Where the wild things are

Ever since I saw the wonderful wildlife tower Nigel Dunnett built (with, no doubt, the aid of a small army of helpers) for his 2009 Chelsea show garden, Future Nature, I've had a bit of a thing for them. It's not often, after all, that you come across something that's useful in the garden, doesn't cost a penny, yet - unlike most things with what might be called an allotment aesthetic - looks fabulous.

I came across this one at a spring open day held at the Magdalen Project, a sort of experimental eco-smallholding place just round the corner from where I live. It was tucked away at the back of a not particularly inspiring - mainly because it had only just been planted - forest garden. Though the jury is still out, for me, on forest gardens, I am totally sold on the whole idea of bug blocks, wildlife stacks, call them what you will.

It was made from old pallets, sawn in half and stacked: if you use full-width pallets you'll only fill the outer six inches or so, therefore to save space you really only need the end bit (this also means you only need three pallets for a six-storey stack, if you get my drift, as you use the two halves on top of each other).

Then you just let your imagination rip to create as many little hidey-holes for bugs and beasties as you can. I loved the way they used roof tiles on the top stuffed with holey stones gathered from the beach.

Bits of old garden hose inside a flowerpot on its side....

...and these rather pretty old slates, interwoven with larger stones to create not only gaps for small things to crawl into (looks like this bit is a favourite with spiders) but also a range of textures and colour, part of what makes these things so pretty.

You can just about make out next door another flowerpot filled with hollow stems - the dried-out remains of cardoons, run-to-seed parsnips and carrots, or Queen Anne's lace from the hedgerows are ideal.

Anything can be co-opted for use: here some old engineering bricks with bits of cane stuck into the holes. You could of course just leave the holes open: the canes just add a bit of quirkiness. The blocks which hold the pallets together have holes of varying sizes drilled into them, too.

And if you don't like the whole pallets thing, there are other shapes and combinations you can use: here a tower of marine ply circles built up like a wedding cake on sturdy lengths of fencepost and topped with a bicycle tyre. Personally I prefer the 'conventional' pallet look: and whichever you choose, it's a fantastic project to do with the kids on aimless school holiday weekdays.

There's a very serious point to all this imagination and frippery: there are so many benefits of attracting insects to your garden. Pollinators - and pest-devouring creatures like beetles, frogs and toads - need every bit of help we can give them, thanks to our tendencies to throw pesticide cocktails around and remove every wildflower we can strip out of the countryside in favour of executive homes. By giving them somewhere safe to live, not only are you helping out your garden (especially if you grow veg), you're doing your bit for biodiversity too.

I've already squirrelled away my first pallet (is there anything, I wonder, for which pallets are not useful?) and I can no longer pass a skip without having a quick peep inside just in case. I've even got the perfect spot for it: just below the window in what will, one day, be my fruit cage - a place where I need as many pollinators and pest-eaters as I can get. Time to get creative...

Hedging my bets #1

I am feeling the heavy weight of responsibility on my shoulders.

You see, I have a proper hedgerow to look after. Actually, that's about the understatement of the year: I have about half a mile of hedgerow, as it forms the entire border of my very long and very thin garden.

Hedgerow is a proper recognised wildlife habitat: it's a priority habitat, in fact, protected under the Biodiversity Action Plan which describes them as 'particularly important for biodiversity conservation'. About 130 vulnerable species (so rabbits don't count) depend on them for their survival, including moths, birds, lichens and fungi.

Around here, there are miles and miles and miles of hedgerows. They are a wonderful, atmospheric feature of the landscape, turning lanes into green tunnels and patchworking the fields. They are, let's remember, essentially man-made: the farmers around here have formed them over centuries, with traditional management techniques which are still, essentially, unchanged (although these days they use tractors and flails, not billhooks). If farmers didn't manage hedgerows, they would disappear.

The OPAL project (it stands for Open Air Laboratories) is currently running a biodiversity survey which uses hedges to measure health of your local ecosystem. So I thought I'd put my own hedge to the test: you take a three-metre stretch of hedge and analyse the state of the hedge, its plant species, evidence of mammals living there, and any other creatures you find (mostly invertebrates like woodlice and snails).

