Getting Back to Nature

Picture your ideal garden. What do you see in it? A greenhouse, a well-planned flourishing vegetable plot, some pretty flower-filled borders and some space for a deckchair to take a well-earned rest from your labours? It's a lovely image, particularly when you add in a glass of elderflower cordial and a good book.

But wait! Let's try again. Shut your eyes and this time listen to, smell and feel your ideal garden. This may seem to be a strange suggestion, but why do we so easily focus (another sight-related word) on the visual aspects?

So... I'm on my deckchair and the first thing I can feel is the warmth of the sun and also the touch of a gentle breeze. No surprises there, but there's nothing even the best gardener can do to make that more likely to happen (I'm not even going to mention patio heaters...). I must admit I don't think I have a great sense of smell so I'll restrict myself to the wafts of scent coming from the overgrown honeysuckle. But when I listen...

Birdsong: the shouted ‘tea-cher, tea-cher, tea-cher' of the great tits, the cheerful songs of the blackbird and robin, and the odd hiss from an incubating blue tit when she feels threatened... Then the chirp of grasshoppers and crickets. The buzzing of the bees as they drift from flower to flower. In the evening, the sound of amorous hedgehogs in the undergrowth. A sploosh from the pond - was that a frog, or a bird having a bath, or maybe even a newt?

Does this take you back to your childhood? It does me. We know only too well that there are now fewer birds, butterflies, bees and fauna in general than there were only a few decades ago. Not only are natural environments in decline, but also it seems that the more we strive for perfection and productivity in the garden, the more we lose sight of the link between our own personal outdoor spaces and nature itself. Maybe it's time to change our focus.

I became the proud owner of a wildlife pond in February last year and it has given me an immense amount of pleasure for much less effort than a similar-sized flower border would take - though admittedly I didn't install it myself.

The pond was created by the same men who built our patio a couple of years ago so I knew I was getting a reliable team who knew what I wanted from the garden, but I was still amazed at how well Chris, the ‘artistic, creative' one, seemed to be able to read my mind. I am neither artistic nor creative, I just knew I wanted something that would be good for wildlife and would look very natural. Chris and Adrian created a teardrop-shaped pond edged with rocks and pebbles, and an adjacent bog garden edged by an old branch of tree and several gnarled stumps. I wasn't quite sure what to think when Chris showed me an old decaying tree stump festooned with fungi and said ‘I saw this and thought of you'!

Within weeks life appeared by magic in the pond. At first this was restricted to an assortment of ‘squiggly things' which I think were mainly mosquito larvae. We bought some water snails and ‘borrowed' some tadpoles from next-door's pond. By the end of the season we only seemed to have a couple of frogs, but I guess that's par for the course because if all tadpoles survived we'd pretty soon be ankle deep in frogs! I also saw a strange white wormy thing with a long tail one day which after scouring the internet was revealed to be a rat-tailed maggot, a hoverfly larva. Sadly, this individual was never destined to become an adult hoverfly as the tadpoles devoured it very rapidly! Most exciting was spotting a newt larva - I think this must have arrived on an aquatic plant as it seemed a little soon for newts to have found our pond and bred. Then in the summer, we had the joy of studying the beautiful damselflies at close quarters.

This spring, of course, I was desperate to see if any frogspawn would appear and I'm delighted to say that not only do we now have loads of the stuff, but we also have a pondful of very, very small tadpoles! To my great excitement, when removing some fallen leaves from the pebbles that form a ‘beach' I also uncovered a rather large, fat newt. On another occasion I found a smaller newt whilst trying to dredge fallen leaves from the bottom of the pond. I have heard it said that ponds tend to be good either for frogs or for newts but not both so I'm hoping that ours will prove to be the exception to the rule.

So, with a whole new thriving ecosystem to enjoy, my mind turned to the rest of the garden. Now, one look at the garden will tell anyone that I'm not a born gardener. Despite the hundreds - or possibly thousands - of seeds I've sown and plants I've bought over the years there are still patches of bare soil where nothing has wanted to grow, and what has survived has turned out to be the wrong height, or the wrong colour, or flower at the wrong time of year, to create a good impression. My attempts at vegetable growing have been even more embarrassing - my tomatoes get blight the moment I turn my back, my mange-tout get nibbled by I don't know what, but it's certainly not me, and my blueberry bushes produce about one blueberry per day which I eat straight away before the birds have a chance to steal it from under my nose... really, there has to be a better approach.

So why not forget about creating a Monet masterpiece, or putting hours of effort into preventing myriad creatures from eating your crops before you can, or struggling to grow the latest exotic hybrids that really don't belong here and flummox the insects? Why not create a garden specifically for the animals so you don't mind when the plants get eaten? I'm not suggesting you should plant a bed of hostas to attract every slug and snail in a five-mile radius to your garden, but that you adopt an attitude whereby the plants are for the wildlife, and not just for you. Of course, the aim is to attract animals that are beneficial for the garden and will themselves control those we're less keen on having around. If you do grow vegetables, this will also help protect them, as will the fact that the flowers will distract the pests from your valuable crops.

This year I have a new bed where I'm planning to plant wildlife-friendly plants such as teasels, borage, scabious, poached egg plant (Limnanthes) and echinacea, and I will also be looking for wildlife-friendly plants to fill the gaps in other borders. I've sprinkled wildflower seeds on a small moss-filled lawn at the end of the garden which I hope will become a jewel-studded ‘meadow'. I've also been tempted to buy the assorted ladybird homes, lacewing homes, frog homes, hedgehog homes and so on that you see in garden centres, but am determined to make some of my own out of old bamboo canes, twigs, logs and whatever else I can find. I already have a very overgrown area at the bottom of the garden which is filled with old wood and a huge shredding pile that never seems to get any smaller, so I suspect I already have plenty of readymade habitats there!

I'm looking forward to seeing how it all works out. I know there will be mistakes and failures, and I know that I certainly won't have an elegant coordinated colour scheme - the poached egg plants will see to that! But the point is that I'm not growing the plants for me. I'm growing them for the birds, the bees, the butterflies, the lacewings and the hoverflies, the beetles, the slugs and the snails. Well, maybe not the slugs and snails - they never need inviting in the first place but I'm hoping that a large frog population will keep these under control!

So if you visit my garden this summer, please don't look too critically at the poorly coordinated, poorly laid out flower beds, the overgrown shrubs and the naked blueberry plants. Kneel on the large slab overhanging the pond and gaze at all the squiggly things (not for too long though; I gave myself housemaid's knee from doing this last summer!), look between the blades of grass in the wildflower meadow to see if you can spot an iridescent beetle, then join me on the patio with a chilled drink in your hand, shut your eyes... and listen!

Judy

To increase your enjoyment of your garden even more, why not make your own elderflower cordial, using our editor, Jo's, prizewinning recipe? You can find it in her article on the Elder, here.

Teasel photo (c) Joe Napper 2009

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