This seems so obvious you would think that it doesn’t need saying: but it still does. If you put poisonous chemicals on your pretty garden then you kill the food chain that the pretty birds rely on and they die! Scientists urge people to stop ‘spraying gardens with poison’ and adopt wildlife-friendly practices
— Read on www.theguardian.com/environment/2023/feb/06/garden-pesticides-british-songbird-declinestudy
In the Christmas carol “Good King Wenceslas” the page following his master, steps into his masters’ footsteps . I was thinking of this when admiring badger paw prints in the fresh snow on a cold morning .
The print seemed very large and I marveled that badgers seemed much bigger than I remembered them. I realised eventually that the largest prints were doubles, made as the badger stepped into his own footprint in the snow. I wondered if , like the struggling pageboy in the carol, he kept his feet warm in this way, though I doubt if he obtained the same miraculous heat from the foot print that saved the freezing page ! I doubt the badger was following the saintly King through the snow either, but I hummed the tune nonetheless to warm myself as we walked back across the winter landscape.
The carol, as we know it, was written by John Mason Neale . It is based on a poem and uses a very old melody. King Wenceslas, the first Christian king of Bohemia was murdered by his pagan brother. The King was out in the snow taking food and fire wood to a poor man on a freezing winter night followed by his faithful page who stepped in the King’s miraculous warm footprints.
Good King Wenceslas
Hither, page, and stand by me,
if thou know’st it, telling,
Yonder peasant, who is he?
Where and what his dwelling?”
“Sire, he lives a good league hence,
underneath the mountain;
Right against the forest fence,
by Saint Agnes’ fountain.”
*
“Bring me flesh, and bring me wine,
bring me pine logs hither:
Thou and I shall see him dine,
when we bear them thither.”
Page and monarch, forth they went,
forth they went together;
Through the rude wind’s wild lament
and the bitter weather.
“Sire, the night is darker now,
and the wind blows stronger;
Fails my heart, I know not how;
I can go no longer.”
“Mark my footsteps, good my page.
Tread thou in them boldly
Thou shalt find the winter’s rage
freeze thy blood less coldly.”
In his master’s steps he trod,
where the snow lay dinted;
Heat was in the very sod
which the saint had printed.
Therefore, Christian men, be sure,
wealth or rank possessing,
Ye who now will bless the poor,
shall yourselves find blessing.
If we are lucky enough to have a garden, then we are custodians of a tiny slice of the earth and we have control over it ( “up to a point Lord Copper”, as Evelyn Waugh’s character would say.)
The garden has a flat surface, that is the figure on the deeds of the house but how we cover up that space is up to us.
The most negative thing we can do for wildlife is cover it in tarmac or concrete. Black tarmac absorbs heat and actually contributes to global warming.
We can cover it in stones quarried from hundreds of miles away and then drench it in herbicide to stop any passing seed germinating.
We could lay plastic turf over it, or lay wooden boards over it made from dead trees and put plastic furniture on it and heaters and barbecues to burn meat, or reconstituted vegan burgers, surrounded by solar lights from China that stop bats and moths from ever taking wing, all in the name of being in the great outdoors.
All of these options involve buying stuff and making the planet a worse place for wildlife and for us all.
Or we could think in three dimensions. We could think not just of the flat ground we own, but of the whole cubic space above it and how we could maximise that for as many different species as possible.
The simplest thing to start with, is to grow tall plants . Tall plants make use of the sky space to provide food for bees and butterflies, moths and birds. The tallest plants are trees and if you have space to grow real trees then you can make the biggest difference possible to wildlife. Low growing plants are much better than concrete, plastic or stones, but they only make a few inches of life. Tall flowers are beautiful hollyhocks, delphiniums, dahlias foxgloves; what ever flourishes in your climate and soil. Flowering shrubs are wonderful: lavender, lilac, rosemary again what ever the bees like and will tolerate your climate. If bees don’t come to it and you need pesticides to keep it happy, then ditch it. You are doing more harm than good by growing it in the wrong climate. There are always better things you could grow!
Think of the borders of your garden. Could they be alive? Could you have real hedge? Could it have a real mixture of local shrubs that provide berries and nuts in the autumn for birds or evergreen shelter in the winter? If you have a chain link fence, could you grow flowers up that fence? Is there a gap in the fence for hedgehogs or other wildlife to pass between gardens?
Rather than a plastic awning or sunshade, why not sit in the shade of a tree? It is far cooler and more lovely! Plant one now for your future or even that of your children!