I must admit mine was quite a cursory inspection: you're supposed to do these things in groups, and record it on a proper form, which I'd forgotten to print out. But in my randomly-chosen three-metre stretch here's what I found:


Plantlife:
Hart's-tongue fern (Asplenium scolopendrium)
Herb robert (Geranium robertianum)
Queen Anne's Lace (Daucus carota)
Brambles (Rubus fruticosus)


Ivy (Hedera helix)
Creeping buttercup (Ranunculus repens)
Nettles (Urtica dioica)

and I also happen to know (because they're now starting to come up) there are also;
Snowdrops (Galanthus nivalis)
Cuckoo pint (Arum maculatum)

Other things:
Lichens, most of which I can't identify
Mosses, ditto
Little yellow fungi, ditto
Bracket fungi on the rotten bits

Woody plants:
Elder (of which the above is the oldest example I've yet found in the hedge)(Sambucus nigra)
Hazel (lots) (Corylus avellana)
Blackthorn (Prunus spinosa)
Hawthorn (Crataegus monogyna)
Alder (Alnus glutinosa)

It's also a sign of the health of my hedgerows that there is a good mix of dead wood and live: the live provides the fruits, berries etc while the dead wood is colonised by tunnelling insects and the like.

However the hazel is undeniably taking over: there is less blackthorn than I would like (though my poor prickled fingers don't agree) and I could do with some more elder too.

Creatures:
I didn't find much to look at since it was winter and very cold when I looked at my hedgerow, and most sensible things were tucked up warm and weren't remotely interested in being surveyed.

However I did find this rather fine evidence of rabbits (as if I needed any proof: they scatter to right and left as you walk down the garden here). I have also, since I've been here, seen voles, mice, fox footprints and hundreds and hundreds of birds: wrens, sparrows, bluetits, wagtails, blackbirds, thrushes, robins, and that's not counting the ones I couldn't identify. And buzzards, and crows, and seagulls. though I don't think they rely too heavily on the hedgerows for day-to-day sustenance.

You see? What a responsibility. But though I like wildlife as much as the next person, and have a sense of tradition and history, and a great love of the countryside: I must also garden. And my hedges are undeniably taking over my garden, to the point where there is little garden left. They are 8ft wide in places, for goodness' sake.

My next step? What would you do?

Ladybird, ladybird, fly away home

Has anyone else had ladybirds setting up home in odd corners this autumn?

We've had a veritable plague. They started appearing early last month, when I took this photo: they were crawling around on the windows, wandering over ceilings, popping up in cupboards. I was initially delighted as I thought, aaahh, dear little ladybirds, looking for somewhere to stay for the winter.

Actually I had no idea they hibernated: but yes, apparently they like all sorts of different hibernating spots. And spots is the word: the number of spots on a ladybird's back determines where, and if, it will hibernate.

Seven-spots (the most common type) migrate; others mostly hibernate in hollow plant stems: but tree trunks, bushes and fence posts are other favoured spots. It's mainly two-spots which seek out our houses. And they all hibernate in big groups - it makes finding a mate easier in spring. If all goes well they can live two to three years, apparently. That's as long as our last pet hamster.

Sadly, though, there isn't a two-spot to be seen in my little cluster of snoozy ladybirds. That's because these are not our native ladybirds but the harlequins, the grey squirrels of the ladybird world. They're from America, but they're not nice cultured friendly amusing Americans: they're very large, very successful and very competitive Americans. In fact they have a simple strategy in elbowing out our native ladybirds, which tend not to like to make too much of a fuss (am I overdoing the anthropomorphism here?): they simply eat them out of house, home and aphid colonies.

This leaves me with a dilemma. Obviously the reason we gardeners like ladybirds is because they eat aphids - and a ladybird with a monster appetite sounds like a serious asset to a harassed vegetable gardener. But at what cost?

I am recording my little colony on the UK-wide Harlequin Ladybird Survey (http://www.harlequin-survey.org/) which is tracking the spread of this possibly-not-entirely-unwelcome alien across the country. We are definitely on the fringes of its spread - but it's definitely here and in some numbers.

But what do I do now? Kick this lot out of the corner of my dining room? Or live and let live? (this last does not apply to our local aphid colony next year, of course....)

There's an elephant in my garden

Look what we found crawling across our lawn today.

Isn't he extraordinary? He stayed just like this, reared up like some prehistoric mini-dinosaur, no doubt in an attempt to make us fear for our lives. He needn't have worried - we certainly weren't about to eat him.

Fortunately, given his size (about the thickness of my ring finger and almost as long) he's not a garden pest. I discovered from the outstandingly good identification site UK Moths that he's an Elephant Hawk Moth caterpillar, and eats rosebay willowherb - which, owing to the fact that I'm seriously behind on the weeding at the moment, I happen to have a patch of at the end of one of my borders. So off he went to feast on my weeds till he turns into a lovely big moth with pink-striped wings. Who knows - if he finds another big pink-winged moth I might I no longer have a willowherb problem. Now that would be a result.

School lessons

I mentioned some time ago that I'd taken over the school garden.

Well, in the way of these things, shortly after I took it on, they started building work which meant not only was everything on hold for more than a year, but also we lost half the garden before we'd even started.

