The night visitors

Most days, before gardening, I take a look round the garden to see what’s happening and what needs doing – and occasionally find surprises. 

The weather has been wet most days over the past month; there have been a few dry interludes, but the soil is pretty soggy and sticky, making digging or clearing weeds difficult, and there has been limited opportunity for getting the bigger jobs, such as pruning the big apple tree, done.  I’ve managed a little clearing of old vegetation, some light cutting back and odd other jobs, but the ones that need a full good day outside are still pending.  While checking round the garden the other day, however, I spotted a couple of interesting, not to mention puzzling, things – we have had some nocturnal goings-on that I wasn’t aware of.

First, I checked over the windfall apples left out on the old table by the dining-room window, to remove the totally rotten ones and put a couple of sound(ish) fruit on the patio to give the birds a variety of places to feed.  Among the apples were three or four softish oval objects – owl pellets, I assume.  We have tawny owls around here – a female was calling nearby last night – but I didn’t realise that they visit so close to the house.  Owls regurgitate pellets containing the inedible bits of their prey; I broke one open and could see beetle wing-cases in there.  Fascinating.

Owl pellets

Then I took a look at the path by the long hedge. Not much needs attention there at the moment, given that the hedge was trimmed in the autumn and the prunings dropped on to a cardboard base to suppress weeds, so I hadn’t been along it for a while, but halfway down there’s a self-seeded hellebore which I tolerate, and the old leaves needed to be cut off.  The path, still well covered by bits of fresh evergreen conifer, is overhung by various shrubs and is quite secluded, so it’s not unusual to find evidence of wildlife having been there; foxes seem to like to take prey in there, and I’ve found remains of pheasants left behind by them.  I noticed clusters of droppings on the path – just a couple at first, and then on closer inspection quite a few; lots of roundish, fairly fresh droppings, each about pea-size.  My initial thought was that they had been left by a rat (an inevitable part of living in the country), but the quantity and size made that quite impossible – these had been left by a much larger animal.  Even a rabbit couldn’t have generated those.  After much cogitation, I can only think that we’ve had a deer in the garden.  There are roe and fallow deer in the vicinity, but I can’t imagine that they would come into a domestic garden – there’s plenty of secluded grazing for them in the fields and woods around here.  A close neighbour has had a muntjac in his garden, eating windfall apples in broad daylight, and that seems much more likely.  There’s no sign of it (or them) having eaten any plants (that I’ve noticed), so I don’t mind; I’m just rather surprised that it would venture so close to a house for no obvious reason!  I assume it visited at dusk or very early morning as I haven’t seen it.  A fox appears to have found it interesting too; there was fox poo beside one of the droppings piles, where the fox ‘made his mark’ to assert it was his territory.

Nocturnal droppings - deer (top), fox (bottom)

There are obviously several goings-on in the garden that are not apparent to the owners!

BGB

The rain continues to fall, with a few dry and bright spells this weekend; this is useful, as it’s the Big Garden Birdwatch this weekend and the birds are less active in wet weather, at least in the open where I can see them.

We’ve only had a couple of periods of hard weather so far this winter, and food will be plentiful for the birds.  A woodpigeon was feeding precariously on some ivy berries the other day, and the early shoots and buds in the fields and hedges will be providing sustenance for the smaller birds.  A lot of them hang out on the shrubs, looking for insects in the bark, eating berries or buds or just preening or sheltering.  However our fatball container continues to attract interest from tits, sparrows and the occasional robin or blackbird that can master the technique, and other birds gather underneath to eat the dropped food; today a pheasant with a claw foot (he manages to stump around quite successfully) was enjoying a feast after a small chunk of fatball had fallen out into the grass.  Another attraction is the old table outside the dining room window with its array of windfall apples, providing us with a close-up view of blackbirds and robins coming for a meal; the beak-marks in the fruit show which apples are the current favourites!  A male blackcap has found them and has been visiting regularly for the past few days to have a hearty eat. 

Beak-marks in the apple!

