splash, no small amount of pain on hitting the water and the instigation of a large insurance claim to replace my soon-to-be-ruined camera. Thump! I opened my eyes to find that I hadn’t hit the water at all, as I had straddled one of the huge oak roots protruding from the bank. Despite the fact that the tree had saved both me and my photography kit, I didn’t get away scot-free, as I had pulled a groin muscle, slightly bruised my err … undercarriage and cut a couple of fingers. Nevertheless, it was a lucky escape. Elsewhere in the garden, Christina hadn’t been aware of my fall until she turned round on hearing my pathetic cries for help as I came out of my momentary daze and realised I was struggling to get either up or down. On peering over the edge of the bank Christina wasn’t sure whether to be worried for me or laugh her socks off at my ridiculous predicament. After passing the camera to her, which had fortunately not been damaged by my tumble, I was eventually able to scramble back up the bank, and recount what had happened, feeling somewhat embarrassed and chastened by the whole experience. Deciding that because of my sore groin it would probably be easier if Christina put up the tree nest boxes, leaving her klutz of a boyfriend to hold the ladder and pass up the tools, we set about finishing the job. Starting with the tit boxes first, we elected to attach one each to the trunks of the oak and the birch whilst embedding the other two in the centre of the hazel stands. Two of the open nest boxes were nailed at differing heights to the playing field fence line whilst the other was placed on the dividing fence between our garden and Marjory and Dennis’s. The only problem we encountered for the rest of the morning was in our attempt to put up the large nest box. We were struggling to find a place to put it where it would have a chance of being used, without endangering our lives in the process. After a half-hearted attempt to put the box some 15 feet up in the beech tree, using a combination of our ladder and then a bit of tree-climbing, we decided, after my experience a few hours earlier, that it was probably a touch too ambitious and dangerous, and so left the nest box in the garage for another breeding season. Because the nest box was of the open-fronted variety, I was also fearful that if anything did try to nest in there, the chicks would have been an easy target for those opportunistic squirrels. We planned to spend some time in our postage-stamp-sized front garden in the afternoon, so I went in to prepare lunch, only for Christina to dash in minutes later urging me back out into the garden. As I looked down the garden you could have blown me over with a feather as we watched a prospecting blue tit stick its head back out of the nest box on the birch tree, scarcely more than an hour after we had put it up. Talk about an instant response! MARCH (#ulink_88d2b0e4-c64c-5a81-a1b3-9ecd0b664100) SPRINGING INTO ACTION (#ulink_88d2b0e4-c64c-5a81-a1b3-9ecd0b664100) Although it may seem glamorous from the outside, a career in television can in reality involve working long days, spending many nights living out of a suitcase and substantial periods away from home and loved ones. In my case, it also brought the new and totally unexpected feeling of missing the garden. In the space of just over a month, I had already spent more time in our new garden than the entire previous decade in my old Bristol garden. So as I arrived back at 1am on 3 March after a long trip away filming bats down caves, I felt like I was coming home in more ways than one, and experienced rising excitement at the thought of seeing both Christina and how the garden had changed over the last few days. Pulling up outside the house, I had barely got out of the taxi before the garden gloriously delivered, as I picked up the unmistakable hoot of a male tawny owl calling from somewhere down by the stream. Perhaps the most surprising thing, in retrospect, was that I hadn’t already heard a tawny owl up to that point. After all, I was now living in the country, and the patchwork mosaic of woodland and mature gardens along Strode Brook in many ways represented the ideal habitat for this most adaptable of species. Still, better late than never, I thought, as I dragged my sleep-deprived body and over-sized bags into the house, hoping on just this one occasion that the hooting wouldn’t keep me awake! Due to another filming commitment later the same day, to track down Cornish grey seals, on waking up my first thought was to maximise any spare time in the garden. I was also delighted to discover that while I had been away the substantial order I had placed from a company specialising in bird food and feeders had arrived and awaited my attention on the patio. To someone who gets the most ridiculous satisfaction from feeding his garden birds, the pile of birding paraphernalia just waiting to be unwrapped and distributed around the garden made me feel like my birthday and Christmas had just been rolled into one! In addition to sacks full of sunflower hearts, peanuts and bird-table mix, I had also ordered a couple of bird feeders especially designed to thwart even the most determined of squirrels. Design number one incorporated a feeder mounted on a pole, with all six feeding ports cleverly encased in a cylindrical mesh cage. This ring of steel would enable tits and finches to pass through but not squirrels or equally domineering wood pigeons. The second design was a regulation hanging feeder but with a Perspex dome attachment, which when placed like a bell immediately above the feeder would prevent the squirrels clambering onto it from the branch above. The key to the successful implementation of this design is that the feeder must be placed high enough to ensure the squirrels can’t jump up to it from the ground, but also far enough away from any other branches to prevent them leaping across, and crucially underneath the dome, from another vantage point. Not wanting to deny the buntings, chaffinches or robins the opportunity to join in the food-fest, I had also ordered a ground feeding table, complete with an anti-squirrel guard in the form of a mesh-rectangle which covered the table and was then secured to the lawn via pegs. Having stashed all the food in rodent-proof bins in the garage, I then set about taking down my old feeders and replacing them with my lovely new acquisitions. The bell feeder was hung about 6 feet from one of the lower branches of the remaining rowan tree, whilst the caged feeder with accompanying pole was stuck into the lawn close to our shared fence with Andy and Lorraine, in order to entice the birds away from their feeding table and onto to our feeders. Let the battle for (sunflower) hearts and minds begin! Taking a tour around to admire what was becoming an utterly irresistible garden, I couldn’t help but notice that the natural flora, particularly around the meadow, was already subtly beginning to change. Despite the still occasional appearance of ground frosts in the morning, things had patently become far too tropical for the snowdrops, which were definitely looking past their best. However, without doubt one of the most exciting aspects of botany is that, for most of the year, as one flower fades another species will often quickly take centre stage by moving into bloom, and in this case that plant was the primrose. From the Spanish prima rosa, or the ‘first rose of spring’, the primrose’s name can be somewhat misleading, as of course it’s not related to the rose but is a member of the primrose family itself. If I were to choose my top ten favourite British wild flowers, then the primrose would comfortably sail into the top five. It is not just about the flowers, which I have always thought emanate from the leafy basal rosette like a large dollop of clotted cream, but, just like the chaffinch’s song, it represents a gateway to my favourite season of the year: spring. With the species name vulgaris, translated as ‘common’, this plant is paradoxically nowhere near as abundant as it used to be. Overpicking and a loss of suitable habitat are the prime reasons behind this plant’s disappearance from large swathes of our countryside. That would not be the case in this garden, though, as the primroses would be removed over my dead body. They were there for us and the wildlife to enjoy. Christina joined me for an hour’s work in the garden, before I had to disappear away again in the evening, and we rolled up our sleeves and got stuck into the front garden, as the border in front of the house, having now been weeded, prepared and fertilised, was at last ready to be planted up. We had planned for the border to be filled with a combination of plants from a variety of sources: those which had sneakily been dug up from our previous garden and brought with us, as well as recently purchased perennials and some shrubs from our new garden which could still be saved. Being the artistic type, Christina wanted to trial the potted plants at varying locations around the border, to try and work out what would look best where. ‘Having spent so much time, effort and money on these plants, it would be a shame not to create a lovely mixture of colour, texture and pattern.’ One thing I have learnt over the years with my wonderful girlfriend is not to even attempt to assert my opinion when it comes down to who has the last say on colour or positioning schemes – she just does this kind of thing better. The result of this game of Chinese ‘plant’ chequers meant that, as the light began to fade, the only plants we had managed to put in the ground that afternoon were a couple of large hydrangeas carefully positioned to cover the gas meter, and a climbing honeysuckle that would eventually mask the ugly cables emanating from our newly installed satellite dish. As we began to pack up, my thoughts had already turned away from arranging flower borders to my paid work and the pre-departure checklist for filming down in Cornwall. BLACKBIRD! I couldn’t believe my ears, for the first blackbird of spring was singing from somewhere down the road. A scan of the most obvious vantage points quickly revealed the silhouette of a male in mid-performance on the TV aerial of Number Six, with a salmon-pink sunset as a backdrop to make the moment even more special. In a recent poll by the National Trust to find the nation’s favourite songbird, the humble blackbird trounced all the opposition with a whopping 45 per cent of all votes cast. In summary, this is a song that means an awful lot to an awful lot of people. I’ve personally always felt that the song has a beautiful, melancholic sound to it, and if I were to indulge myself further by giving the bird an accent, then it would have to be that lazy but mellow drawl easily encountered in any of the southern states of the USA: ‘Y’all come back now yer hear!’ it seemed to be singing to us! The impact of this most natural of symphonies on our brains cannot be overestimated. Recent studies have shown that the psychological impact of birdsong can affect anything from our mood to our levels of attention and creativity. I have no idea how researchers are able to calibrate these effects, but as the blackbird belted out its virtuoso performance, while Christina and I listened enraptured with our arms around each other, all I know is that it made us both feel content. The weekend finally brought a break to my hectic work schedule, meaning it would also free up some time to indulge in my two new favourite activities: watching the wildlife coming and going in our garden, and planting lots of lovely plants. Taking up my preferred perching point by the landing stairs window, and with the two essentials for any early morning birding session – my binoculars and a cup of coffee – I was particularly keen to see how the new feeders were being received. I had barely taken my first sip of coffee before a flash of pink and an even tinier flash of blue betrayed the presence of a pair of jays playing hide and seek through the hazels on the wooded bank. Historically an arboreal bird most at home in the wooded countryside, the jay is one species which has seemingly developed much more catholic tastes over the last few decades. As a result of extensive planting schemes in many urban and suburban areas, combined with the fact that urban pollution levels are now at their lowest levels since before the Industrial Revolution our towns and cities are now a much more attractive proposition to birds like the jay. In fact, so prevalent have they become in Bristol’s suburbs, for example, that I considered jays to be relatively common visitors to the diminutive urban garden attached to my previous flat. Despite having made the bold decision to come and live alongside us, the jay has still retained that nervous and skittish demeanour and none of the cockiness or swagger of, say, house sparrows or wood pigeons. This introverted nature means that the jay will always be one of those birds that leaves you wanting more, and such was the case here, as the pair all too briefly melted away into the undergrowth. Nevertheless, I was particularly pleased officially to add this bird to the garden list, as it was the one species that Christina had seen in the garden the week before, but I hadn’t yet managed to catch up with. Knowing that I wouldn’t have been happy until I had seen them for myself, Christina had enjoyed exploiting this fact by winding me up, or in birding parlance ‘gripping me off’. ‘How can you have the audacity to actually call yourself a birder when you haven’t even managed to see as common a bird as a jay in your own back garden?’ In a number of ways, even more pleasing than the brief appearance of the jays were the large numbers of greenfinches which were constantly crowding around the bell feeder in the rowan tree. The greenfinch is a garden bird familiar to even those with little more than a passing interest in our feathered friends, but it is also a species that since 2005 has been so heavily targeted by a parasite-induced disease called trichomonosis that populations are thought to have plummeted by as much as a third in those areas affected by outbreaks. Living in the bird’s upper digestive tract, this dastardly parasite’s action is to slowly block the bird’s throat so it is unable to swallow food, ultimately causing a long, lingering death by starvation. While the parasite can’t survive for long outside the host, it can unfortunately be easily transmitted between birds via saliva, which will always accumulate at communal feeders and drinking areas. This tragically means that the disease cruelly targets those garden owners who ironically care most about their birds by regularly feeding them. So prevalent has this disease become in the southwest over the last few years that, for me, seeing what was a once abundant bird has now become a notable event. But as I watched the constant flickering of yellow and green around the feeder, I was struck with the thought that maybe our new garden could just conceivably be located in a healthy enclave, meaning we might be spared the ravages of this pernicious disease. I could only hope that this refreshing sighting was one that I would continue to enjoy. Whilst scanning through the hordes of greenfinch, my gaze latched onto a pair of somewhat more uncommon finches, in the form of a couple of siskin. So excited was I at this find, that my ‘birding Tourette’s’ kicked in once again, causing me to suddenly shout, ‘Siskin!’ involuntarily to nobody in particular, and certainly not to Christina, who was still doing a fine impression of someone keen to spend the whole day in bed. This smaller cousin of the greenfinch has a curious distribution in Britain, with most individuals preferring to breed in Welsh, Scottish and northern English coniferous forests, before electing to spend their winter holidays in the milder climes of southern England. Having never before seen siskin in any Bristol urban garden since moving to the southwest in 1999, this was one of those winter visitors I was secretly hoping would at some point have turned up in our new garden before disappearing back up north for the breeding season. I hate to be sexist when talking about birds, but I’m afraid that the male siskin is just so much more attractive than his washed-out female counterpart. Adult males will generally undertake a complete moult between July and November, but it takes until early the following spring for the pale feather tips to abrade sufficiently for the gorgeous back cap and bib to be revealed – and boy, this specimen was looking pretty dapper right now! Of course the cast of garden characters wouldn’t be complete without the presence of a Panto Villain, played so ably as ever by the grey squirrels. Unlike the entire month of February, where they had been given free rein to bully and monopolise the feeding stations whenever they felt hungry, free and easy hand-outs were now proving somewhat more difficult to procure thanks to the addition of my two new feeders. I must also admit to having given myself a childish chuckle of delight on seeing two different squirrels unsuccessfully trying to clamber up the pole on which the caged feeder had been mounted. Like most campaigns it wasn’t going all my own way, as I watched what looked to be a still juvenile squirrel, having squeezed through the anti-squirrel bars covering the ground feeder, busily filling his cheeks with food intended for others. Still, I couldn’t deny that a better balance between the birds and squirrels had now been achieved. Christina having surfaced, after a quick breakfast on the patio we set about our designated task of finishing the planting up of the herbaceous border in the front garden. Having decided on a floral arrangement that she would be happy with, trowels were wielded as planting began. It being very early in the season, a lot of our recently purchased plants were still pretty small, which meant that they were cheap to buy and easy to plant, so it was hardly arduous work as we happily plonked in twos and threes each of foxgloves, lupins, Jacob’s ladders and penstemons. Having soon exhausted our supply of recent purchases, we then moved on to the more established lavenders, salvias and fuchsias which we had potted up from our old flat and brought with