You take these things on the chin, though, and in fact it's all worked out OK in the end since now the work has finished, I know where we are and we can go forward. I got all inspired by the Dorset Cereals Edible Playground garden that won Hampton Court this year, and between me and various teachers and parents who should really know better, we've come up with a big and rather exciting scheme for developing a new space for the kids to grow lots of food in.

So before we started I thought I'd record what state it's in at the moment - neglected in places, presentable-ish in others, but in need of a lot of work, hopefully from people large and small.

This is the wildlife pond - weedy, unkempt, and recently much larger. The bit on the other side of the picket fence is tarmac now, but it used to be garden. Never mind: there are plenty of bits left to have fun with, including a raised bed, a soon-to-be herb bed and a bog garden, as well as sundry weed-infested borders which once cleared will be open to inspiration.

This is the (somewhat neglected and overgrown) Millennium Garden - can you see why?

And these are the raised beds along the front of the school itself. Currently planted with a hotch-potch of different plants, and not in too bad a state, but one talented mum has now come up with a design involving box balls, a lot of alliums, some Geranium 'Rozeanne' and a few prostrate rosemaries, which will hopefully pull this lot together and make it look pretty good for most of the year. This is our first project - I'm going shopping next week if the PSA give me the green light.

Finally - the bit everyone's getting excited about. All the kids in the school, from 4-year-olds in reception to the big girls and boys in Year 6, are being given a design project in which they're going to be asked to come up with loads of imaginative designs, from which we'll select as much inspiration as we can cram in without making it too overcrowded. From this we'll create our Kitchen Garden. The hedge behind it (a mixed wildlife hedge around the pond) is coming down by about half, which is a huge job for November, but I'm trying not to think about that too much: instead looking forward to lots of colourful drawings and some seriously good ideas!

Didn't we have a luvverly time...

I promised you some pics of our weekend at the Great Gardening Show at Loseley House - so here they are...


Our humble little corner - that's my hubby and dog looking rather lugubrious (or is that just embarrassed?). We sold quite a few of those nice oak boxes and got lots of interest in the garden storage solutions. Quite a hot topic at the moment, it would seem (all the better for our bank account, then).


Then I set off to have a look around. Got very excited about these "hanging bamboos" - finally, I thought, I've found a way of using bamboos that keeps them in their place. But then I found out they're not bamboo at all but a grass - Agrostis stolonifera. I suppose bamboo is a grass, strictly speaking, but I think my campaign to outlaw the stuff continues unabated.



Loads and loads and loads of flowers everywhere - I thought this display was a riot...


...and so did the bee, which took absolutely not a jot of notice of me while I took this photo. Far too busy. As you would expect, from a bee.


This fig tree was on the rather wonderful stall from Plants On Line. They had some fabby citrus and olives too (I'm a bit obsessed by exotic-ish edibles at the moment as I'm cooking up a scheme for my garden - literally...) And a few pomegranates, which is another tree I hanker for. Apart from their rather regrettable predilection for bamboos, this is a seriously good nursery which I hadn't come across before.


Further indulging my edible exotics fetish, this is my must-have plant for this year: I spotted loads of colocasia at Hampton Court and this one was a beaut. Just look at those leaves... the edible bit is the tuber, which tastes a bit like potatoes so they tell me. I'd like to know who digs up £20 tubers to eat, mind you...



Last but not least, on the same stall as the colocasia (that's Athelas Plants - another fantastic exotics nursery) was this gorgeous Anizoganthus in full flower. It's called 'Gold' (can you tell why?): don't know the plant well but apparently it's not that easy to get it to flower like this. The label tells me it needs sun and well-drained soil - might do well in my acid sand, then...

My "must-grow-before-I-die" list is getting longer and longer. Better make it to my Queen's telegram otherwise I'll never get through it at this rate.

Plant of the month - January

Pyracantha 'Saphyr Jaune'

These little jewels have been cheering up my garden since last autumn. Pyracantha can be the only really bright colour shining through the dull months of winter, and they're all the more welcome for that. The birds have snaffled the red and orange berries already - I have P. 'Saphyr Orange' and P. 'Saphyr Rouge' planted along the same fence, and they're meant to mix 'n' mingle, but the yellow is all that's left. No complaints here, though - I'm just grateful to have such a dainty little sprinkling of colour at this time of year.

Pyracantha is one of those shrubs which is doing something useful all year round. I keep mine trained against the fence - I find they become badly-behaved thugs in the border if left unsupervised. If you're strict with them, though, they behave themselves beautifully. They're one of the few plants which provides evergreen climbing cover all year, and as a sideline are excellent security - climb over a fence clad in pyracantha and you won't forget it in a hurry. As if that wasn't enough, they froth up with flowers in early summer and then sparkle all winter too. I wouldn't be without them.