A garden can go up as well as down. I decided a pond dug down into my little garden will make a space for frogs and dragonflies and maybe newts and damselflies too and this is my project for the spring.
The earth isn’t flat . Our gardens don’t need to be flat either and by thinking of filling every millimetre of the land we own and the space above it with life will make such a difference to the fragile planet.
Oh and forget traditional lawns!
Happy New 3D thinking !!
Something different on a snowy December day. Dr Mark Scherz was a student of my husband at our last school . A passion for natural history produces amazing results!
When wading knee-deep in mud really pays off.
— Read on www.iflscience.com/20-new-frog-species-with-gurgling-stomach-calls-discovered-in-madagascar-66666
It has taken a long time to turn cold here and real frosts have only just begun.
My pretty little acer tree has been flaming for weeks in the drizzle, but the real winter has extinguished it at last. I picked up the final fallen leaf from the ground like a still glowing ember.
The dahlias and gladioli are safely dug up and stored in the basement and the scented geraniums are bulging on the spare room window sill.
When cleaning between the pots, I spotted some tell tale black frass on the window sill. The tiny black spheres were the frass of a caterpillar that has smuggled its way into the warm of the house.
We managed to find it, well camouflaged amongst the munched green leaves and I am hoping it may grow into a hawk moth caterpillar of some description. Hawk moths caterpillars have wonderful markings and spikes on their tails. The adult moth could be a thing of astonishing beauty: a humming bird, eyed, or even an elephant’s head hawk moth; but dreams of gorgeously patterned moth wings are still months away.
Until then I have to wait with the lucky caterpillar, in the warm back room, for the seasons to slowly change.
I like to share hopeful news.
This nature reserve is close to my sister in law’s village . A complicated project has opened up part of the Thames to fish to swim and spawn in for the first time in 130 years . How is that for righting a wrong after such a long time?!
Thanks to the EU for funding and local wildlife trusts for having vision and determination to make something better!
A new watercourse has been created at Chimney Meadows Nature Reserve near Bampton in Oxfordshire.
— Read on www.bbc.com/news/uk-england-oxfordshire-63228082
This article has really set me thinking again about my own flat garage roof, which could be home to more wild life. The bus shelter roof idea is really taking off and this is the way to go across the world !
Now that is what I call very very good news!
In the depth of lockdown, in the winter, we saw a wolf walk down our silent, deserted village street. We live near a forest so it wasn’t too many glasses of wine. It was proof.
: report on species recovery shows how effective legal protection, habitat restoration and reintroductions can be
— Read on www.theguardian.com/environment/2022/sep/27/wolves-and-brown-bears-among-wildlife-make-exciting-comeback-in-europe-aoe
This tiny perfect sliver of life was under the bucket. At first it was coiled like a bracelet in a golden knot, but by the time the photo was taken it was warm and lithe, sliding over my fingers. The sight of one slow worm used to be astounding in our garden ten years ago, but as the garden has grown up and the wild spots and compost heaps have been cultivated, they are increasingly common.
It is heartening to think we must have done one small thing right in our little corner to visibly increase this bit of wildlife.
By the way my hands are not usually so dirty, but they are currently stained from picking up walnuts without any gloves on!
Happy Autumn !
I spent the afternoon surrounded by sparkling water; water lilies and reed warblers, sunlight dancing on ripples and dragon flies that seemed as big as birds.
A buzzard swooped out of a tree, mewling mewling and flew low over the water. Buzzards don’t fish and I realised that this bulky, noisy bird was in fact an osprey. In this quiet, out of the way lake an osprey was hunting. Perfect.
But the lake was once a football field, drained and filled in to provide work for the unemployed during the depression of the 1930s (so the information board said).
The lovely lake is at Bonfol in Switzerland and it is also the site of one of the worst dumps of toxic chemicals in Europe.
Bonfol is right on the very, very edge of Switzerland, right up against the French border. It is also very close to the city of Basel, which is famous for its chemical factories and life saving pharmaceutical companies. In the 1960s and 1970s those companies dumped massive amounts of toxic waste in metal barrels in a hole in the ground left after digging out clay for a pottery works. The barrels were simply covered in earth and left to fester and leak and even explode.
When the full horror of what was under the fields was realised in the 21st century, an unbelievably expensive clean up operation had to be undertaken. It was so bad that robots had to dig out the chemicals, as it was too dangerous for any human to go close. A vast dome was built over the dump site in which the work could be undertaken.
