Tag: Optimism

Let your garden free. Don’t pave it over!

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There has been an awful fashion of seeing a garden as just another room and this has encouraged us to pave it over or to bury it under decking.

The black bit is liberated patio.

This is simply terrible.

Paved over land cannot absorb water and it cannot sustain plants and all the other creatures we share our world with.

“You’re a happier person when you live in a green surrounding, so every slab you flip is 900 square centimetres of potential happiness. You’re also healthier and, if that’s not enough, there are the big problems we are facing with climate change.”

This quotation comes from a wonderful Dutch movement to dig up your paving slabs and to let the garden and life come back.

We cannot change everything that is wrong with the world but we can start in our own back yard by flipping over the pavement stones and letting the garden back in.

Let your garden go free!

I have started with my own back garden. I have a big, pointless patio that is actually used only once a year maximum. I have to spray clean it twice a year and sweep it every other day in the summer.

I have started lifting paving stones and covering the sand in compost from my own bins . Plants are already stretching out into the new space and seedlings are growing despite the rain.

Do read the article from Holland and the video is very funny!

Happy flipping !

The start of new life!

First Light

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Picked out of the packet,

dry as a stone.

Pushed into the soil, dusty and thin:

Some water

Some water –

The soil swells,

The seed feels the water, smells the water

And expands.

Oh how it wringles into the soft smelling wet!

Pushes itself upwards

Shouldering the darkness away

Easing out of its souple skin,

A root bores downwards

The stone clasped hands

Unfold the fist of first leaves

Out of the soil

Into the light –

Shiver of release and the surge of spring power.

Weatherwatch: how solar farms benefit bees and butterflies | Biodiversity | The Guardian

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If, like me, you worry when you land being covered in solar panels, then this is very good news! The ground around them is richer in wildlife than farms. The future may be greener than we think!

Research shows pollinating insects thrive in solar parks, particularly where a variety of plants are flourishing
— Read on www.theguardian.com/news/2024/mar/01/weatherwatch-how-solar-farms-benefit-bees-and-butterflies

400+

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I have just passed the 400 mark today of moth species recorded in my garden.

Some are big, some are small and one or two are wrongly identified, but I have seen them all and pondered over their names, their shapes and their colours. I know the usual suspects by sight and can tell the season of the year by what is in the light trap.

Early autumn is large yellow underwings and swifts and many more besides. I have started taking more interest in the smaller moths, tortrixes and the like and so my total has slowly crept up.

I wonder sometimes what on earth I am doing.

Does my obsessive recording of the nocturnal life of a tiny patch of land on the borders of France and Switzerland amount to a hill of beans? Am I just fiddling while Rome burns or adding to the sum of human knowledge? I dont know the answer, but when I manage to give a name to a new night visitor to this speck of no where I feel as if I have understood a tiny bit more of the puzzle, and so I keep naming and counting and marvelling.

Orache moth
Privet hawk moth

And 390 more!

The little moth on my finger is a flame moth . In latin Axylia putris . The pattern on the wings looks like a flickering flame and it hugs them close to its body to resemble a twig and thus avoid being eaten by a bird.

Summer end garden.

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Mid August and the garden is looking tired.

It has been such a good year so far, there has been enough rain and enough sun and very little garden shredding hail: so many things have flourished. There have been all sorts of flowers and the vegetable garden has been wonderfully productive, but after such plenty it is feeling tired.

Or is that just me?

There have been no end of green beans to pick, the courgettes are morphing into marrows before I can reach them. The gherkin cucumbers have scrambled over everything and the potatoes are massive and need lifting.

Stuffed marrow again?

After pleasant summer temperatures, real heat is forecast for the next few weeks and very little is going to get picked, weeded or replanted at 34 degrees. Plans to get a new crop of something or other in to replace the finished gerkins and beans are definitely on hold.

I have managed to plant a few cosmos seedling and have a couple of patches of night scented stock filling a gap in the flower bed. There are still some gladioli to come and the morning glory are climbing the fence before they flower, but generally it is seed heads ( they can’t be cut down until I’ve collected the seeds!) and mint and tough weeds.

I can remember where every flower that bloomed in the spring and early summer was. Memories of beauty seems too fanciful to describe the knowledge that I must wait for next year to see them again . This is the great pleasure of being home all day. I have time to see things grow and to flower and to fade and set seed. Oh no I can feel metaphors overwhelming me again and I strive to stop, do some weeding or water the tomatoes again.

Blanket flowers and evening primrose and mallow seed heads.

A thirsty garden is never satisfied!

The grapes are coming.

Old Enough.

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Boasting is ugly and blowing your own trumpet is a discordant noise, but I am going to do it any way because I want to share my front garden with you.

