cat snacks

The garden provides good habitat for breeding birds, both for those that actually nest here and for those that visit to forage.  The tall trees give height for a quick get-away, dense shrubs give cover for nesting and a wide range of herbaceous plants support the wide range of insects hungry chicks need.  This year wren, blackbird, blue and great tits have all nested in the garden and now fledged chicks are making their first forays out and about.  They leave the nest as soon as they can, the whole brood is vulnerable to predation while in the nest, many predators watch foraging parents to discover the whereabouts of the nest, so splitting up and moving about lessens the chance all will be lost.  The individuals are still vulnerable and yet to learn it is a hard world out there. 

Wrens are shy birds and nest low down in dense cover.  This year they have used a log stack, dense ivy on a wall and a 'twiggy bundle' to build in - twiggy bundles are simply bunches of spiny prunings tied with twine to form a hollow ball, these get tucked into dense shrubs and wall climbers in quiet corners to make predator proof nesting sites.  Young wrens are out and about now, concealed in the bushes and calling with high pitched breathy 'wheesps'.  They and the parents forage eagerly for any small insects and get excited when I give a hand by turning the top layer in the compost bins.  They can be in such a rush that they forget I am a danger until a parent frantically reminds them, with sharp calls to 'run!'  

Blackbirds usually raise a number of broods each year in the garden, building nests from twigs, grass, string and mud in concealed places.  Sometimes they make odd choices where to build - last year they built a nest neatly on top of a paint tin in the tool shed - this year they have been thoroughly conventional using a dense bush of ivy to conceal them.  The young have recently fledged and are out and about, so trusting they will happily wait in the garden office for feeding time.  They follow their parents round the garden calling loudly to be fed - and seemingly to be eaten - the local cats must be drooling at the mouth!  

Blue tits feed their young on thousands of small insects and will collect vast quantities of aphids in the foraging frenzy.  This makes them vulnerable to the effects of pesticides and many young birds are poisoned while still in the nest, so we use no pesticides - aphids are soon controlled by everything that eats them - and everything does.   The parents keep their energy levels up with occasional visits to the feeders for a sunflower seed or two and now the Red Hot Pokers are in flower will drink sugary nectar for a quick energy boost.

  

the eyes have it

I think ox-eye daisy are irresistible.  I am not alone in this.  The flowers are constantly busy with any number of small things going about their busy business.  A quick walk round the garden reveals why they are right at the top of my must-have-for-wildlife plant list.   

A mining bee,

and a greenbottle make the most of the open faced flowers.

Harlequin ladybirds, in 'mostly black'

and 'traditional' forms, hunt for aphids on the heads.

Tiny white-faced bees feed from the flowers - males also patrol and unceremoniously mate feeding females, the violation doesn't interrupt their meal. 

When downtrodden or flattened by bags, snails will get to work to graze the open florets.

Ox-eye daisy, Leucanthemum vulgare, a common wildflower, will grow anywhere with good drainage and some sun, are reasonably drought tolerant - they grow here unwatered on broken brick filled gabions - and they flower for a long season.  If they have any faults in a garden it is that they will grow far too lushly on rich soil and collapse messily.  They are better in spartan conditions.  They are short lived and easily succumb to bossy neighbours but they will move around a garden by seeding into any suitable places and here have designs on conquering the paths where there is little competition.  Of course left here the flowers would be crushed underfoot so in early autumn I rip up the plants, tear them to pieces and poke the bits into any spare corners.  They will all take and be flowering by the following summer. Well done them! 

a quick brick trick

has once again been the solution for new seating in the garden.  Last autumn a miscalculation with the paving brick order left us with an enormous stack of bricks unused outside the office and I've been wracking my brains on how to make the best use of these.  The Sunday workers are dab hands at knocking up gabion benches filled with random broken rubble but with whole bricks aplenty I thought we could try something  rather more sophisticated to provide seating to encircle the new south-end lawn.  

I mislay tape measures regularly so usually resort to sticks, my feet or similar to measure up.  The new bench was measured to be exactly one long piece of string in length.  Pauline and Michael, used to my methods and length of string in hand, cut the required pieces - two long sides, two end panels and lots of dividers - from a new roll of steel mesh, making do with a rather dilapidated pair of bolt cutters.  Laid out around the curve of the lawn, side by side and upright, the sides, the end panels and dividers were simply connected with steel spirals  'twizzled' into place.  

This made a long, curved, bottomless, topless box with sections along the whole length.  Lightweight and flexible, it is easy to adjust the position before firmly pressing the bottom edge, 'toothed' with the cut edges of the steel mesh, firmly into the soil beneath.  Full, it will be immovable.  

To make the body of the bench the sections are filled with a double layer of bricks stood on end and jammed in very tightly so there is little room for movement.  It was filled in no time.  To finish off the   cut ends of the spirals will be ground down smooth and it will be complete.  A big brick bench finished in a day - a bit bumpy on the behind maybe but it does look rather elegant.  

I sit and drink tea in a plastic chair by the office so will not be troubled by the bumpiness myself.  Let me know if you are.

the quick and the dead

Again I find myself delighted by the Dragon Arum, Dracunculus vulgaris, and its comedy stinkiness.  Every year without fail the flowers, whopping great funnels of rich velvety purple, fill the garden with a far reaching stench of death, perturbing visitors and making me smile.  The flowers fragrant mimicry is proven effective as the blooms dance with flies drawn excitedly to the promise of a corpse-based feast.  They will be disappointed.  

