Garden Centre

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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