wildlife – Page 2 – Charlton and Blackheath Amateur Horticultural Society

A robin for Christmas

John Sturgis has recently written an article in the Spectator, much after my own heart. He says he has two birds on the go, one in the garden, one at the allotment, both real beauties — and both robins.

With much of the nation still working from home, robins have become more familiar than ever. Most species of garden birds are horribly in decline, but the robin has stubbornly stuck around in great numbers.

While those other great survivors, magpies and pigeons, are brash and ungainly, the robin is a delicate little gem: magpie song is shrill, pigeon dumbly repetitive, but robin chirrups are a delight. They’re bold, too. Other garden birds flap away when we appear, but not robins. In fact, they approach — as inquisitive as a kitten.

The robin has a territory that ‘can be as small as a half acre’ so where I live I must share my robin with several neighbours. But one always appears as soon as I venture out of the back door, for human activity is their cue. My robin particularly likes it when I use my daisy grubber on the lawn. The stabbing activity seems to prompt all the worms near the daisy to come to the surface, in case I stab them too, I suppose. But there she comes, Mrs Robin following my every footstep, darting around where I have just been, feasting on the worms leaving their cover.

I say ‘she’ but frankly I don’t know. No doubt your Chris Packham types would be able to gender a robin from half an acre away, but to the untrained amateur, male and female are very much interchangeable.

Sturgis points out that robins frequently come up in literature and songs – John Donne’s Robin Redbreast, or The Secret Garden, or Rockin Robin of the Jackson 5. And, of course, the robin is the Boy Wonder’s spirit bird in Batman. Imagine trying to pitch that set-up today. ‘I like this Bat guy – very dark and cool. What are we doing for the kid? A scorpion? Eagle?’ ‘No, we thought a robin.’ Yet it works, accentuating the character’s chirpy loyalty.

But their definitive place is on Christmas cards. They’ve somehow smuggled themselves into the greeting card nativity scene, apparent survivors, along with holly, ivy and mistletoe, of pre-Christian winter festivals, one of the few flashes of colour in the bleak midwinter.

So just go outside with a trowel or daisy grubber and she will soon appear. And despite the Christmas connotation, she’ll still be there in the bleaker days of January and February. Because robins are very much for enhancing life, not just for Christmas!

Kathy

Butterflies and sunflowers

Beautiful picture of Gatekeeper butterflies enjoying Sharon’s garden. Lysimachia clethroides is grown here with Anthemis “Cally Cream” near a Hydrangea Limelight in a pot.

These are Sunflowers, Helianthuis debilis “Vanilla Ice” growing daintily in Sharon’s garden, producing new flowers continually as she deadheads them.

A neglected patch

Retirement four years ago. Time stretched, or I thought it would. The bottom of my garden was an area where rubble collected, unwanted household items had been left and bonfires lit. It was in desperate need of a clear up and a change of use although to what I had no ideas. Nettles and weeds thrived and tall trees belonging to neighbours and the MOD who own the land at the back ensured there was shade for most of the day apart from an hour or so. One year on it remained untouched as there proved too many fun things to do.

A visit to the Hannah Peschar Sculpture Garden in Surrey spurred me on to make a start.

http://www.hannahpescharsculpture.com/

Much of this magical woodland garden is in shade and shuttlecock ferns were in abundance. I loved their structure and vibrant green. I had not grown ferns before and felt that they at least may like my shady patch. The hard work began.

Picking up the obvious rubbish, carrying it up the garden, through the house, up a steep flight of stairs, into the car, onto the recycling centre – halcyon days! – was just the beginning. When I dug into the ground, I realised there were layers of broken bricks and glass underneath. It was heavy labour and took weeks to clear. The reverse journey, but now from the garden centre, brought in bags of compost, rotted horse manure and chipped bark.

I had no particular vision of the final outcome but by now just wanted to plant something. Half of the area had been dug over. Ferns along with a few other shade tolerant plants such as astrantia and hardy geraniums were planted.