us. Anyone who has ever put in plants knows that it is hardly rocket science, so after a sufficient-sized hole had been dug, it was furnished with a few granules of slow-release plant-food (nick-named ‘Magic Balls’ in our household), before the plant was inverted, pot removed and then placed in its carefully excavated hole. An optional extra of a small amount of mulch was then added to give it a good start. Not for the first time, while watching Christina plant away I was taken aback by how quickly her green fingers had developed. True, her father and uncle were fine gardeners in their own right, so there must have been a genetic element to the instinctual way she seemed to have with plants. But it was not just how she handled them; she had not only managed to pick up the Latin names of many of the plants in double-quick time, but many of their specific and quirky needs too. I love it when a hidden talent surfaces. We had decided beforehand that plants for the garden would be chosen with three criteria in mind. Firstly, and most importantly for Christina, they needed to look good; whether through imposing foliage or impressive sprays of flowers was of secondary concern. The second point, and the most important factor for me, was that the plants purchased (wherever possible) should be high nectar and pollen producers, to ensure a bountiful selection of invertebrate pollinators which would in turn attract predators such as spiders, birds and insectivorous mammals. Thirdly, neither of us wanted the effort of having to deal with any delicate, wilting types that were considered high maintenance, so only those plants robust enough to withstand the rough and tumble nature of life in our garden would be represented. As we stood back to see our handiwork, it had to be said that the border currently looked far from the finished article, with the discrete clusters of chlorophyll surrounded by a sea of soil. But before we knew it, the days would soon begin both to lengthen and become warmer, triggering the plants into a sustained period of growth, culminating in a riot of colour as the flowers opened up for passing trade. Having planned to spend the afternoon shopping for various garden-related paraphernalia, we were just at the point of packing up tools when my eagle-eyed partner noticed a bird whose identity she was unsure of soaring way above the garden, causing me to sprint inside to get my binoculars for a better look. On closer inspection my initial guess was correct, as I was able to confirm that we were watching a male displaying sparrowhawk! Birds of prey, or raptors, can often be incredibly tough to identify for novice and expert alike, as many look superficially similar and are rarely seen at close quarters. But when a sparrowhawk is clearly seen out in the open, its relatively small size and distinctive ‘flap, flap, sail’ way of flying are usually enough to ensure a confident identification. Having said that, the only time when the sparrowhawk deviates from this more usual way of flying tends to be in early spring when love is in the air. Usually conducted above the nest site, the spring courtship flight sees the male flapping his wings much more slowly than normal, almost as if in an exaggerated fashion, which is then often combined with a narrowing of the tail and a sticking out of the pale undertail-covert feathers. This slow-flapping flight, if the observer is lucky, will then conclude with a breathtaking series of peregrine-esque stoops designed both to demarcate his territory and impress his potential mate. As we watched what must have been our resident male sparrowhawk go through this skydancing routine, and irrespective of what his prospective mate thought, he certainly impressed us. If the pair did indeed settle down locally, and I for one hoped they would, then both male and female would also over the breeding season be making a slightly different impression with all the tits and finches currently flocking to my garden for food too! Without doubt one of the best features that any self-respecting wildlife gardener should find room for is a compost heap. Obviously this makes getting rid of household vegetable and garden waste a piece of cake, rather than going to the extra effort of sending it off for somebody else to make a profit from or, worse still, using it as land-fill. There is also something amazing about the miracle of decomposition; a process whereby potato peelings, banana skins and apple cores can be broken down, only to be reconstituted back into the most wonderful fertilizer with which to feed your herbaceous borders. We too were keen on making our own compost rather than spending our hard-earned cash on bags of it from the local garden centre, but the other reason why I wanted one was because they are hugely important wildlife habitats in their own right. All manner of animals are drawn to compost heaps because all that warm, rotting plant material provides a habitat which is mostly absent from gardens. Ask most knowledgeable gardeners which animals are most commonly associated with compost heaps and hopefully the majority would respond with the answer – reptiles. This heat-loving group simply adores the warmth and protection offered, evidenced by an urban wildlife survey recently conducted around Bristol which revealed that those gardens with a compost heap were twice as likely to play host to resident slow-worms as those without. Compost heaps are also pretty much the only place in a garden (unless you have a huge pond) where you have any chance of catching up with a grass snake, as this is often where females choose to incubate and hatch their eggs. In fact, on the two occasions I have been lucky enough to have seen this wonderful and enigmatic snake in a garden setting, it had converted the heap to a home. While not every garden compost heap will be able to double up as a natural vivarium, all heaps can be guaranteed to attract a much wider array of invertebrates, such as beetles and woodlice, than would otherwise be found in a sterile, tidy garden where a compost heap would be considered an unsightly eyesore. So, with all this in mind, and aware of the fact that the wood from the dismantling of both the fence and pergola was still sitting there just begging to be used, I had decided that in the spirit of recycling I would try to use the timber to build a couple of compost bins. Of course, on the surface this grand plan seemed a quite brilliant way to improve the wildlife potential of the garden without either spending much money or wasting any more of the world’s timber resources, but the biggest obstacle to the successful completion of this task was that, in a nutshell, I’m terribly unpractical. As all the Dilgers hail from an academic background, it’s safe to say that, like my mother, father and two brothers, the practical or technical genes seem largely to have skipped a couple of generations, and like the rest of my family I’m much better at talking the talk, rather than walking the walk! In many ways what makes this even more hilarious is that I’m actually considered the most practical one, simply because of my ability to wire a plug or use a drill to mount a picture – we are that bad! A plug or a picture was one thing, but would I have the ability to cope with building something as technically demanding as a couple of compost bins? Well, we would have to see. Having found a timber design for compost bins from an old Geoff Hamilton gardening book and having been promised the loan of an electric saw from Christina’s father (did he realise what he was promising?), the only bit of kit I now needed to begin the big build was a work bench, hence the visit that afternoon to our local DIY supermarket. As a person who has only recently realised the difference between a plum-bob and a plum-duff, I have always felt a touch intimidated going into these large DIY stores, where the staff have a habit of making you feel terribly inadequate, by perversely responding to your tentative question with another question they know you’ll struggle to answer. However, today was different as I knew exactly what I wanted; I was after that iconic tool of the trade which has done more to convey rugged manliness than any beer, aftershave or pair of jeans could ever do … I was after a Black & Decker Workmate! Unaware that there was more than one design of Workmate, but not wanting to enquire further about the precise technical differences of each model without sounding stupid either, I did what I usually do in this situation, which is to go for the middle of the range. Christina, who incidentally does come from both practical and academic stock and so would have been a useful sounding board with my workbench dilemma, had taken herself off to the gardening section to feed her plant-buying addiction and so was unavailable for a quick consultation. Nevertheless, I felt both confident and ever so slightly thrilled at the fun I would have with my new purchase … ‘Mike Dilger, naturalist, broadcaster and compost bin builder’! The following day should have brought the promise of more fun and frolics in the garden for both of us, but instead it started