The flowers only stink to heaven on the first day of opening and this is key to their successful cross pollination.  Inside the flower the female parts are receptive to pollen only as it opens and smells ripest.  As flies enter the bloom they deposit pollen carried on their hairy bodies, fertilising the flower, but they are unable to climb the waxy, slippery walls of the flower to get out.  Trapping the flies overnight until it is no longer receptive to pollen, the flower releases its own, the scent fades and the flower starts to wither - in the morning the hungry flies with a fresh coat of pollen flies are released.  Of course being gluttonous simpletons they rush to the next freshly opened flower only to spend another night trapped by deceit.  Ha!  

Here the flies get busy on a newly opened bloom.
  

  

bee but no bumble

Since the earliest flowers opened at the end of winter there have been bees busily working the flowers in the garden.  Lots of small glossy black bumblebees and lighter coloured, hairier ones and I was stumped as neither  appeared on the bumblebee ID chart.

Watching the black bees feed at the flowers it was obvious what extraordinarily long tongues they had, perfect for the tubular flowers of the early comfrey, and the pollen baskets on their back legs stood out bright orange.  The lighter coloured ones were patrolling territories around patches of flowers, just like Wool Carder bees, but instead of pouncing on intruders aggressively as these do it was clear they were intent on mating with the black intruders - Wool Carders don't appear until June and I was confused.         With these characteristics noted an internet search followed.  

Turns out they are not two species of bumblebees at all but instead are Hairy Footed Flower Bees, Anthophora plumipes.  Aside from their lovely name I discovered they nest in holes in walls and other cavities, constructing cells from particles of soil, prefer deep-throated flowers and defend themselves with their large and hairy middle feet (love that!).  The lighter coloured males do patrol flowers on the look out for willing females but they don't chase off other species - though they will try it on with them.  I read they are easily recognised as not being bumblebees by their colour - there are no black bumblebees, by their flight pattern, quick and full of stops and starts - bumblebees fly slow and steadily, and by the shrillness of their 'buzz' (this last seems rather subjective, for me a buzz is a buzz).  

Here is a male, shrilly buzzing as he feeds on blue comfrey flowers.

They will all be gone soon until next year as they only fly from March to late May, wisely leaving the scene before aggressive Wool Carder males appear eager to club them to death with their spike-pronged tails.  Can't say I blame them.       

everyone wants to know...

what this is.

It is Abutilon vitifolium, in full bloom with a great display of silky violet flowers.  It is a quick growing, drought tolerant shrub, this plant has grown to 2m in two years, for full sun and well drained soil and opens the first of its crop of  flowers in mid spring, continuing for at least a couple of months.  

 

I can't remember which form we have - the label is somewhere - but all are good.  Their is a lovely white form called 'Veronica Tennant' that is widely available but I do prefer the darker shades.  I read they are not the hardiest of shrubs but I know of one growing in a cold Yorkshire garden in badly drained clay so they can't be that tender.  They are not long lived but are easy to root from cuttings and easy from seed. The only problem with them is that the wood is very soft and they are easily broken by strong winds in exposed situations - or by being planted too close to railings.  

This poor misshapen fellow flowering cheerfully at the North end has been repeatedly ripped to pieces by drug-rooters needing a rooting stick so has never really had a chance to get going.  Blighters! 

under lions and unicorns

St Georges Church, Bloomsbury, has a spire draped with a lion and a golden horned unicorn.  Luckily this attracts the attention upwards so it was easy to miss the sad state the hard winter had left the planters in (if you were a passer-by).  For Nicolette, working in the office, it was all too obvious and she got in touch to see if we could help.   

Last year the church had new planters installed and these were filled with a range of summer flowering perennials edged with small box plants.  The box plants had established well but the perennials had proved not to be and a fine crop of Sticky Willy and nettles had taken their place, their seeds lying in wait in the topsoil used to fill the planters.  Nicolette informed me that most of the previous plants had been brightly coloured sun-worshippers such as gaillardias, so it isn't surprising that the  combination of a cold winter, a shady position and claggy topsoil had done for them.  It only gets an hour or so of sun here and is open to the public, suffering from the usual West End silliness, so the replacement planting was chosen to be tough, reliable in shade and give a quick bit of colour for the summer ahead.

The Clean Sweep Group usually works in the garden on Wednesdays but with the garden still full well after lunch ("ain't you got jobs to go to?!") it made sense for us to work off site at the church.  Doug and Zoe first cleared out the weeds, roots and all, and gave the soil a good trowelling to loosen it.  The large concrete trough holding a large clump of crocosmias, these rapidly increase and starve themselves into non-flowering, was weeded, dug over and most of the crocosmia were removed.  The box hedge was given a trim to tidy it and encourage it to thicken - it will - box is tough.  A dead rose was removed and then the new plants went in.

The rose was replaced with a Winter Box, Sarcoccocca, an evergreen shrub with great winter fragrance.

The perennial plants chosen for the containers were; 

Geranium macrorrhizum - scented leaves, pink flowers, 

Anemone hupuhensis Praecox - good foliage, pink flowers, 

Euphorbia robbiae - evergreen leaves, green flowers, 

Phalaris arundinacea Feesey - bright white variegated grass, 

Stipa arundinacea - clumping grass, orange in winter,

and to give colour this summer fuschias and busy lizzies were inter-planted - these both do better in bright shade than in sun and will keep going to the frosts of autumn.  A few Mirablis roots were tucked in, these prefer sun but should manage to give something even here - but only after four o'clock.

In the concrete planter the crocosmias still dominate their end but the new additions are all vigorous and will soon claim their spaces.  With a feed the crocosmias should return to flowering but if not the foliage will still contribute and contrast well with the euphorbia's glossy rosettes, the geranium's cut leaves, the big 'hands' of the anemone and the bright white striped elegance of the phalaris.

It looks a bit sparse at the moment and the plants have that shocked look of the newly planted but given a big cheer they will soon pick themselves up, fill out and brighten this corner.  So if you are passing...