Outside again at last!

Well after what seems like weeks and weeks of non-stop rain, I'm gardening again!

The water table is still high, but the rain has subsided to a light drizzle and the floods have abated enough to allow me to get a fork into the ground without turning it to mud. I'm back to a full slate of gardens and muddy knees.

This week I was tackling an out-of-control mixed hedge, containing hazel, conifers (not sure exactly what - it's not a strong point of mine, but I think it's some sort of cypress), and various assorted self-seeded things like ash saplings.

I'm all for mixed, aka wildlife hedges - I've got one at the end of my garden which is part adapted from what was already there and part encouraged by transplanting, say, a hawthorn sapling that self-seeded itself where it wasn't wanted. But you do have to keep on top of them or, like most native species, they go mad.

Hazel in particular heads for the sky very quickly indeed. I've got one in my hedge which I keep under very strict control - any stems going in the wrong direction are snipped out right away. I let it grow well above the line of the hedge (I think it makes the hedge more interesting to have plants of different heights from time to time) but I do take out a few of the thickest and tallest branches each year. You can, of course, just shear over the top with hedge-clippers, which is a brutal sort of way of doing it but very effective in keeping it in bounds.

This one in my client's garden, though, was about 50ft high, so that was rather out of the question. In the way that hazels do, it had multi-stemmed and several of the trunks were leaning quite heavily into the main garden. Well - I did the best I could, and pruned back the worst of it into the hedge line again. But in this case, as it's quite a high hedge, I've advised the client to get a tree man in (gardeners aren't qualified, insured, or brave enough, to tackle full-grown trees - it's much better to get a proper arborist in). Hopefully s/he will curb the general skywards tendency and cut it back to just below the top line of the hedge - then it doesn't matter if it sends up some thinner shoots, as I can keep them in a kind of pollard and make them behave themselves.

Sometimes situations just don't comply with the textbooks, and you have to find your own way around.

First frost of the year

We had the first really hard frost of the year last night - down to minus 7 degrees, which is pretty low for any time of the year in this part of the world. We've had a couple of minor ground frosts in the last few weeks, but this one has really sent temperatures plummeting.

I love frosty nights, mainly because they're almost always followed by a day of glorious winter sunshine which makes the garden sparkle as if it's been dusted with diamonds. I've left as many of the seedheads on this year as I felt I could, and it's in these conditions that they really reward you for it: the ones in the picture are Helenium "Moorheim Beauty", which were beginning to go a bit soggy and brown but have been transformed this morning by their frosting of mini-icicles.

Leaving seedheads on à la Piet Oudolf can be a bit hit-and-miss, I find. Some are strong enough to cope, but others (even ones Mr Oudolf recommends) collapse very quickly into a rather uninspiring mass of damp bobbles. A client of mine has an otherwise lovely clump of Rudbeckia, which are supposed to stand most of the winter, but despite my exhortations to last at least until Christmas I think I'm going to have to tidy them up in a week or so as they look just awful at the moment.

The lovely fluffy puffballs that adorn my cardoons (Cynara cardunculus) on the other hand have been wonderful - the birds think so, too, as everything from great tits to starlings have been tugging great clumps of fluff out of them to line their winter quarters with. I've got another flock of bluetits which have been stripping the seeds off the Stipa gigantea (which has been truly gorgeous this year - you can see why everyone raves about this fabulous grass). They also perch precariously on the wildly-waving bobbles of Verbena bonariensis to feast on the seeds inside: now this is one plant which stands bravely no matter what the weather, though I think mine are about to lose their heads if the birds carry on the way they are. It may be winter, but it's not boring.

Trimming to size

Back to the monster mahonia again yesterday - I came to the conclusion that I'd see what happened after I'd done some restorative pruning (i.e. thinning out the very congested centre, removing crossing branches and so on).

Luckily that did take the height down a bit and what with a few judicious cuts which removed the remainder of the really tall bits, I managed to take about 5ft off the top without actually changing the shape of the tree much. I also had a lot of fun climbing about in the canopy - it doesn't take much to get me up clambering about in trees!

Result is a happy client - he got his view back - and happy me, having preserved a very special plant. I've revised my opinion of mahonias and will be recommending them as an unusual architectural plant to designers - but as 20ft trees, not the modest little specimens you see in most gardens.

One other thing - I have for my sins agreed to take over running the garden at my local primary school. Why is it we gardeners are such suckers for co-opting more things to grow and spaces to grow them in? Hopefully I can delegate a lot of the work to other parents - but I have to confess, I'm secretly quite excited about this little pond area they have there, which I plan to make into a fantastic little wildlife garden. Minibeast heaven. More later...