LOCKDOWN GARDEN & MOSAIC

 

LOCKDOWN GARDEN, and MOSAIC

I am sheltering under my temporary workshop in the garden, where I have been sieving compost for the last several days, watched by two fat Collared Dove squabs bulging over the edge of their flimsy nest in the Buddleia nearby. I am looking out at a menacing black cloud bearing down from the north, and the first big raindrops start to plop on the roof.

 

The Watchers: Collared Dove squabs.

 I contemplated the scene and thought back through the fifty years I have worked in this garden. We moved into a ¾ acre, rectangular plot behind the house, running downslope towards the west. We are nearly 600 ft. high on the NW slopes of Kit Hill, a granite landmark in East Cornwall. The garden is bounded by a 3-4 foot earth bank to the south and stone banks topped by mixed deciduous native bushes and trees to the north and west. Across the garden, three-quarters of the way down the plot, is a  line of big granite boulders  marking an old field boundary. The soil is a moderately deep free-draining acid loam overlying yellow shillety sub-soil. These features remain, though we cut and layer the hedges every few years.

The immediate problem  when we moved in, were the abundant bramble patches throughout the garden, concealing holes where the outgoing owner had dug up her shrubs to take away.  A few garden plants of rugged disposition still hung on. What to do?

Looking down the garden in the early days

 Over the next 18 months I cut then mowed an open area at the top end and gradually dug my way outwards making temporary veg and strawberry beds. A plan formed and I laid down ropes to mark the outline of wide curved-edged borders down each side of the top end and vegetable beds below, and started digging. Beyond the boulder row was an area designated for the children’s play, and beyond that we planted fruit trees to augment what had once been an orchard, but with only one apple left. It had been cut to a 2 foot stump but regenerated and turned out to be a local variety nicknamed ‘Pig Snout’. Throughout this bottom end appeared rows of daffodils, Spanish bluebells and the local double snowdrop, apparently part of the past local flower-growing industry.

We kept generations of various poultry down this end over the years: hens, ducks, ‘gleanies’, our beloved geese, but we finally capitulated. Frequent fox attacks left devastation and sadness and after our last lot of bantams was devoured we stopped poultry keeping and instead devoted our barricading to keep out the deer which in latter years have been visiting the local gardens. Rabbits and squirrels are a fact of life, but on the upside, so too are grass snakes, slow worms, frogs, toads and newts, more rarely now, a hedgehog, and a varying population of birds and insects.

 

Looking down the garden now.

 

 

Looking up the garden. The Prunus shirotae cherry was planted two years after we came here.

 Largely devoted to perennials with shrubs and trees in places, the ornamental garden developed over the years, every plant with a story, a memory and associations. This sort of gardening requires a good knowledge of what is where, and a great deal of work.  After about twenty years, for the next ten year period the garden was subjected to the neglect of several six- month spells while we travelled in Australia and slowly the choice plants were overwhelmed by the more robust pushy  individuals. Thus the main structure was developed, refined and modified throughout the years.

 During this time two things have become apparent; although the rainfall seems to still average about 50 inches a year, it falls in a different way! There are more spectacular really heavy downpours these days. And the winters must be getting milder on the whole because when we first came here in 1969 bits of ‘Mind Your Own Business’, a not fully hardy plant would get blackened and almost killed in most winters. Now it survives all too well and has spread throughout the garden in spite of great cushions being yanked up at regular intervals. Similarly an obscure little club moss which roams through the lawns of houses in the milder west, now survives and is increasing fast in our grass.

As the work of maintaining the garden and especially the big borders became too much as we have got older, we have grassed down parts of the southern border  to make a series of garden rooms, each different in its degree of sunshine or shade, with surrounds of different plants and shrubs. 

 

After grassing down this makes a sheltered 'room'

 

This year good rain followed the drought, and then another warm spell, so the growth has been terrific and good crops have followed. We have had bushes smothered in fruit that we have never seen before. The orange flowered Berberis darwinii became a mass of blue-bloomed black fruit, taken over by a family of blackbirds till they had stripped it bare; the Amelanchier which has slowly grown into a multi-stemmed tree has had a huge crop of small black fruit which attracted birds for several weeks. The Greenfinches started feeding on them while they were still green. The Alder Buckthorn grown from seed many years ago, for the Brimstone butterflies, this year has a big crop of red-ripening berries.

 

Peas (etcetera!) in raised vegetable beds. Exuberant growth this year.

 We live with wildlife as much as possible. We don’t spray, so the battle against Ground Elder and Hedge Bindweed is unrelenting, though we have managed to eliminate Creeping Thistle and ‘Stroil’(Couch Grass). Brambles frequently arch from the banks into the soft soil below and young Oak, Ash and Hazel saplings attempt to turn the garden into woodland. On the whole, there is enough bounty for nature and us. The voles, once they have picked and cached enough small green strawberries, leave the rest for us, though the squirrels don’t share. They get the Hazel nuts before they are ripe enough for us to harvest.

 This lockdown year, our resident birds soon became accustomed to our constant presence and went about their business of nest building then feeding youngsters, unfazed by us. For weeks the traffic noise from the distant Launceston road was silent and the air was full of birdsong, dominated by dawn to dusk Blackbird song. Suddenly in July they were hushed and only now, in mid-August are we beginning to hear a few calls again. Greenfinches and Nuthatches are calling in their family groups and now  we are hearing the evocative ‘tick-tick’ and phrases of Robins’ autumn song. In the height of the drought we could set the time by the birds' bath-time. Between four and half past, every day, a succession of birds from Siskins to tits, from Blackbirds to finches, perched in the branches of the Amelanchier beside the pond and plunged down to drink or wash in the shallow water below, then returned to the tree to shake and preen.

Despite growing a wealth of what are  now trendily recognized as ‘pollinator plants’, this year, sadly, is repeating the story of the past decades of reducing numbers of butterflies. Plenty of assorted ‘whites’ but the numbers of our showy, dashing ‘coloured butterflies’ bears no resemblance to the dozens especially round the buddleias which our kids used to delight in counting till they ran out of fingers, when they were young. Now half a dozen in one count throughout the garden is a triumph.

 

Small Tortoiseshells on Sedum, a welcome sight.

 But it seems a good year for bees of all kinds, and now, hoverflies as well. Setting the moth trap down the garden at fairly frequent intervals is showing, until this recent warm and humid spell, a decline in overall numbers which seems to be echoed across the country.

And don’t laugh  --  this summer I have been digging up bits of our previously grassed-down areas to grow more plants again! Tony is appalled.

MOSAIC

 

 

 

 

Katrin.

 Katrin, our daughter-in-law has swopped the warm summer for the Arctic. She is currently part of a scientific expedition in which the German Research Vessel  Polarstern has been drifting in the Arctic ice since last autumn. The expedition is joined at intervals by international teams of scientists, investigating the ice and its behaviour, the sea below, and the weather, with consequent insights into more knowledge about climate change. Katrin is a member of the last, fifth, team to join Polarstern, coincidentally the ship on which she and our son Angus first met when he was a visiting scientist  on board Polarstern  in the Antarctic! That was over twenty years ago!

 

 

 

 

The link given below gives an interesting insight to the expedition.

https://follow.mosaic-expedition.org/