off with a big argument. Like all disagreements it had begun with something small; with us arguing as to where the pond would be located, but this had merely been the stalking horse for a much larger bone of contention, namely what we actually wanted the garden to represent. In our sketched plan we had effectively decided to divide the garden in two, with the half closer to the house representing the more cultivated and formal part of the garden, while the other half alongside the wooded bank would be left more au naturel with a screen of apple trees marking the border between the two sections and effectively operating as green curtains through to the secret nature reserve. While we agreed that a pond was something we both wanted, the only issue was whether I would lose a large chunk of my meadow for the pond to be situated in the nature reserve, or whether Christina would have to sacrifice a site closer to the house which she had earmarked as a potential seating area. The crux of my argument consisted of why we would go to all the considerable effort of digging a pond if we couldn’t even observe what would be attracted to the feature due to it being hidden behind the trees, while Christina countered that the area where I wanted to locate the pond was one of the very few positions which would also comfortably accommodate a table and chairs in the sun. Once again, our beloved birds abruptly ended the argument, as above our shouting match I suddenly heard a siskin in the birch tree above our heads! The argument stopped instantly as we both fully understood this was not a moment to be squandered, but one to be savoured. I suppose the siskin’s song is like a cross between the wheezy greenfinch song and the chaotic, staccato rhythm of a sedge warbler, and to someone like me, whose favourite aspect of natural history has to be birdsong, it was a very special moment. Unlike the blackbirds and chaffinch which had already begun singing to hold territories, this siskin would soon be leaving our garden to raise a family elsewhere and so I suspect was probably just putting in a bit of practice in order to hit the ground running on his chosen breeding ground up in Scotland or Scandinavia. Deciding that a compromise could easily be worked out, we elected instead to use our time more usefully by making a cuppa and enjoying the garden rather than arguing about it, so the rest of the morning was spent sitting on the patio with our coats and coffee, as we watched early spring unfurl across our garden. Although the siskin had by that time left to practise elsewhere, the sun coming out had patently given other birds sufficient stimulus to join in the throng, and so in quick succession we were also treated to a chorus of dunnock, great tit and chaffinch all competing for both air space and territory in and around our garden. Despite early spring undeniably having already begun, food was obviously still thin on the ground in the wider countryside as greenfinch, chaffinch and siskin were still fraternising the feeders in large numbers. In addition to the normal suspects, three reed buntings were happily feeding away on my ground feeder, having decided that they weren’t quite ready to desert the lush oasis of our garden for the reed beds just yet. Continuing the raptor theme from the previous day, we were also thrilled to spot three buzzards wheeling away on the thermals some 200 feet above the garden whilst making their mewing ‘peee-uu’ display call. Now vying with the sparrow-hawk as Britain’s commonest bird of prey, the buzzard was a bird I never saw as a child due to draconian persecution tactics, but thanks to the complete protection of all birds of prey, it has made a sterling comeback and seemed a particularly regular fixture amongst the West Country’s cast of wild characters. Watching wildlife is one of those lovely hobbies which rewards the time and effort you put in, and as we sat there being warmed by the sun’s rays, in addition to all the birds going about their business, another somewhat smaller creature that had just emerged from hibernation was also buzzing about. At this time of the year, bumblebees are easy to sex as it is only the queens who are equipped to survive the perils of winter, the rest of her colony having perished in the first frosts of the previous autumn. In a life cycle that beggars belief, the queen, having already been fertilised by the previous year’s males, then stores the sperm throughout winter. Upon emerging from hibernation the following spring, her first priority is to immediately replenish the body fats lost during the winter with the pollen and nectar from any suitable early-flowering plants. Using this food to develop her ovaries, it is only then that she will be in a position to fertilise the eggs. With the eggs ready to be laid, her next task is to find a suitable location for the nest to initiate her new colony, explaining why many people in early spring report bumblebees seemingly behaving erratically as they investigate nooks and crannies in walls and holes in lawns. All the queens are doing is looking for somewhere to set up home. We leapt up to take a closer look, and we could clearly see her crawling around the bottom of the wisteria looking for a mouse-hole or any suitable cavity, and that she was a buff-tailed bumblebee (Bombus terrestris), one of the commonest of our bumblebees and also one of the earliest to emerge from hibernation. Bumblebees in Britain have had a tough time over the last 30 years, with two species having become extinct and around half the remaining species being recorded as in serious decline. Unfortunately it is no coincidence that during this period large swathes of our countryside have fundamentally changed from being places teeming with wildlife, to sterile monocultures with little space for the wild flowers and their attendant insects. However, throughout this dark, depressing period of environmental degradation, a ray of light has been created by gardens. Due to the extended flowering seasons gardeners often create and the bountiful sources of nectar and pollen on offer from all the different blooms, gardens have taken on the mantle of becoming extremely important habitats for these beleaguered insects. How appropriate then that our first bumblebee sighting of the year should be in the garden. Our planned trip to the garden centre that afternoon would now also need to include the purchase of a few more early-flowering, bee-friendly plants, as a garden can’t be called wildlife-friendly, unless it is full of the sound of buzzing bumbles! Due to work commitments it was not until the following Friday that I was presented with any further opportunity to get my hands dirty in the garden. I downed my breakfast even faster than usual before bidding goodbye to Christina, who was off to work, for the whole day had been earmarked for a particularly manly job – commencing compost bin construction! But even before I would be able to start the measuring and sawing, the first task would be to actually build the Workmate, as it was only available for purchase in flat-pack form. One of the prime reasons why historically I have tried to avoid shops like IKEA is that I hate building flat-packed furniture from instructions. To someone like me for whom DIY is a dirty acronym, the accompanying instructions can be the stuff of nightmares; these awful leaflets always assume dangerous levels of competence, are invariably poorly written and often contain diagrams that seem to bear no resemblance to the product you have just purchased. Despite the instructions being more of a hindrance than a help (Black & Decker please note), it was not until lunchtime – yes, a full three hours later – that at last I was ready to begin sawing up the timber. Despite Mr Hamilton’s design initially looking complicated, it was easier to follow than I had expected, and with Christina’s father’s circular saw cutting through the timber like a hot knife through butter, I was soon giving the wood from the pergola and fence a second lease of life as precisely measured planks. With it being such a lovely, clear day my top half was soon stripped down to nothing more than a T-shirt as a result of the exertion – what a manly occupation compost-bin building was! Geoff’s design had incorporated wooden planks both on the back and either side, with small, vertical wooden battens at the front that would keep in place removable slats, which could then be slid out when the compost either needed to be turned or was ready to be removed and then used on our, as yet, nonexistent flower beds. The roof would then simply consist of a large piece of marine plywood to be purchased at a later date. The thinking behind the building of two bins was that it enabled one bin to be maturing while the other one was being filled with household waste and garden trimmings. Standing back after a couple of hours, I was stunned with my progress. I had turned a large pile of partly rotten timber into a neat stack of perfectly sawn planks, and without any incidents either! I had also achieved something in my own mind of much more significance – I had put to bed my silly notion