When we bought our house 14 years ago the front yard was limestone gravel.

It was big enough to park a couple of cars on and was the drive to the garage. So far, so boring. We soon realised that the previous occupants of the house could only have kept it “weed free” by drenching it in herbicides regularly.

I pulled up the odd dandelion thinking I could keep it “it clean” that way, but plants started to appear and I decided they looked better than the bare stones and so I left them. When walking in stony places I collected seed heads and scattered them randomly .

Each year new plants appeared in this hot sunny spot.

There was wild marjoram.

Wild carrot

St John’s wort

Self seeded lavender

Sedum

Tiny pink saxifrage.

Bright pink silène

Yarrow

And then the butterflies and the bees came.

And the bugs .

Just today I identified this plant as is Iranian wood sage, which has taken me years to identify.! It must have blown in as a seed or been dropped by a bird. It flowers all summer and is covered in bees.

And I was astonished by how much life there could be on a stony drive way, when you just let it be.

I do a little judicious weeding at different times to stop it grassing over and I pull out he odd interloper that seems determined to take over; but apart from that I do very little except cutting some down in the winter.

It amazes me every year with its profusion of life and the real reason I am so proud of it is that it exists because I overcame the curse of tidy.

I am retired and definitely grown up, but it has taken me all this time to escape from worrying what the neighbours will think about “ letting it go”. A “ tidy” garden can be a dead garden and mess can be life!

Flat earth?

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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.)

Butterflies love butterfly bushes!

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!

This is long term planning and the best thing we can do!

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?

Brambles make flowers and fruits!

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 !!

Think tall – look up – use all the space your plot allows and then some!!

Togo achieves ‘major feat’ of eliminating four neglected tropical diseases | Global health | The Guardian

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People are a huge part of the ecosystem in which we live and good news about health is so often smoothered in all the bad news. So here is a fantastic good news story from Africa . Something to really enjoy!

WHO hails west African country as first in world to stamp out Guinea worm, lymphatic filariasis, sleeping sickness and trachoma
— Read on www.theguardian.com/global-development/2022/aug/25/togo-achieves-major-feat-of-eradicating-four-neglected-tropical-diseases

What my garden really thinks of me!

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These gloves were drying out on some gladioli canes and I suddenly thought my garden might be telling me something!

It has been very hot, it has been very dry, it has been watered with bath water and then last night it got shredded by a hail storm!

I think it maybe in a bad mood, but hopefully it won’t last and the water ( once the hail has melted!) will put a smile back on its green face!

On the waiting windowsill

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I was inspired to photograph my window sill today by Flighty at flightplot.Wordpress.com . So here it is : two overwintered geraniums, two small trays of seedlings and an absurd sunflower .

The sunflower found its way from the bird seed in to the vegetable seedling trays and very soon out grew the chilli seedlings that were supposed to be germinating there. I have given it its own pot for fun and have been astonished by how much it has grown. I turn it every day and soon it will be taller than the window frame.

Of course it should be in the garden and that is the tension of this time of year. I want to plant everything out, but it is still cool at night and if I go too early , the seedlings will be stunted or worse still, frosted by the ice saints. Saint Sophia’s feast day is May 15th and it often coincides with a few days of really cold weather in this part of Europe . She is known as Kalt Sophie and can be the last frost of the spring and it isn’t advisable to put anything tender out before this date.

So my window sill is still is groaning under geraniums that have kept me cheerful all winter and flower seedlings ( cosmos) for later on the season and gherkin seedlings for tiny cucumbers harvesting when it is hot .

Two more weeks seems a long time to wait when the sun is shining and my fingers are itching to plant them outdoors. It is such a wonderful time of renewed life . Everything is far from perfect in the world, the news from the Ukraine is appalling and Russia seems to want to start World War Three, so I turn to my laden window sill; to faith in goodness and to the glory of the garden.

Night time

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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!

A World Turned Upside Down.

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New year: old year.

Covid hasn’t gone, but maybe we have changed instead.

Everybody has had their own adaptations to the new reality that nobody wanted, everybody has had their own privations, some small, some fatal. Work, family, school, friends the list goes on and on of the things changed by the pandemic that seems to never end. The things we miss seem endless too, but in a world turned upside down, we have maybe learned to see things differently and not to miss the things we took for granted before.

My cat is perfectly happy upside down on the sofa. He is warm, there will be food, maybe someone will dangle that left over Christmas ribbon close enough for him to play with. He has lost one of his lovely long front teeth, but he doesn’t seem unduly worried by it.

He quite likes the world upside down, he can get used to anything.

Still flowers.

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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.