I first saw the gigantic white dome in the middle of the woods from a nearby hillside. I naively thought it was something to do with marking the hundred years after WW1, as this was in 2014 and the nearby area had been fought over in this war: but no. Interestingly, the companies responsible for this potentially deadly dump did not pay for the colossal clean up until 2000. Local government and Greenpeace managed to exert sufficient pressure on the polluters and the complicated and expensive clean up finally began.
I take a wonderful drug everyday developed by a Swiss pharmaceutical company and I am very grateful for it; but I would not put a toe in the water of this lake and I would not share the fish caught by the osprey on this sparkling afternoon.
We all need good news and this is a wonderful initiative which I really hope works – not just for the cheetahs, but for the whole ecosystem that will be protected in order for them to survive..
Officials announce eight cats will be brought from Namibia in effort to reintroduce animal to its former habitat
— Read on www.theguardian.com/world/2022/jul/21/wild-cheetahs-to-return-to-india-for-first-time-since-1952
There isn’t any creature much cuter than a squirrel!
I saw my first red squirrels in Formby which is a wonderfully unexpected area of sand dunes, pine trees and sea very close to my childhood home in Liverpool. The story of their survival is the first wild life story that I really remember. Grey squirrels are an American import that has apparently driven out the native red squirrel from most of England.
However, as with most stories of alien invasion, it is more complex than it first appears. Apparently grey squirrels don’t compete for the red squirrel’s food, as the red squirrel is much more dependent on the seeds from pine trees, but greys can eat all manner of foods ( especially peanuts from bird feeders!). Unfortunately they carry a disease which is transmutable to red squirrels and this is the real reason why reds do not thrive in the presence of grey squirrels.
The first place I really watched red squirrels up close was in the central parks of Almaty in Kazakhstan. The length of the tufts on their ears made me laugh out loud, as they seemed improbably transgressively punk, leaping amongst the carefully managed trees.
The photos here are from just over the border in Germany, but red squirrels are at home here in France and I once saw a buzzard pluck one from a branch and fly away with the little helpless little bundle in our local woods.
Before you get too dewy eyed about red squirrels, it is thought that the fashion for red squirrel fur collars was responsible for introducing leprosy into Europe during the Middle Ages. The scourge of leprosy has been tracked down to squirrel furs imported from Scandinavia into Britain , but it may also have arisen in many other places before colonials exported it to the Americas and beyond.
These beautiful ferns stay green all through the darkest months of winter and when they make new leaves in the spring, the slowly uncurling fronds look like the soft tongue of a female deer – a hart.
I decided that the world had gone to hell in a hand basket when I saw a venerable old pub in the Cotswolds had changed its sign from that of a deer, to that of a cheesy looking gold heart and of course the spelling of the name was changed from the Golden Hart to the Golden Heart.
I have since realised that there are other things more worthy of getting angry about in the world and so I enjoy watching the ferns unfurl in the late spring and imagining that a real deer might even lick the rain from their glossy surface.
This article is in French about German cats and in the spirit of internationalism and Catdom I paraphrase it!
In one Southern German town cats have to stay indoors for months. They are not allowed out to stop them eating the rare crested lark during its breeding season.
I love cats and birds, who is right?!!
Insolite. Bade-Wurtemberg : un passereau menacé, les chats confinés !
— Read on www.dna.fr/insolite/2022/05/18/bade-wurtemberg-un-passereau-menace-les-chats-confines
I fall asleep to “Just William “ books. Gentle escapism of the most perfectly dated nature allows me blot out the world and while I sleep, the moths reclaim the night.
The first wonderful specimen is an emperor moth. It is the only European member of a family which is much more wide spread in the tropics. The huge eyes are to scare away birds and other predators and when it flies in the day, it is often mistaken for a butterfly.
The second moth perched on my finger is a purple thorn . It’s Latin name is tetra luna which refers to the four half moon shapes that just catch the light from the window in this shot (at the top edge of the jagged wing.)
The third moth is a peach blossom. The improbable pink blotches on the wings look like the delicately coloured flowers of that fruit tree.
The last moth is most prized because it is new to me. It is called a pine beauty and I had great difficulty in identifying it as I was mistakenly convinced it was a type of swift moth ( due to the way it sits) . Unsurprisingly, it lives in pine trees and it’s gingered, pink appearance apparently allows it to hide in yellowing needles ( though I find that hard to believe!)
So while we sleep, some beautiful things fly free, even if it is just our dreams!