that I simply wasn’t up to anything more difficult than the simplest of practical tasks. There was also a huge feel-good factor associated with re-using and recycling rather than my usual course of action, which would have been to throw away the old timber then solve the ‘conundrum’ by buying something pre-constructed in a Thai sweatshop. Making my own was cheaper, better on the environment, would probably function better than anything I could have purchased in a store and had proved fun to build too. The only downside was that because the noise of the saw had driven everything elsewhere for the day, it had been the one occasion where I had neither seen nor heard any wildlife of note. I was sure they’d be back the following day, though. There was only so much that could be achieved with two pairs of hands at such a crucial time of the year, so Christina had asked her family in Bath if they fancied turning up in force to help out on the Sunday. Kindly accepting our offer of a free lunch in return for a day’s labour, the work crew had agreed to arrive by mid-morning, giving Christina and I time to scribble down a quick list as to who would do what and, equally crucially, who would work with whom. Three main jobs were targeted; these were primarily tasks which really had to be undertaken in winter so could not be delayed any further, but they were also activities that could be completed with a day’s hard graft. Firstly Christina and her technically minded father Graham would tackle the most technically demanding job of putting up trellis along the fascia of the garage and re-training the old wisteria and clematis back to some degree of order after their years of neglect. Christina’s sister Katy and her boyfriend Andy would be given what we considered to be the most fun job, which involved the planting of three apple trees and a damson purchased from Simon at the excellent local Chew Valley tree nursery. And finally Christina’s brother Jon and I would get stuck into the most physically demanding task of digging a trench along the fence line between our garden and Marjory and Dennis’s, into which we would be planting a combination of native whips, with the ultimate aim of producing a mixed-species hedgerow. The team didn’t just bring manpower with them, but the weather too, as their arrival heralded the disappearance of the early morning fog to reveal wall-to-wall blue sky, with little or no wind to upset the status quo. Cracking straight on after a quick cuppa to admire the new sofa Christina and I had just bought (it was not just about the garden), the posse split up into their respective teams, to receive instructions where necessary, before tooling up and getting stuck in. Given the physical aspect of all the jobs, it wasn’t long before all team members were peeling off fleeces and coats as the mantra ‘cast no clout, fore May be out!’ was also cast aside. Most importantly of all, it was delightful to see how much everyone was enjoying the work – clearly audible in between the grunts created by the swinging of the pick-axe or the whine from the drill was the laughter from chirpy banter. There was also a fair amount of spade-leaning too as each group took regular breaks to check up on the progress elsewhere. The jobs were nevertheless far from plain-sailing, as what we thought initially might have been the most straightforward task ended up being the most problematic when Andy suddenly hit concrete while digging the hole for the first apple tree. Andy’s misfortune had been to hit the subterranean concrete foundation of the furthest washing-line pole from the house. On evaluating the problem, three options seemed immediately available – plant the tree in the smaller hole regardless of the block; move the tree to a different location; or keep the tree where we originally wanted it by removing the concrete. Option one was quickly discarded as we decided that planting the tree next to the block would have severely restricted its root system, and the second option soon proved equally untenable as moving the sapling would have placed it far too close to the other apple trees, ultimately giving them insufficient space in which to thrive. The only feasible option left was also the most exhausting one – the block would have to come out. Having taken Andy a mere 20 minutes to dig the initial hole, little did we know that it would then take a further 60 minutes to clear the soil sufficiently from around the block to allow for its removal. It was not until four of us had finally managed to lever the concrete cube out of the hole and onto the path that we could fully appreciate why Andy had struggled. Measuring close to a yard across, the huge unearthed lump of concrete would have perhaps been more useful as one of the foundation stones for a nuclear reactor rather than just the footing for a washing-line pole. The one plus side of forming a huge crater in the middle of the lawn was that it provided the perfect place to dispose of the wheelbarrow loads of excess soil that Jon and I had spent most of the morning generating whilst digging the hedge-line trench. With all four holes finally dug, the trench prepared and the trellis up, we stopped only briefly for an al fresco chicken stir-fry lunch, before I had to crack the whip again, as plenty more still had to be done before we lost the light. However, with most of the hard graft already completed, the second half of the work programme would be the fun part, as it was time to plant and prune. Following the tried-and-tested methodology for hedgerow planting, the trench Jon and I had dug was back-filled with a mixture of compost and the soil we had already dug out. The whips, which we had also purchased from the local nursery in a job lot with the fruit trees, were then planted in two rows, half a yard apart and in staggered fashion, creating a zigzag pattern. As by far the most whips we had purchased consisted of the cheaper hawthorn, with a smaller mix of field maple, blackthorn, spindle and alder buckthorn, Graham had the excellent idea of planting the back row with pure hawthorn and then alternating the front row with the other pricier species. It was inevitable during the morning’s work that one or two of the primroses just pushing their heads above the surface would be in the wrong place, but, wherever possible, any plants in the way were carefully dug up and then relocated to a safer place elsewhere in the meadow. It was not just the primroses that were flowering; in addition to at least half a dozen varieties of daffodils randomly cropping up all over the garden, small golden rafts of another of my favourite early spring wildflowers were in full bloom too. Overlooked by many as nothing more than a small and inconsequential early-flowering buttercup, the lesser celandine is anything but, figuring heavily as it does in the writings of surely one of our most celebrated poets, William Wordsworth. Probably best known for his ‘I Wandered Lonely as a Cloud’ poem, where he waxes lyrical about daffodils, his favourite plant was actually the lesser celandine, which he honoured with an entire poem that begins thus: There is a flower, the lesser celandine That shrinks, like many more, from cold and rain And, the first moment that the sun may shine Bright as the sun himself, ’tis out again! So adoring had Wordsworth been of this flower that it was decided after his death that the plant would be carved on his tombstone, but it seems the chap commissioned to carry out the work was no botanist and actually carved a greater celandine by mistake. To make matters worse, the greater celandine is not even related to its lesser namesake, but is a member of the poppy family instead – a grave mistake! In Wordsworth’s poem he is of course spot-on when describing how the lesser celandine tends to be a bit of a fair-weather creature, only bothering to unfurl its petals properly when the sun comes out. And today was such an example, with the gorgeous weather having encouraged the flowers to emerge from the massed ranks of kidney-shaped leaves, to create the most wonderful golden splashes in amongst a field of green. But for me personally, he missed out the most interesting quirky feature of this plant, which is how all the flowers operate like miniature satellite dishes as they faithfully track the progress of the sun across the sky – this plant is in essence a botanical representation of me, a dedicated sun worshipper! The planting of whips was of course kids’ play, and involved no more than using a spade to create a slit trench into which the roots of the sapling were carefully placed before a boot was delicately applied to bed the plant properly in. So with Jon starting at one end and me at the other, in less than half an hour we successfully managed to plant ten yards of mixed-species hedge between the rear of the garage and the wooded bank – all we needed to do then was to water the whips and wait another decade for the hedge to mature and it would be job done! Back over where Andy and Katy had been busy toiling away, the planned junction between formal garden and nature reserve had in the meantime been transformed into an orchard! Their