By June 2018 I had dug up the remaining rubble and added more plants – foxgloves, aquilegia, thalictrum delavayi to give height and the nettles were left for butterfly eggs. Other wildflower/ plants that had found there way in and settled were allowed to remain as good for pollinators. I now have a large clump of greater stitchwort (also known as gentlemans shirt buttons – love that name) and cow parsley. Hellebores were put in later that year.

Bronze fennel was planted last year which grew to such a height it needed staking. I found an obelisk which does the trick. As the area is fairly bare in early spring, I had put in loads of aconite bulbs. None of these survived as the local squirrels found them irresistible. A few English bluebells and snowdrops did grow and more will be planted in Autumn.

Time stretches now. I sit and enjoy watching bees, early butterflies, neighbouring cats, toads, ignoring the gaping holes where the fox has squashed the gentlemens’ shirt buttons and hoping the hedgehog recently spotted in a garden two doors away will wander into mine.

SC Garden Hogg

Sharon

Musings in the garden

When I moved into my present house, there was already an established garden. Of course I wanted to make it my own so I started to remove the Rockery. Large white stones on a sloping bed were taken away and I prepared to level the ground. I soon realised why it had been a rockery, it was to conceal a rubbish dump of builder’s rubble and concrete slabs! I’ve replanted the area- with a new rockery!

Having put myself into self isolation for 3 weeks now, I can see a pattern evolving with the wildlife in my garden. About the same time each morning, two squirrels chase each other from one side of the garden to the other. A blackbird keeps watch from the same branch all day after collecting nesting material from the lawn. A family of foxes visits around 4pm to dig for worms. The birds singing as I garden are a constant delight and I’m starting to distinguish the robin from the chaffinch, some soothing benefits from enforced isolation!

Jenny

Go wild gardening

CABAHS Committee member Paula, reminds us that even the smallest urban garden can attract and help wildlife. She suggests you can select a small space in a patch of lawn to sow wild flowers as well as well-known plants. Plants such as Echinacea, Foxgloves, Hollyhocks and Lavender – there is a huge choice to pick from, or how about letting the grass grow and think of the time you will save in not mowing! It will attract insects, bees and who knows what else will show up. Check out the RHS tips for creating a wildlife garden

Has your ‘wild bit’ attracted any unusual wildlife? Let us know!

In praise of… earwigs!

I have not been an earwig lover for all of my life. As a child, I remember my father making a nightly check on his prize dahlias and coming back into the kitchen with earwigs crawling out of the turn ups of his trousers. My mother’s predictable reaction meant that I thought earwigs were definitely not insects one was meant to love. Now years later, in my own garden, I can see the results that a small earwig population have on my own favourite Dahlias, Verrone’s Obsidian, and it’s extremely annoying. But this Christmas my husband gave me a book – “The Garden Jungle” by Dave Goulson and it has rather opened my eyes to the trials and tribulations of this little insect.

Goulson points out that earwigs are easily eradicated by sprays, and because they don’t fly and only produce one generation a year, they don’t re-colonise very quickly once they have gone. I haven’t used pesticide sprays for some years, with the exception of a drench for vine weevil in my containers, so I know I do have earwigs in the garden, although not in the numbers I remember as a child.

Earwigs are overwhelmingly beneficial insects, they feed voraciously on aphids, as well as munching on the occasional petal. In orchards where earwigs have been sprayed out of existence, trees are infested with three times as many woolly aphids as those with a good earwig population. It is generally the case that beneficial predators of a crop pest breed more slowly than the pests they feed on. Aphids, in particular, breed spectacularly fast, giving birth to live young which themselves have developing offspring inside them when they are born. In contrast, Mrs Earwig produces maybe 50 offspring a year, laying creamy eggs in a burrow in the ground towards the end of winter. She tenderly cares for the eggs, guarding, cleaning and turning them and looks after the young brood (nymphs) until they moult and gradually become independent. Then she turns them out of the burrow and they must look after themselves, foraging at night and hiding in the day in any crevice (or dahlia) they can find. They must do this all Summer and Autumn dodging predators while they grow, until winter comes and they find a mate and it all starts again.