The Garden Birdwatch started slowly; my first brief attempt was during the late morning, by which time the birds had had their fill of breakfast and had retreated to cover to digest it, and I gave up as the results weren’t looking like a true reflection of the birdlife of this garden.  But another attempt in late afternoon was much better, with a really good list of birds.  True, there weren’t many sparrows – we can have a dozen or more at a time – and no great tits or starlings, but our two robins came, two pheasants and a partridge visited, a small flock of goldfinches gathered in the hazels with a couple of chaffinches among them, both the blackcap and the marsh tit dropped by (have to look carefully to tell them apart!) and – a real treat – a treecreeper spent some time checking out the apple tree.  An appearance by the song thrush would have been nice, and the fieldfares haven’t been much in evidence this year, but you can't have everything; blackbirds, blue tits and a dunnock made up the rest of the list.

Snowdrops ready for the Burns Supper (hellebores and viburnum behind)

The days are starting to lengthen slowly, the snowdrops are opening (a few cut to provide table decorations for the village Burns Supper) and the birds are showing the first signs of having mating on their minds.  A woodpecker has been drumming in the trees opposite, the robins are tentatively feeding together again as a prelude to pairing up and a small bird, probably a tit, has taken a look at the nestbox. 

The value of nets

One of the lessons I’ve learnt over the past year has been the value of covering veg crops with fleece or netting.  In recent years I’ve tried to cover brassica crops such as cabbages with nets – not always very successfully! – against cabbage white butterflies, which lay their eggs on them (producing caterpillars that eat their way through the plant), and to lay fleece on newly-planted garlic cloves to stop birds from pulling them up.  But more is needed, particularly against the pigeons and partridges.

I removed the fleece from the garlic bed in early winter, so that the garlic leaves could grow up straight.  It didn’t stop the birds; while the bulbs have remained in situ, the leaf tips have been eaten off.  I think the plants will survive, but it’s annoying.  Equally annoying is the adjacent bed of radicchio, which I didn’t cover (thinking, naively, that it would be too bitter for the wildlife to attack), but which has been nibbled down and in some cases scratched up.  Too late now to do anything about it; although the plants might recover and grow new leaves in the spring/summer, as one rogue plant left from autumn 2024 has done, I will want that part of the bed for other plants.  Then there’s the sad demise of last year's leeks, attacked by allium leaf miner; I shall have to net my leeks this year to prevent another attack. 

On a more positive note, this winter’s brassicas have been netted and are doing well (so far); no pigeons eating the broccoli tops, no butterfly damage on the spring cabbages.  Lesson learnt.

Broad bean seedlings, still in the cold frame

The first sowing of broad beans, sown in late autumn and kept in the cold frame until yesterday, has gone into the ground (the bed vacated by the leeks - any leaf miners remaining in the soil shouldn’t attack the beans), and a tent of fleece placed over the top.  In the cold weather, hungry pigeons and partridges, and maybe pheasants, will peck at anything green, and being large birds they can pull plants out of the ground quite easily (like the radicchio!); in winter other birds can scratch through freshly laid mulch in search of grubs, regardless of any small plants in the way.  Once the weather warms up, they might not be so destructive, and once the shooting season stops in a few weeks’ time the game birds won’t necessarily be hanging around the garden so much.  There were 20 partridges gathering on the lawn a few days ago, and a dozen or so hiding in the shrubs today.  In a few weeks' time I might be able to protect plants with a nest of pointy sticks instead of nets or fleece!

Icy nights

 

Hellebores - already in flower

After a mostly mild autumn and early winter, the post-Christmas weather has been fairly chilly, especially overnight, and sometimes icy.  There has been little snow yet, though some is forecast for the next couple of days.  Nevertheless, at least some plants are ahead of themselves, with a few snowdrops (Galanthus elwesii) and hellebores already in flower.