last remaining job was to drive in the supporting stakes, at an angle of 45 degrees to avoid any damage to the root-balls, and also along a southwesterly orientation to give the trees the best possible support against the predominant prevailing wind direction. The formation of a mini-orchard was something that Christina and I had both been keen on. Due to a combination of there nowadays being little room for small orchards in modern farming and the fact that supermarkets have been reluctant to sell homegrown apples, more than half of all our British orchards have disappeared since 1970. This is particularly shameful when you consider what hugely important wildlife habitats they have become, as orchards will often be the best places to find a wide range of wildlife, from the lesser-spotted woodpecker to rare beetles and mistletoe. Probably as a result of the mild and wet climate found in the West Country there was also a strong tradition of growing apple trees in all the counties, spanning in an arc from Herefordshire and Worcestershire all the way to Somerset. This local long-standing regional association with the apple can also easily be verified by a visit to any public house within the area, as is this is probably the one region in the UK where cider drinkers outnumber ale-drinkers! With all this in mind it would have been criminal not to do our bit both to halt the decline of the orchard and to continue supporting a strong, local heritage. There would also hopefully be the small added benefit of a few apples for both us and the wildlife to share too! Continuing our theme of buying local wherever possible, Christina and I had selected the three apple trees from three different varieties with both a regional heritage and a similar pollination group. With luck, the garden would be graced with ‘Scrumptious’, ‘Cheddar Cross’ and ‘Discovery’ apples for decades to come, starting with this autumn. Last but not least, the technically adept pairing of Graham and Christina had done a marvellous job of erecting the trellis to hide huge sections of pebble-dashed garage wall. With something for the wisteria and clematis to be finally pegged back to, loppers and secateurs could at last be ruthlessly wielded to give them a radical short back and sides – with such unruly plants, you often have to be cruel to be kind! With all the tools stowed away, Christina then brought ice-creams for the workers out of nowhere as we wandered around admiring our efforts. Thanks to the willing posse and the clement weather it had been our most productive day so far, and the transformation to the garden nature reserve was at last well on its way. With Christina now back at work and my filming schedule of back-to-back trips still a month away, I was keen to capitalise on our good start by filling any spare time with garden chores, and the following Tuesday was one such opportunity to initiate phase two of the compost bin construction job. With my now trusty Workmate, Graham’s borrowed saw and in the most beautiful weather, I soon made short work of sawing up the last of the recycled wood ready for the planks to be nailed together. Suddenly realising that a trip to the DIY store would be necessary to buy larger nails and screws than I had planned for, I decided temporarily to shelve the completion of the bins to provide some post-planting TLC to the apple and damson trees planted by Andy and Katy. Care for a tree should not stop the moment that it is placed in the ground, as the vulnerable bedding-in time is in many ways just as crucial to the tree’s survival as to how it was planted in the first place. So with this in mind, all four trees were given a good soaking, and then in turn had their bases furnished with a mulch of bark chippings to suppress any weed growth, while they settled in. I was just down on my hands and knees finishing up the mulching when I suddenly caught a flash of sulphur-yellow out of the corner of my eye. Spinning round, I was ecstatic to see a male brimstone butterfly as it flew along the newly installed hedgerow which Jon and I had only planted a couple of days previously! The first butterfly sighting of the year is always a red-letter day for me, testified by the fact that for the rest of the year I will always be able recall where I was and what I was doing when the butterfly made that appearance. I can remember bizarrely, for example, that in 2010 my first butterfly of that year was another brimstone seen flitting past a lay-by off the A1 in Hertfordshire; however, this year my first sighting would be doubly special, as for the record it was spotted in my own garden on 15 March at about 11.40am! Being one of the few British species capable of overwintering as an adult, the long-lived brimstone is invariably the first butterfly of the calendar year to be recorded on the wing as the nomadic males emerge early from hibernation to begin fluttering around woodlands and along hedgerows in their annual search for virgin females to mate. The bright yellow-coloured brimstone was certainly well known amongst the earliest butterfly collectors, with some people still maintaining that the word ‘butterfly’ is nothing more than a shortening of the brimstone’s old name of ‘butter-coloured fly’. The paler-coloured and more scarcely seen females are also incredibly fastidious as to where they lay their eggs, only choosing either purging buckthorn or alder buckthorn. With this knowledge in mind, the sole reason why I had picked alder buckthorn as one of the constituents of our mixed-species hedgerow was to try and attract the butterfly into the garden – what I didn’t expect was for it to take a mere 48 hours. This was more coincidence than design, I suspected! Buoyed by my butterfly sighting and having collected the large nails I needed, I was soon straight back onto the bins assembly, which slowly but steadily began to take shape with the addition of each plank to the corner posts. Despite the near-constant noise interruption created by the sound of hammer on nail-head, I was surprised to still be able to count at least six different bird species singing from in or around the garden. Chaffinch, greenfinch, dunnock, blackbird, robin and wren could all be heard staking their claim for the chunk of real estate which also happened to be our garden – and they were most welcome to it! Putting the hammer aside for a break to properly enjoy this impromptu concert, I then suddenly picked up the call of a kingfisher as its shrill whistle cut through the other birdsong like a knife through butter – it was back again! Fully expecting it to have disappeared around the bend of the stream and out of sight by the time I stuck my head over the bank for a look, I was astonished to see it perching on one of the hazel branches arcing over the brook from our side of the bank. Even without binoculars the red base to the lower mandible could be clearly seen and immediately identified the bird as a female. As far as I was concerned, the presence of an adult female in the middle of March meant that she was clearly the resident female and would be laying her first clutch within the month. How exciting was that? Not only did we have kingfishers whizzing past the bottom of our garden, but the presence of a female so close to the breeding season indicated that there would almost certainly be a resident male too, which in turn probably meant that the nest site would be close by. Our own resident kingfishers – it was too thrilling for words, and, for me, total vindication for having bought the house and garden in the first place. True, we knew that both needed a lot of work, but the garden particularly had the most enormous potential, and more importantly we were going to have the most fun this year unlocking it. Christina was envious of the fact that I’d been able to spend some quality time in the garden midweek, and so, come the weekend, she was determined to make up for her GWS (Garden Withdrawal Syndrome) by spending a couple of full days capitalising on our good start. Despite the fact that it was now nearer April than March, there had been a ground frost over night, but once again the weather looked set fair. What an early spring we were enjoying! The first part of the morning was spent in the front garden. While we had already agreed to prioritise the back garden, the front garden did represent the public face of our property – and what would our neighbours think if we hadn’t made an effort? So while I carefully weeded, Christina’s job was to heavily prune the buddleia just to the right of our bay window, which had obviously not been touched for years and was enacting out its plans for world domination. Buddleia is perhaps much better known as the butterfly bush, and I have strong memories from my childhood in Stafford of a huge butterfly bush in our next-door neighbour’s garden. Mr Hill also had the most amazing collection of pinned butterflies – a practice frowned on today now that digital photography has enabled collectors to create something every bit as good without harming a single insect. But what I remember even more clearly than his trays of butterflies was the thrilling sight