Garden Centre

Wednesday, April 1, 2009

Wildlife Gardening

This is the month when the garden really comes into its own in wildlife terms. The fish are frisking in the pond; the frogs have stopped being frisky and are ignoring the growing frogspawn; the first cabbage whites are fluttering around and I saw three bumble bees this morning.

We garden for wildlife by providing a range of resources that suit insects, mammals, birds and amphibians. For insects we have a log pile that we hope might one day be inhabited by stag beetles, although at present it probably only hosts earwigs and woodlice. Did you know that stag beetles can spend as much as seven years as larvae and as little as two weeks as beetles? Amazing.

We also have bee logs: short lengths of tree-trunk with holes drilled into them at downward angles – solitary bees love to nest in them and it seems to be working as our bumble bee population is definitely growing. The downward angle is to stop the hole filling up with rainwater and drowning the bee larvae that is developing in it.

We have a pond, which has goldfish, frogs and lots of mayflies and we grow plants that should provide food throughout the year, so native daisy type flowers in summer and autumn, berrying plants like rose bushes, cotoneaster, pyracantha, berberis and viburnum in winter and mahonia in early spring. In summer the beans and sweet peas attract lots of bees and other pollinators. We no longer put out bird food: instead we leave the dead heads on roses to provide rose-hips, ditto sunflowers, and use the berrying plants and the log pile to provide seeds, berries and overwintering insect life to feed birds.

Am I a gardening April Fool?

This is a picture of my greenhouse, taken from the outside. The top polycarbonate panel has been painted with one of those products that is supposed to cut out the sun. It does seem to work, if you compare it to the lower panel.

Here’s the question though: the product is supposed to be transparent when it rains, so that it allows what little light there is to get through – which is a great idea. But it’s also supposed to be ‘easily removable with water and a cloth’ to quote the instructions. But how do you know? If it’s transparent while wet, how do you know if you’ve managed to wash it off? Or am I being too complicated …

Labels: garden ponds, garden wildlife, greenhouse, Wildlife Gardening

The All Seasons Gardener at 5:49 AM 0 Comments

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Friday, August 1, 2008

How many butterflies …

… have you seen this year?

We’ve seen cabbage whites, peacocks and chalk blues. We know where there are some wood whites but they are nowhere near our garden and I’m not saying where they live in case somebody goes and damages their habitat. But when I was a kid (and it wasn’t that long ago, really) I used to see many more different kinds of butterfly than I do now.

There’s a plan to build something called Butterfly World, a huge environmental safe space with specialised butterfly habitats. The name may be naff but the project is being supported by the great and good, including David Attenborough.

Butterflies love buddleia, Michaelmas daisies and many of them adore nettles – so if you plant some nettles in a bucket in the corner of your garden, it may actually keep the pesky cabbage whites off your cabbages and hostas! Here’s what you might see if you plant for butterflies:


• High brown fritillary (Argynnis adippe) Numbers down by 79% since 1970 – the most serious recent decline of any British butterfly. This large insect is now found in just 50 sites in the UK.
• Wood white (Leptidea sinapis) Numbers down by 65%. A delicate, low-flying butterfly famed for its “head-bobbing” mating ritual.
• White-letter hairstreak (Satyrium w-album) Down by 53%. A small butterfly with a white “w” on its wings. The species was badly affected by Dutch elm disease in the 1970s, which wiped out its main food. You see them a lot in France where British people on holiday thing they are ‘deformed’ cabbage whites
• Grizzled skipper (Pyrgus malvae) Down by 49%. Known for its rapid buzzing flight, it is typically found in old industrial sites such as quarries, used to be seen a lot on London bombsites after the war, my dad tells me!
• Marsh fritillary (Euphydryas aurinia) Population numbers down by 46%. A gorgeous butterfly now nearly limited to the west of Scotland, this brightly patterned butterfly can lay up to 350 eggs in a single batch.

Peacock butterfly courtesy of Neil Phillips

Labels: garden butterflies, Wildlife Gardening

The All Seasons Gardener at 9:30 AM 2 Comments

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Thursday, August 16, 2007

New garden visitors

We’ve had two new arrivals in the garden this month, and I’m not able to show you a picture of either of them; one because it only turns up after dark, the other because it move too fast.

The first is an owl, possibly a barn owl, although we only hear it, which means identification is a bit of a problem. The second is definitely a sparrowhawk, and not just one; we’ve seen both the male and the female of what must be a breeding pair, skimming along the edge of our fence, flushing out sparrows to take back to their fledglings. It’s very exciting (although a bit tough on the sparrows, I suppose) because when we moved here, nearly ten years ago, the garden was pretty well bare of wildlife – to have increased our garden population to include two top level predator species is quite something!

The other reason it’s exciting is that it makes the garden an area of suspense, twenty-four hours a day. We never know what will happen next. Will we hear (or see) the owl? Will one of the sparrowhawks appear? Is this the day we’ll discover a new butterfly species that hasn’t previously visited us, or perhaps the famously shy newts will put in a rare appearance? Add to these more random expectations the daily pleasures of coming across a frog hiding under a large leaf, the mayflies darting across the pond, the constant scolding from the sparrows as we trim plants near their hiding places … from a rather bleak and unfriendly space, the garden has become a home and haven for so many species that we find ourselves apologising for disturbing them by tidying up!

