My Garden and Other Animals. Mike Dilger
and Dennis, and brute force. For a job like this, a pair of eye goggles that I had just purchased would be essential, as doubtless small pieces would be flying all over the place. And with so much work to do, the last thing I wanted was to waste three hours down at Accident and Emergency having my eyes checked.
There is something incredibly satisfying about intense physical labour that makes you feel alive, and in no time, despite the cold, cloudy start to the day, I was soon peeling off layers. After trialling different methods, I soon found that the technique that worked the best involved initially swinging the sledgehammer with blunt blows to fracture the concrete, and then changing to the pick-axe to lever out the broken chunks. After an hour’s solid graft, during which, quite frankly, I looked more like the missing link in a chain gang than a respected naturalist, I had completely cleared a two-yard section of the path and replaced it with a sunken mud pit. Ninety per cent of any hard landscaping job seems to involve making a mess and then having to tidy it up again, and having already ordered a skip to be delivered the following week, in a rare moment of forethought, the concrete could be piled up to one side in the full knowledge that the usual disposal issues wouldn’t in this case be a problem.
With the weather suddenly beginning to clear and my first task completed ahead of schedule, it gave me a free hour to enjoy the garden before Christina came back to instigate a whole new raft of jobs. Taking a tour around the meadow, the primroses and lesser celandines were looking pristine and had just been joined by another top-notch plant which we had both been delighted to have discovered emerging in a couple of discrete clusters a fortnight ago. Surely there can be few flowers more charismatic or enigmatic in the whole of the British Isles than the snake’s head fritillary. Largely confined in the wild to just a few winter-flooded hay meadows along the greater Thames Valley, of which the famous site is North Meadow at Cricklade in Wiltshire, the snake’s head has now become an exceptionally rare plant. So while there was no doubting that the plants currently flowering in our meadow would have been introductions, their origin did little to detract from their beauty. And as I watched a queen bumblebee disappearing into the bell of one of the flowers in front of me, it was patently not only me who was enjoying them.
The snake’s head fritillary’s name is particularly interesting and is thought to emanate from both the pattern on the flowers, where the chequered design of purple and lilac seems to overlap like reptilian scales, and the long slender stem and nodding bell, which from certain angles bears more than a passing resemblance to the body and head of a snake rearing up to strike. While also a plant that can be quite easily purchased in cultivated form from many garden centres around Easter, when it tends to be at its blooming best, I have known a number of very technically proficient gardeners, including my esteemed friend Mr Flowers, who have attempted to plant them in their own garden but somehow failed to replicate their fastidious requirements, resulting in their time and money being wasted. Here, though, probably more by luck than judgement, they looked as much a natural component of the flora as all the dandelions, whose bright, brash flowers were beginning to crop up en masse in the main body of the meadow.
In addition to the bumblebee still systematically working the fritillaries, a couple more bee-flies had also been enticed out by the lovely weather and were doing their rounds of the primroses, and with the additional appearance of a number of hoverflies, they suddenly gave the garden an entomological gloss I hadn’t up to that point seen. This was all hugely exciting as even the most basic student of ecology knows that most invertebrates are at the base of most biological food chains; in other words, if I was attracting six-legged creatures in healthy numbers then surely the four-legged and two-legged creatures would follow.
Christina arrived back, and she joined me in the garden. Almost instantly her presence brought out the star insect of the day, my first orange-tip butterfly of both the year and the garden too. I’m well aware that I keep going on about how I have favourite birds, plants, mammals and insects, but I think why I favour certain species more than others is because of what they represent, and in the case of a stunning male orange-tip, its arrival encapsulated, at the micro level, a lovely day (otherwise he wouldn’t have been flying), and, at the macro-level, surely the most exciting time of year for wildlife.
Having spent close to the last nine months in chrysalis form, whereby, through the miracle that is metamorphosis, the caterpillar somehow manages to reconstitute its bodily ingredients into that of an adult butterfly, he then emerges into the world with just one mission, or his life will have been wasted. The male orange-tip’s sole raison d’être is to pass on his genes by tracking down as many virgin females to mate with, before all his exertions catch up with him after a couple of weeks and he dies alone, a spent force. This explanation should hopefully go at least some way to explaining why I was jumping around for joy like a demented idiot – the orange-tips were back; the world was still turning.
Determined not to be left out of the action, the birds also belatedly began to find their voice. The chiffchaff is one of the earliest migrants back to the UK after a winter spent either in the Mediterranean or West Africa, and whose name is a perfect onomatopoeia of its repetitive and monosyllabic call. It is almost identical in looks to another closely related migrant, the willow warbler. When I was working as a warden at the RSPB’s Minsmere Reserve after graduating from university, I remember eavesdropping on an elderly couple’s conversation while taking a turn around one of the many footpaths. They had obviously taken up birdwatching as a retirement hobby, and while watching a bird singing away, I could clearly hear them debating long and hard as to whether the individual they were looking at was a chiffchaff or willow warbler, while the bird was actually busy trying to helping them out by handing out the biggest clue … ‘Chiff-chaff, chiff-chaff’! So, like the orange-tip, the first chiffchaff of spring is always an exciting moment, but this enthusiasm soon wanes; the call quickly loses its novelty status because the bird never shuts up!
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