of his huge butterfly bush alive with small tortoiseshells, peacocks and red admirals. A native of China introduced here in the 1890s, the butterfly bush has proved a blessing and a curse in equal measure. While its long, honey-scented, purple flowering spikes are undoubtedly a big summer hit with all manner of moths and butterflies, its light winged seeds have also enabled its prolific spread across virtually the whole of Britain, with the exception of the far north. Certainly in Bristol you can’t pass a piece of waste ground in the city without at least a few buddleia bushes exploiting the cracks in between the pavement or the tiniest of crevices in the surrounding walls. Certainly on the train journey between Bristol and Bath, the buddleia dominates the vegetation along the rail-side clinker to such an extent that the view out of the window often seems to be that of just one very long, sinuous butterfly bush. So in a nutshell, because of its excellent wildlife credentials, the bush would be able to stay in the front garden, but only in a much more diminutive and manageable form! Taking a break from our work, we put the kettle on in preparation for the arrival of a VIP. We were both terribly excited as we were about to receive a visit from gardening royalty. One of my oldest and dearest friends, whom I first met at university, one of the few people I stayed in contact with during my five years of working in the tropics and also the person whose floor I slept on for 10 months when I moved down to Bristol in 1999, is Mark. Being a Senior Producer at the world-famous BBC Natural History Unit, Mark has worked on everything from The Private Life of Plants to Human Planet, but, more relevant to this book, he is also the most amazing gardener, and a man who also seems to have chlorophyll rather than blood running through his veins. Also, rather hilariously, his surname is, erm, Flowers! Mark had kindly accepted our invitation to come and give the garden a once-over and to dispense some much-needed advice, but what we hadn’t expected were the plants he also brought over, which were deemed surplus to requirements from his own garden. Arriving with the delightful surprise of his car boot chock-a-block with sedums, pulmonarias and phlox, Mark had also thoughtfully driven over in his gardening clothes, aware of the fact that he would have to sing for his supper! Starting on the wooded bank, we were firstly keen for him to identify a few plants, which without flowers or foliage we were still unsure of. With the experience of having spent the best part of the last 40 years being obsessed with garden plants, this proved a straightforward exercise for Mark as he revealed with typical theatrical poise that we were also the proud owners of a magnolia, a viburnum and a winter-flowering honeysuckle. The magnolia was a particularly exciting find, but was really struggling for light and space and needed help. Expertly handling the loppers, Mark began to prune the magnolia into a much more manageable size and a more aesthetically pleasing shape. Advising us that the surrounding shrubbery would also need pegging back, Christina, under Mark’s direction, began brandishing her secateurs as she continued to make room for our surprise find. As the two clipped their way into the surrounding vegetation I then began to get alarmed at the amount that was being taken out, stating that while I, too, was keen to see the magnolia flourish, it shouldn’t be at the expense of the native woodland species which had far higher wildlife potential. I also didn’t want too much of the hazel and hawthorn removed before the breeding season, as this would deprive the birds of potential nesting locations. Christina, of course, sided with my old friend by stating that if progress were to be made, then some of the vegetation would simply have to go. With both actively ganging up on me, I was not only outnumbered, but left with little alternative other than to accede to their demands, and I was also delegated the job of tidying up the mess that they had been busy creating! I was keen to give Mark something in return for all the plants he had kindly donated, and I noticed that his eye had been caught by some of the snowdrops from our front garden which had finally gone over after putting on a fine display over the previous six weeks. The best time to dig up and split snowdrops, Mark explained, was just after the flowers had faded. Removing some of the bulbs would not only give the opportunity to introduce snowdrops elsewhere into the garden but would ensure that the remaining bulbs would have more than enough room to put on an equally impressive show the following winter. Following Mark’s lead, it really was child’s play as we carefully dug up a few bunches with trowels, which were then split into smaller clumps of, say, half a dozen bulbs. Some of these small clumps were then either given to our horticultural consultant as a gift, or planted down in the woodland to repopulate our bank the cheap, easy and quick way, rather than having to wait the decades necessary for the snowdrops to spread under their own steam. This was also the first time that we had played ‘botanical swapsies’ – a game which hopefully we would continue to enjoy during the up and coming months. After lunch, Mark and I headed off to Bristol, Mark to enjoy the rest of the weekend back in his own garden whilst I was away to feed one of my other addictions – watching football. Both watching and playing sport has often come a close second to my obsession with natural history, to the extent that Christina has long since given up fighting the constant drone of BBC Radio Five Live that I usually insist of having on in the background all weekend. Having chosen to support Bristol City since my move down to the West Country, it has to be said that, while skill levels are often seriously lacking, it is still a fun way to spend every alternate Saturday afternoon. Making me feel only slightly guilty that she was determined to carry on working whilst I was off enjoying myself, Christina wanted to begin digging up the weedy section of lawn running the length of the garage. Our aim was that this section would be turned into one of the real highlights of the more formal part of the garden – what better place to plant a huge herbaceous border? I returned some three hours later, buoyed by an uncharacteristically adept performance and a 2–0 win by The Robins, and I couldn’t believe how much Christina had achieved in such a short space of time. Having removed the turf, she had then created a lovely sweeping curve that would mark the front edge of the bed – the neck of which began at the defunct garage side-door, and widened out to a depth of three yards past the wisteria and newly erected trellis, before then swinging sharply back in to meet the corner of the garage wall underneath the hawthorn standard and by the water butt. This shape had the effect of a drawing the eye away from the garage and down the garden towards the apple trees. Not content to stop there, she had also turned over most of the soil, incorporating three or four pre-purchased bags of compost to create the perfect growing medium. In the space of three hours and out of nothing she had just created a herbaceous border in which to put all Mark’s plants. This girlfriend was a keeper! In fact, it would turn out to be a weekend of guests. I met Ed when we both worked on Springwatch; I was employed as Bill Oddie’s researcher, and Ed and I have since become the firmest of birding buddies. Not content with regular birding excursions around the UK, we have also satisfied our unquenchable thirst for birdies with a whole array of trips to Europe, the Middle East and West Africa. A full decade and a bit younger than me, Ed is without doubt one of the finest birders of his age in this country, and in addition to having the largest private collection of feathers, skulls and wings I have ever seen, he has also found time to be one of Britain’s top peregrine experts. Another addition to his mightily impressive CV was his recent qualification as a bird ringer, and it was in that capacity that I wanted to invite Ed round. Hopefully a siskin or reed bunting in the hand would on this occasion beat two in the bush! Even penetrating above the buzz of my electric toothbrush and through the double glazing of the bathroom I could still hear the deep timbre of male wood pigeons serenading prospective partners with their endlessly repetitive ‘I’m bor-ing I am, I’m bor-ing I am’ call as I got ready for a morning’s bird-ringing. The wood pigeon’s call is possibly the sound that reminds me most of my childhood, as I have strong recollections of their call droning on in the background whilst I prised myself out of bed each morning for my paper round before school. Befitting a man who’s time-keeping is always nothing short of perfect, Ed pulled onto the drive exactly at our pre-arranged time of 7.30am, and without further ado we barrelled straight out into the back garden to work out the best locations to put up his mist nets. For those not familiar with mist nets in action, they are made of nylon mesh vertically