If you are a masonry bee, finding love needs some patience. These amorous bees have taken up residence in my bee houses and are very obvious at this time of year, but I really understood very little about their life and love cycle ( and probably still don’t!)
In March, apparently, the male grubs hatch and bite their way out of the mud blocked bamboo canes . They are distinguishable from the females by their white hairy faces. They then have to wait for the females to emerge and often back right back into the hollow canes to wait for their date. A line of these whiskered bees reminds me of impatient bearded blokes waiting for their girl friends outside of the ladies’ changing rooms in a clothes store .
When the long awaited ( and larger) female bee finally emerges, they buzz around each other and finally mate, sometimes wrestling her to the ground and fighting off other males. She then gathers as much pollen as she can and makes a bright yellow bed of pollen food onto which she lays her fertilized egg. This bed is then laid in the empty bee “ room” of the bee “hotel” and grub slowly eats its own bed as it grows in the quiet safely of the plugged up tube.
Some times there is no room in the hotel and the female needs to find somewhere else to lay her egg. I have been most perplexed to find myself unable to put on a gardening glove sometimes and found that the fingers of the glove were blocked by something. When teased out, the blockage was bright yellow and I now realise that I had inadvertently evicted a masonry bee lava and his tasty bed of yellow pollen.
I have put up more “hotels” this season and I hope that all the bees emerging this year will find a comfortable space to start the next generation again!
This Tom cat, in the quiet church yard , was fixated on the mice in the ivy below. The gravestone on which he perched was oddly blank . I assume he would engrave it eventually with the names of his quietly rustling victims!
Pure white, pure black, a defiant stare and gone.
An ermine ran across our path, dived into a jumble of rocks and then sat straight up to watch us stop and stare back.
The morning smelt of spring, but this twist of life was dressed for deep snow or a coronation. It was so totally white with a tail dipped in black ink that it was impossible not to grin.
Then it was gone and I spent the rest of the day reading about stoats ( or short tailed weasels ) and marvelling at the ludicrous link between this vicious shape shifting “rat” and the royalty of Europe.
Ermine are the winter colours of stoats. As the days shorten their coats whiten and the unremarkable brown rabbit killer metamorphoses into this royal creature. Our ancestors were so impressed by the cleanliness of their fur in a winter world of brown mud and sludge, that they decided that ermine would rather die by hunters than foul or besmirch their clean coats. To hunt an ermine all you had to do was lay mud across the entrance to their den and they would rather die than be dishonoured by dirt. This gave raise to the death before dishonour mottos and their purity became linked to the idea of royalty. Having a cloak of ermine pelts with the little black tails dotted against the fur become the badge of kings, queens and emperors throughout history. The most recent European coronation of King Willem-Alexander of Holland saw both King and his Queen wrapped in swathes of ermine to signify their royalty to all the world.
It is of course bad luck for the stoat, but the fall from grace of fur in fashion is bound to be reflected in coronation regalia very soon. Most ermine fur came from Russia though the very name ermine is supposed to be corruption of Armenia where the Greeks considered the ermine to be from.
I wish I had a great photo for you, but I have nothing but the memory of it to share with you. An “ Armenian rat” that cloaked the shoulders of kings and trimmed the crown of queens.
It is the brown time.
Ploughed fields and bare trees in the sleety rain. The clouds are full of snow that doesn’t fall and sun that blinds momentarily and is then gone swallowed by a slab of racing grey .
We are counting red kites for the LPO ( French bird charity) Red kite survey. They are rare in the Alsace outside of the Vosges Mountains and just where we live on the edge of the Jura Mountains. I see one most days from the garden and more when they move through on migration in spring and autumn.
I am glad to be in the car, as all the various hunts are out this cold Sunday and the chance of being shot seems abnormally high.
Over two days of watching we have seen 13 red kites ( Milan royal) all together, but a few may have been the same bird counted twice.
There have been a few blackbirds, crows a raven and a kestrel and then thousands of little birds flowed over the brow of the hill. Chaffinches and bramblings poured over unexpectedly and covered the bare trees like so many leaves against the sky.
Nothing to see really.
Empty gardens turn my eyes to other things and I am always delighted to see life in the oddest places . My bird table has a lichen on its roof and it flares pale green in the wintry light .
This is probably Parmotrema perlatum and it is indicative of cleanish air. Lichens are a very ancient symbiosis of an algae and fungi combining the abilities of both to create an organism capable of living in virtually every place on the planet and colonising the most unpromising surface for life .
There are two other types of lichen just on this little bit of wood. I can’t identify them with confidence but their compact, complex beauty astounds me.