The New Year’s Day flower count wasn’t much up on previous years, however: twelve in all, including the winter shrub stalwarts (rosemary, winter jasmine, winter honeysuckle, and Viburnum tinus – but not the Mahonia ‘Winter Sun’, which has been and gone some time ago); the aforementioned snowdrops and hellebores; the Vinca major which is still resisting my attempts to pull it out of the front wall; and isolated flowers on the variegated lamium (dead-nettle), Geum ‘Mrs Bradshaw’ (one bloom, frankly rather past its best), the miniature strawberries and various patches of meadow grass; as well as some unidentified salad leaf seedlings (mustards?) in the cold frame that I haven’t got round to eating yet.

The dahlias were dusted down, dried off and wrapped up, and put in the garage for protection from the frost, before the temperatures dropped.  Those other plants of questionable hardiness are tucked up in the greenhouse, and the rest left to take their chances outdoors.

The colder weather has brought back a few of the Scandi-avians, who haven’t been much in evidence through recent weeks; a fieldfare has been enjoying the fallen apples.  Bullfinches have dropped in to enjoy the flowers on the winter honeysuckle (there are plenty of them this year).  A song thrush has been down a few times, and the marsh tit continues to come to the fatballs along with the more usual tits; I hope both of those stay around for the Big Garden Birdwatch later this month.

Unexpected guests

A common theme in magazine articles throughout the run-up to Christmas is what to do about ‘unexpected guests’: what to cook for them, and what to buy as presents, should any of these inconsiderate beings descend on you over the festive season in need of food and demanding gifts.  I can’t say that such ‘unexpected guests’ have ever arrived on my doorstep at this time of year (and they might get short shrift if they did), so I pay little attention to this advice, and certainly don’t buy things on the off-chance that they might appear.  But this Christmas we’ve had a few unexpected visitors in the house.  None of them has required feeding, nor would any of them have thanked me for a pair of gift-wrapped socks, in fact they have needed very little if anything from me.  All are insects, and much less troublesome than the journalists’ (probably imaginary) human guests.

I was sitting in front of a cosy log fire in the sitting room one evening this week when something suddenly started fluttering around.  It was a peacock butterfly, seemingly a little bemused by its surroundings.  Peacocks hibernate in winter, normally in crevices in places like sheds, and I don’t know how this one got into the house.  Its chances of making it through to spring indoors wasn’t great, so I scooped it up and put it out into the front porch, which is enclosed but unheated and has plenty of suitable hibernating places; I hope it survives there.

Shield-bug (at the base of the flower)

Our current orchid (phalaenopsis), which has flowered spectacularly this year, has one last bloom on it (another spur is showing a good display of buds, still to come).  This final flower is fading now and will soon drop off.  The other day, I bent to examine it more closely (to see if it was time to pull it off) and found a shield-bug sitting there.  Like the butterfly, it had probably been lured from its wintering quarters by the heat of the room.  It had disappeared by the next day, I hope back into its hibernating place.

We had neighbours in for drinks on Christmas Eve, which necessitated a move from the cosy sitting room into the slightly more spacious lounge, and for the first time this winter the fire had to be lit in that room.  When D started preparing it he found in the chimney a papery sphere, a little larger than a golf ball; we assume it is, or has been, a wasp nest, because two wasps also appeared at the same time.  One wasp escaped outside, while the other is still hanging around the room and has currently taken up residence above the window-frame, where I hope it will stay.  The nest is quite a work of art; perhaps it’s the wasps’ Christmas present to us!

A Christmas present?

The 'outsiders'

After a dry summer and early autumn, November and December have been quite wet; not many good gardening days this past week, although I have made a start on clearing the weeds beyond the far side of the patio.  Standing at the window and looking out at the garden, my eye is taken by the big Viburnum davidii by the pond.  When I say ‘big’, I mean about 2.5 metres (8-9 feet or so) across.  It stretches out across part of the pond, which the birds like because they can bathe (water level permitting) out of sight under the branches, and the foliage cover (it’s evergreen) also helps stop that part of the pond from freezing in cold weather, so they have drinking water on icy days. 