It wasn’t difficult. The first thing was to get the pond healthy and once that was done, we built log piles, became organic (nearly) and started the process of removing highly exotic plants and replacing them with more wildlife friendly native ones. We’re not purists though; I still have beloved plants that I will never get rid of – my tigridia, dahlias, ceonothus etc, and our log piles are tucked out of sight, so the garden doesn’t look too tatty. Even so, we’ve been amazed how things have changed and how the garden resounds with the various noises and movements of our native wildlife.

Photograph by kthypryn, used under creative commons licence.

Labels: garden flowers, garden ponds, garden wildlife, owl, sparrowhaw, Wildlife Gardening

The All Seasons Gardener at 8:58 AM 0 Comments

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Thursday, May 17, 2007

Yet another 'what is this?' moment ....

Except I’ve managed to find this one out. It’s odd really, I think of myself as being a pretty competent gardener – I can do Latin names and all that stuff and plant identification is an absolute doddle for me, but when it comes to the birds and the bees (and the butterflies and the moths) I’m actually pretty useless. I can tell blackbirds from other birds by their call, and I can just about tell the various forms of tit apart (don’t giggle) blue-tits, coal-tits, great-tits (I said don’t giggle) etc. Neglected education I suppose, which makes me wonder – I grew up in the country and if I can’t name common butterflies what hope is their for our urban young people to be able to recognise and appreciate such beautiful creatures?

Anyway, this is a Holly Blue – ‘The larvae of the Holly Blue have two preferred food plants. In spring, the larvae feed on the flower buds and berries of Holly while in late Summer, the buds and young berries of Ivy are preferred (odd, as this picture shows it making itself comfortable on my bay tree, another evergreen but not one of the preferred food plants, both of which grow all over my garden). The larvae are up to 15mm in length and are generally green in colour with a pale yellow line along each side and a small jet black head which is generally unseen because it spends much of its time deep within a flower bud or berry feeding. The adult Holly Blue emerges early in spring. Unlike other blues, the Holly Blue tends to fly high up around trees and bushes in full sunlight. The males can sometimes be found at ground level taking salts from dried up puddles in summer.’

An excellent site for butterfly novices or nuts is British Butterflies from which I cribbed the butterfly description above.

And this is one baby I can feel completely happy about – it can eat ivy and holly to its heart’s content – as far as I’m concerned they are both just wallpaper plants that provide a background to the garden, and to get this gorgeous blue beauties flitting about, a few nibbled ivy leaves is a small price to pay.

Labels: General, Wildlife Gardening

The All Seasons Gardener at 8:42 AM 0 Comments

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Monday, April 23, 2007

Pest or Pleasure?

It's always a problem, isn't it? Most of us love birdsong, glow worms, hedgehogs and mayflies … those are the things that make gardening worthwhile. But we’re not so keen on slugs and snails, cabbage whites and aphids!

The difficulty arises because nature is a complicated creature. The reason we hate aphids and cabbage whites so much is that they aren’t particular about what they live on (cabbage whites will eat just about everything when the eggs hatch, although they do like cabbages a great deal) and so they thrive in our gardens. More sensitive creatures, like glow worms, require a complex set of conditions that even scientists don’t understand yet, and so they become ever rarer at the same time as the pestilential cabbage white becomes more common.

So what do you do. Well, the All Seasons Gardener tries to be as inclusive as possible. Our garden uses a range of techniques including mesh over our vegetable beds, wildlife friendly slug pellets, and predator encouragement to try and keep the garden in balance. So we have a variety of trees and nest boxes in the garden and the birds that visit are pretty good at keeping down crane flies. We have a bee log for our solitary bees, and as they pollinate our peas, beans and sweet peas, we think we get a better crop, so we don’t mind too much if we lose a few plants to caterpillars. The pond is home to fish, newts and frogs – and the frogs are very keen on picking off flies and other nuisances, and that complete ecosystem means that we get lots of mayflies and even dragonflies – no glow worms yet but we live in hope …

And that brings us to the moth. I’m not entirely sure what it is, moth identification not being one of my strengths, but it’s very beautiful. And it’s on my broad bean plants. I should have scared it off, of course, but in the end I pretended it wasn’t there. If our broad beans are eaten to the ground when is caterpillars hatch, then ‘himself’ can just say I told you so.

Labels: Pest control, Wildlife Gardening

The All Seasons Gardener at 3:17 AM 3 Comments

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Wednesday, February 14, 2007

Wildlife Friendly Containers

Native plants keep our native insects alive, and native insects provide the diet for most of our native birds. That means that if you can provide a small area where native species can thrive – you can be doing your bit to keep Britain’s wildlife thriving.

Native plants such as Centuary, Oxeeye Daisy, Rock Rose and Salad Burnet are as pretty as imports, grow well in containers and make an oasis for some of our rarer and more beautiful butterflies, as well as providing sustenance for bees.

Alternatively plant some tubs with more permanent contributions to the native landscape – a crab-apple or malus tree in a pot, or a trough that contains a couple of native heathers and a moss rose, will give winter food to birds like finches as well as revealing their beauty through hips, haws and fruit in the cold months when nothing else is happening.

You can buy packets of wildflower seed, and these can be sprinkled into containers to make a perfect small area that serves as an insect haven. There is a second advantage to this approach; it keeps many insects off your more high maintenance exotic plants! Remember that the soil in these containers should be less fertile than potting compost, as many of our native plants are used to competing with meadow grasses or growing on rough ground, so if you give them too much nutrient in their growing medium, it will cause them not to put out flowers.

Labels: Wildlife Gardening

The All Seasons Gardener at 2:01 PM 2 Comments

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