The post of the bird table is streaked with green algae and it seems fluorescent on this dark day. At the foot of the table is an up turned slab that is being slowly smothered in moss. I have thought of brushing it off, but for what reason? Why would a bare concrete slab be more lovely than this moist moss garden that I like to hope harbours mysterious tardigrades clambering slowly through like teddy bears?
Oh and the sparrows come for breadcrumbs and scraps everyday on the table of the bird feeder. They harry me with indignant squawking should I forget them and dare to step out of the house empty handed.
They are not however the only life here, the table it’s self is almost more extraordinary, if a deal quieter, than the hungry birds themselves!

Make sure you watch the YouTube clip.
Elusive Andean cat, thought to exist only in extremely remote rocky outcrops, caught on camera close to Santiago city
— Read on www.theguardian.com/environment/2021/dec/10/most-endangered-andean-cat-americas-found-living-on-outskirts-of-chilean-capital-santiago-aoe
There are so many environmental problems facing the world that I have to admit to feeling often overwhelmed . The news gives us the big picture and our own eyes and ears show us the reality in our own backyard. My safe place is the garden and so I nurture it and I celebrate it, but it is so very small .
I can’t even protect the hedgehog that feeds in it, or the blackbird that sings over it, as they need more space than I can ever provide . When they leave my garden they can be strimmed or shot or just go hungry. The moths that I identify so diligently need places to pupate and leaves to eat. The red kite that soars overhead needs voles to eat and the voles need rough ground to burrow in and the bats that weave the night together, need old trees to sleep in and safe roofs to bring their babies up in.
The sky and the earth do not belong to everybody, what ever magical thinking we may indulge in. The earth can be covered in concrete, sprayed with poisons and ploughed to dust. The sky can be emptied of the trees that should be swaying in it and the clouds can be full of unbreathable pollution.
So, shall I just plant taller hedges? Stay sane by staying small? Plug my ears to the sound of encroaching construction, chain saws and crop sprayers?
I have started with my husband and very knowledgeable neighbours to catalogue every hedge and tree in the village . We hope this might eventually stop the grubbing up and chopping down that happens on daily basis in the name of tidiness and profit.
We have to have faith . That is all we have.
As a child I always considered the cold didn’t start until after Guy Fawks and this year the weather seems true to a long time ago in Cheshire.
Flowers are hanging on where they have been spared mower and strimmer and I have seen a handful of poppies, some hard heads and a spray of harebells still flowering on field edges. In the garden petunias and marigolds and a few geraniums are still bright. The dahlias have been touched by the frost but not yet slain and some very late gladiolus are a spear of colour against the falling leaves.
When I started gardening in a real garden ( as opposed to my previous tiny international balconies ) I thought I needed to be true to all the gardening manuals I had read and to cut down everything and to tidy and clean up, ready for the winter. Then I lived with my garden for a few years and realised that a “ tidy” garden was in fact a very boring and a virtually dead garden for far too many months of the year. There was no where for the caterpillars to pupate, no corners for the hedgehog to forage in and no where for the birds to perch and peck.
So I have learnt to ignore the outdated gardening manuals and to leave the clearing up the garden for as long as possible. Yes, I am encouraging slugs and snails and things that will eat my flowers and vegetables, but I am also encouraging life and trying to live with it. I don’t grow things that cannot withstand a few slugs and snails, white fly, black fly etc etc . I don’t use weed killer or insecticides not because I love all insects, but because why would you spray poisonous chemicals around your own home when you don’t have to? The world is full of enough noxious ness without adding to it just to conform to a very misguided and outdated concept of “tidy” .
So my garden continues to harbour the last flowers, the hedgehog poo that shows she is still feeding in the weedy corners and the caterpillars looking for a quiet spot to dream the winter safely away.
This extraordinary scrap of life was slowly traversing the path.
It seemed to be a cross between a feather duster and a plastic cat toy: a pulsating gobbit of implausible life. The photo shows the pink tufts and psychedelic green body, but it does not show the strange black winking eye on its back. The eye appeared to open and close as the caterpillar squeezed along and no doubt this was evolved to frighten away a hungry bird. The bright hairs are to make the caterpillar inedible, if the winking eye was not enough to keep it safe through the winter.
Should this fearsome tiny fright makes it to spring time, it will be a pale tussock moth, grey and furry and quite unlike this wonderful punk adolescent caterpillar phase caught indignantly crossing the path this cold afternoon.
Cathy's real country garden 
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