suspended between two poles, giving a vague resemblance of an oversized volleyball net. When properly deployed, the nets are virtually invisible and, most importantly, are able to capture birds without causing any injury whatsoever. We decided to place a six-yard net alongside and parallel to the wooded bank and a 12-yard net running lengthwise along the garden just to the right of the feeders, so that any birds flying in to feed would hopefully become ensnared. With a little cloud cover and no wind, weather conditions for trapping were initially perfect, but no sooner had we trotted back inside to leave the nets in peace, than the double whammy of both the sun coming out and a breeze picking up instantly made it trickier to catch large numbers of birds, for the simple reason that a billowing net is more easily spotted, giving the birds that vital extra millisecond to take avoidance measures. The protocol is that the nets should be checked at least every 15 minutes, so we were delighted on our first inspection to have caught both a blue tit and a great tit in the biggest net. Of course, extricating birds from mist nets is an art that takes years of practice, as birds can easily become heavily tangled in the net, are frightened and surprisingly susceptible to being damaged with inexperienced hands. So I confined myself to photographing the action whilst Ed carefully twisted, turned and rotated each bird with remarkable dexterity until both were free of the net and safely slotted into his ringing bags. My job then morphed from photographer to scribe as I noted down the measurements Ed took of their wing length, weight, age and sex before he placed a metal ring containing a unique code on each bird’s leg which would identify it if it were re-trapped or found dead. The birds were then released back into the garden. As someone who has watched great tits thousands of times through binoculars, I thought I knew this common garden visitor pretty well, so I was gobsmacked when Ed told me that the key to sexing great tits in the field is to look at the black breast-stripe, which is wider in the males than the females. I was slightly embarrassed that someone of my alleged repute hadn’t even been aware of this basic fact. How come I had not read this somewhere or even realised it myself from all my years of birding? I suppose one of the most fascinating aspects about wildlife is that the more we learn about this huge subject, the more we realise how little in fact we really know. Even after a lifetime of studying birds, in many ways I was still only scratching the surface. One thing was clear from this revelation; I would have to start looking at my common birds through different eyes from now on! As the morning went on, although a deluge of birds never materialised due to the weather conditions not working in our favour, we still managed to ring nine blue tits, four great tits, and one each of robin, chaffinch, dunnock, coal tit, wren, long-tailed tit and, best of all, a goldcrest – the latter being a bird I hadn’t even recorded in the garden until we discovered one in the net! In between the net checks we’d also been royally entertained by a couple of jackdaws flying back to our uncovered chimney pots with twigs – it looked like the first nest of the breeding season wouldn’t be constructed in one of the newly erected nest boxes but inside our chimney instead! The lovely weather, while preventing the capture of any siskins or reed buntings, had managed to encourage a couple more male brimstone butterflies out of hibernation, but the best sighting of the morning was indisputably our first small tortoiseshell of the year. This butterfly was a particularly pleasing addition to our garden list, as this is a species which has seemed to have all but disappeared over the last couple of years, due to its larvae having been targeted by a parasitoid fly. Fingers crossed that this would be the year of the small tortoiseshell fight-back! Having just spent the last couple of days in a sleep-deprived and ratty state hasn’t been good. The nesting jackdaws I had been only too happy to observe with Ed a couple of days previously have been habitually at their most communicative at around 4.30 in the morning. And with the chimney breast actually passing en route through our bedroom between the fireplace and chimney pots, it has actually felt like the birds have chosen to nest at the foot of the bed instead. Enthusiastic though I was to do everything possible within my powers to encourage all nesting birds, I had just discovered that this welcoming attitude would not be at the expense of a good night’s sleep. Nevertheless, I felt the painful irony in making the decision to unceremoniously evict the first pair of birds to have actually shown an interest in nesting. The best available option would be to remove the nest as quickly as possible before the female laid her clutch, meaning she would have time to re-build and raise a family elsewhere. So a couple of days later I had to spend the morning watching, with mixed emotions, as Ben the local Chew Valley chimney sweep dislodged the most enormous jackdaw nest out of our chimney. Hopefully that would be the first and last time I would ever have to pay for a nest removal. I elected to spend the rest of the day cheering myself up in the garden, and I decided that I would get stuck into a couple of jobs that would allow me to show Christina on her return home from work how much progress I had made. The first job would be to tidy up the mess that the lopping and pruning duo of Mark and Christina had created the previous weekend. While chatting to Marjory and Dennis as they put out their recycling the week before, my beady eye had also noticed a shredder hidden in their extensively stocked garage. Being the generous souls I now knew them to be, they instantly offered it out for loan on condition that I would also shred some vegetation they had recently generated from a spot of gardening of their own. Once again I was blessed with the most beautiful weather as I powered up the shredder and set to work. By doing little more than feeding one branch after the next into the ever-voracious jaws of a shredder, there was something incredibly satisfying about seeing a huge, messy stack of brushwood converted into nothing more than a small pile of macerated twigs. In fact, in under an hour both piles of vegetation were polished off, leaving me more than enough time to finish off the composting bins in time for their inspection by my other half. I was just in the process of moving my tools into the garden when I suddenly caught sight of a rather extraordinary insect buzzing around the primroses and lesser celandines in the meadow. Looking like a cross between a bee and a mosquito with a huge proboscis was surely one of our most spectacular early spring insects, the large bee-fly. With the wonderful Latin name of Bombylius major, the bee-fly is in fact a fly as it only has a single functional pair of wings in contrast to the two pairs owned by bees, and whilst its huge proboscis looked like a hornet’s sting it is nothing more than an utterly harmless tube designed to tap into the deeply recessed nectaries of some flowers. This is a creature that has become an increasingly regular fixture in our towns and gardens over recent years, but for me it was a total surprise and a fabulous addition to my ever-increasing garden list. Upon nailing the last planks in place, the compost bins were so heavy that I could scarcely move them into their allotted positions without either damaging them or my back. Finally, having managed to wrestle what must have been in excess of a 220lbs of timber into place I suddenly and belatedly realised that their uneven look was due to the fact that I hadn’t taken enough care to level the ground that I had placed them on beforehand. Reminding myself that they were compost bins and not artworks, rather than risk a hernia I decided they were fine where they were, and, most importantly of all, at last they were ready to be used. Dismissing their wonky nature out of hand, Christina was so pleased with all my hard work she immediately declared I should take the rest of the evening off. And proceeding to pour me a large glass of wine before cooking a terrific meal, she was true to her word. In fact, my only delegated job that evening was to dispose of the vegetable peelings – well, somebody had to christen the new bins! APRIL (#ulink_afba709c-fbe9-5763-8798-70e89df06dd0) IF YOU DIG IT, THEY WILL COME (#ulink_afba709c-fbe9-5763-8798-70e89df06dd0) ‘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’?tre 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! Конец ознакомительного фрагмента. Текст предоставлен ООО «ЛитРес». Прочитайте эту книгу целиком, купив полную легальную версию (https://www.litres.ru/christina-holvey/my-garden-and-other-animals/?lfrom=688855901) на ЛитРес. Безопасно оплатить книгу можно банковской картой Visa, MasterCard, Maestro, со счета мобильного телефона, с платежного терминала, в салоне МТС или Связной, через PayPal, WebMoney, Яндекс.Деньги, QIWI Кошелек, бонусными картами или другим удобным Вам способом.