The big Viburnum davidii

However, the bush is much too big and needs to be cut down to size, but the problem is how to do that.  Its manner of growth is to produce foliage at the branch ends, so all the leaves are on the outside, with nothing inside.  Just shortening the branches would result in bare wood; the branches will have to be cut out in their entirety.  I’m not sure that would leave much; I doubt if it re-shoots from old wood.  It might be possible to reduce the size a little by cutting back to the slightly shorter side-shoots, but I think the only realistic remedy might be to take cuttings and re-plant.  It would be a pity; it’s a handsome shrub, with lovely corrugated leaves.  And the birds like to use it as cover.

The other ‘outsider’ is the big hebe between the patio and the pond.  It too is handsome but getting too big, and while it looks good from one side, it has what I can only call a bare backside; there are definite woody patches at the rear, only partially masked by the ivy and other weeds in that part of the bed.  It has the same growth pattern as the viburnum, and is unlikely to look good after conventional pruning for the same reasons.  I have taken cuttings of it, and am growing two of them on, but it’s a very slow grower and it will be some time before the cuttings make any sort of impact.  Other plants will have to fill the gaps in the meantime.

The hebe: front ,,,

... and back

Other plants: well, given it’s mid-December, not much is looking its best at the moment.  There are very promising buds on the hellebores, and the early snowdrops – Galanthus elwesii – are already about to bloom.  I potted up some bulbs earlier in the year, and they are doing nicely; one has a good-sized bud which should open very soon.

Signs of spring in the ground - 

- and in the pot

Christmas tree

 

Not a conventional Christmas tree!

A vase of nerines, which has been brightening up the porch for a good couple of weeks now, had finally faded and needed replacing by something a little more attractive; but early December isn’t the greatest time to look for cut flowers in the garden.  There isn’t a lot of colour out there, other than the big apple tree, which is still festooned with bright red fruits; it isn’t a conventional Christmas tree, but it does look rather festive!

Viburnum tinus

In the end a few stems of Viburnum tinus, nicely in flower, had to suffice.  I have two, one given by a friend (variety unknown, with white flowers) and ‘Gwenllian’, with pink and white flowers and blue berries.  While foraging for blooms of the latter, I had to squeeze past the remains of Rosa altaica, the Central Asian wild rose.  I planted this many years ago because Gertrude Jekyll spoke well of it and its single white flowers, and it is a lovely thing when in full flow; but what Gertrude didn’t say is that, like all wild roses, it doesn’t flower for very long and, while there is a hint of a second flush in late summer, it’s a rather fleeting pleasure.  It’s also very, very prickly and – worst of all – it suckers.  I’m minded to try to get it out, but I suspect that will be easier said than done.  As it's at the back of the shrub border I keep forgetting to prune it; perhaps this winter I'll prune it very, very hard ....

The forecast for today was for showers, but in fact it was almost entirely dry and I got on with deadheading and cutting back some of the other shrub roses.  At the side of the house, Rosa alba semiplena (brief but beautiful, and scented) and Rosa dupontii (also brief and very pretty, but of untidy growth) were cut back hard; the latter is going to be taken in hand very severely this winter, and I won’t mind too much if it succumbs.  

There hasn’t been much gardening over the past few days as the weather has been rather wet, and there’s a storm forecast for tomorrow.  I did manage to replant one of my little strawberry beds.  As I said back in July, several of the plants in there had died in the hot weather and the space had been used as a temporary home for lettuces; these were removed after the first frost and some compost added to the bed.  Alpine strawberries are uncomplaining little plants once they are established, but they don’t take to transplanting very well in dry weather; so, with a wet day forecast last week, I set to on the day before, moved some self-set seedlings into the bed, watered them well, and left the rain to do the rest.  They seem fine.  The other strawberry bed – they are a matching pair – probably ought to be replanted too as the plants are quite old, but they’re not such a pressing case and can be left for the time being.

Replanted alpine strawberry bed

The visiting birdlife at the fatball container has been joined in the past few days by a marsh tit, busily stocking up on food, although the temperatures have been fairly mild for the time of year.  There are even a few berries still on the holly - a more normal sort of Christmas tree.