The fierce looking pincers are actually quite feeble and incapable of doing harm to a human, they are used by the earwig in defence against predators such as ground beetles, and also in mating. The “wig” part of their name comes from an old word for “wiggle” and they definitely never burrow into ears!

We should certainly see earwigs as our friends in the garden, just as we now do ladybirds and lacewings. I have decided that a nibbled petal here and there is a small price to pay for all the good they do.

Kathy

Speaking of foxes: Tales of woe from a frustrated gardener

Foxes are the bane of my life. I first became a keen gardener twenty five years ago when I moved into my small three story terraced house close to Ministry of Defence land, a wooded conservation area, and was confronted with a back garden that was bare. Keen on wildlife, I decided to try and create a wild life garden, including digging a pond to encourage the breeding of frogs which over the years has matured successfully. However I had not bargained with the attraction this would have for the local foxes who much to my chagrin have come to see my garden as their play area and my pond a drinking place They have spent their time wrecking it, most days trampling down and pulling up the plants and bulbs, burrowing deep holes, messing up the paths and pooing everywhere. For example, enthused by the recent CABAHS talk on tulips, I bought a range of tulips which I planted in very large pots and colour schemed. As suggested by the speaker I planted violas on the top of them. The next morning I discovered the foxes had ripped them all up, muddled up the bulbs, totally messed up the different colours and ruined my design irreparably.

Foxes have three times got through my cat flap into my basement kitchen area. The stench they left was awful and on one occasion took two days scrubbing to get rid of. During the fox mange epidemic I even found a bald cub lying near death in my basement. As someone who would not harm an animal I contacted the South Essex Wild life and Fox Sanctuary who obligingly came and took it away. I thought that was the last I had seen of it. But later in the year this charity sent me its annual report. It referred to my fox and how they had nursed it back to health and, much to my horror, had returned it to the area from which it came!

My cats regularly got fleas from the foxes as they both liked to sleep in the same place under a very large sycamore tree. I thought I am going to stop this. The academic in me thought if Qin Shi Huang, the Chinese emperor of terracotta warrior fame, could have a terracotta army I would have an army of reconstituted stone gnomes to deal with this situation. I bought some fifteen garden gnomes which I placed closely packed together on the place shared by the foxes and my cats, thinking they would no longer be able to sleep there. Did that work? No. They just slept on top of the gnomes! Incidentally when my elderly cats later died I took great pleasure in getting rid of them. Some of the gnomes saw their way to the plant stall at CABAHS!

I am an early riser and weather and work permitting, as part of my daily fitness regime, I do some gardening usually about 30-45 minutes. The time is often spent clearing up after and repairing the damage made during the night by the foxes. Sometimes I take a quick rest and sit on my garden seat drinking one of my three morning wake-me-up cups of coffee. Often my ginger cat, Bonzo, would come and sit on my knee for a five minute cuddle. One morning a young cub having seen this came up to me, obviously thinking it was a cat it wanted to do the same. It wouldn’t take no for an answer and took some shooing away.

Angelas fox

Animals know instinctively if a human is an animal lover and none of the foxes are afraid of me. They come up to me and don’t take any notice of what I say or do. I have tried everything to get rid of them over the years. Including fox repellents. The only thing I haven’t tried is lion poo which I gather they don’t like. After the tulip fiasco I have decided to throw in the towel. I finally accept my back garden belongs to the foxes. I will just have to live with them, garden around them and make good after them. The only outlet I now have left for expressing my fox frustrations is boring my friends and social network with my woes.

If any other CABAHS members have gardening frustrations, problems or tales they want to get off their chests and give an airing why not send them to CABAHS for this webpage? Perhaps other members have similar problems. It’s said a problem shared is a problem solved. Some might even have an answer to them. Perhaps we could start a CABAHS Moan Corner webpage.

Angela B