My Garden and Other Animals. Mike Dilger

       FEBRUARY

       SETTLING IN AND KNUCKLING DOWN

      For the entire first week in our new house I’m not afraid to admit that the garden hardly got a look-in. Anyone who has ever moved house knows that the list of jobs needing to be done in order to get services up and running can seem endless. In fact, most of the week was spent waiting in various electronic queuing systems as I attempted to persuade everyone from internet providers to satellite installers to actually do what they were supposedly paid to do – help me out!

      Having moved in on Monday 31 January, it was the following weekend before we were even able to surface for air and actually carve out some garden time. Finally, as our first Sunday in the house arrived, we hurriedly showered, dressed, excitedly gulped down our porridge and donned warm clothes. At last, a garden day!

      Equipped with notebooks, we had decided that the wisest use of time would be to take both a full stock-take of what we actually had in the garden and, importantly, what state it was in, before brutal decisions were to be made as to what was for the chop. To say that in many ways we were starting with a blank slate would have been an understatement. From even the most cursory of glances around the garden it was obvious that many of the shrubs and trees had been neglected for so long they had become so malformed and twisted that to put them out of their misery might be the kindest course of action.

      First to come under our scrutiny was a mature but hideously deformed wisteria, sprawled across the central half of the garage wall. The climber gave the impression more of a mangy dog tied to a rusty fence than the stately and regal vine we know it to be when given proper care and attention. Hanging by its own weight a couple of yards away from the wall in some places and virtually nailed to it elsewhere, I don’t think I’ve ever seen a plant more in need of a bit of TLC. After much debate we decided that it might not be a lost cause, but would need a ferocious short back-and-sides and total retraining to be given a fighting chance of making the grade.

      The same, however, couldn’t be said for two small cherry trees behind the garage, which had been so brutally disfigured by the seemingly totally random action of lopping off of various limbs, and were in such poor condition that they looked half dead. After somewhat less of a debate we decided the best option here would be to remove them entirely and replace them with some healthy new fruit trees.

      Another plant that we also had to give the Caligula-style thumbs down was the middle rowan tree, which, sandwiched between another similar-sized rowan and a big beech tree, had, in truth, never really been given enough room to flourish, making it look like the arboreal runt of the litter. Additionally, having been planted right in the middle of the bottom part of the lawn, its foliage would undoubtedly cast a huge shadow over the area I had set aside for the meadow, which as a habitat needed to be both light and airy for the flowers to flourish. Still, cutting down a mature tree is a decision that should never be taken lightly, as the nineteenth-century parson and gardener Canon Henry Ellacombe famously once said, ‘A garden without trees scarcely deserves to be called a garden.’

      As we were keen to try and make our decisions based on what we thought would best suit the birds and the bees (amongst other groups), we were also mindful of the fact that surely the single most important way to make a garden more wildlife-friendly is to plant a tree. As stated by Ken Thompson in his wonderful wildlife gardening book, No Nettles Required, the more trees gardens have, the more beetles, bugs, snails, slugs, woodlice, social wasps, leaf-mining insects and moths will be attracted to use them for bed and breakfast, which in turn will prove a magnet for animals from higher up the food chain, such as birds and mammals. In addition, trees provide an extra dimension to gardens, enabling them to house more wildlife, just like we would now be in a position to fit more stuff into our new two-floored/three-bedroom house than in my previous single-bedroom flat.

      However, taking everything into consideration, and with heavy hearts, we agreed that the garden would be better served in the long term if the rowan were removed. This same decision was also unfortunately extended to a small, sickly birch tree cowering in the shadow of a much larger and beautifully symmetrical birch adjacent to the playing field. A couple of small, nasty alien conifers on the wooded bank would also be for the chop, but these wouldn’t be missed for a second.

      With other plants, though, our concord would be severely tested. Dotted along the border of the wood, for example, were three or four random shrubs, which in their winter plumage neither of us recognised. Early on in this process, Christina declared herself to be in the ‘if in doubt, chop it out’ camp, whilst I was a follower of the ‘cut in haste, repent at leisure’ school of thought, meaning I inevitably took on the roll of defence counsel, arguing that the shrubs should receive a stay of execution until we found out what they were. After much cross-examination, however, the prosecution (Christina) eventually relented and agreed to wait and see how they turned out before making any decisions about their future. I couldn’t help feeling, though, that this was just the first of many such battles of wills and that our strong-minded obstinacies would be tested on many more occasions over the next few months.

      However, one job we were both keen to see achieved as soon as possible was the removal of Mr Gregory’s fence, which stood out as an ugly junction between garden and wooded bank, in contradiction to our preferred natural blending of all the habitats from back door to brook.

      Another undertaking we instantly agreed upon would be to clear as much ivy as possible from the oak tree in the northwest corner. On the very first occasion I had viewed the property, I remember being utterly thrilled to find that a mature oak tree was part and parcel of the garden. However, with many of the tree’s roots exposed due to the undercutting nature of the brook, the fact that it was festooned from head to toe with ivy and the sheer amount of standing dead wood present, all seemed clearly to indicate that the tree had been struggling for some time.

      In terms of an ability to attract wildlife to your garden, no one species can come even close to an English or pedunculate oak, with some naturalists having even likened an individual tree to the status of a nature reserve in its own right. With a staggering 284 different invertebrate species having been identified as living on oak trees, a diverse array of birds and mammals reliant on their acorns, a number of bat species roosting in the hollows and crevices, and great-spotted woodpeckers, nuthatches and treecreepers scouring the wood for food and nesting holes, it’s no surprise that even a struggling oak would be one of the garden’s real crown jewels.

      The other side of the coin, of course, is that ivy has pretty good wildlife credentials too! Not only is ivy our only native, evergreen climber but it also provides the most wonderful late flourish of nectar in November and a ready supply of berries for our winter thrushes too. The latticework that forms as ivy crawls like a malevolent scaffold over other plants can also provide the perfect nooks and crannies for anything from hunting spiders to nesting spotted flycatchers. On this occasion, though, due to the abundance of ivy elsewhere on the bank, and particularly in amongst the hazels, it would have to give