February 21st

 As far as I can work out from books the ideal time to get some of the growth out of the pond is before things start coming to life - certainly before any frogspawn is laid - and after the water is too cold to bear. So today was the day. Storm Franklin was not affecting Edinburgh and it was pleasantly sunny. So the pond that looked like this

was made to look like this.

One very considerable advantage of a small pond is that I can reach all of it, and the whole job -dredging out excessive growth, cutting back dead stems and trimming the grass round the edge - took less than an hour. I hope the plants that flowered last year reappear this; and I like to have some open water so that I can look into the depths and see any pond-life that may be swimming about.

To my surprise today a pond skater emerged. It seems very early in the year. This one skated across from one dark recess under the bank to another. There was also some minute creature, smaller than a pin-head, jumping on the surface. I have not yet managed to identify it. 

It is important that the plants pulled out are left where any mini-beasts that live in them can make their way back to the water. My shallow end makes that easy.

You can see that I have left the dead stems of the tall purple loosestrife for the moment. I do not know if anything likes to overwinter in them - it is certainly possible - but I think they are very attractive. And all the time I worked, a blackbird was singing and singing, declaring that these gardens are his territory.

Later that night I dug out a book which should belong to all amateur pond owners like me:

You may guess from the price that I have had it a long time. From it I learn about pond-skaters: "The adults are long-lived and many species are capable of surviving through the winter by hibernating". I hope the one I woke up can get back to sleep again. 

And then I found that the jumping pin-head was indeed a springtail: "A few species are found on water, where they occur all the year round". I ought really to check these books before posting the blog - but I guess this slovenliness fits with my main point that wildlife gardening is for everyone, not just for dedicated naturalists. 

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Four Habitats

 This is the last blog-post about the general set-up of the wildlife areas in the garden. After this they will, I hope, chronicle developments as they happen from early spring onwards. But there are a few more things to point out that show how one can practise wildlife gardening in a small space, if that is all you have available.

The Wildflower Meadow

This looks like a patch of rough grass, allowed to get out of hand. Three years ago I lifted the turf from a one metre wide strip of lawn. I guess it is about two and a half metres long. On the bare soil I sowed it with "Urban Pollinator Mix" from Scotia Seeds. It has been rather overcrowded with Ox-eye daisies, and some of the plants enticingly on the label have not appeared so far. But is only a very limited site, and there are about half a dozen flowering plants. I hope I can show you them later in the year..

The water feature (we call it the ditch) is just using up the left-over pond liner. You may remember that I bought far too much. No special effort has been made to get native plants for it, and some of the pretty ones I bought seem to have died. But the two together - meadow and ditch - turned out last summer to be just what the baby frogs wanted. They could hide in the long grass or under the flagstones, and occasionally leap into the water if frightened. You will notice that the left hand end of the ditch has been made so that it is easy to climb out, a very important consideration. I did put some oxygenating weed and some pond snails in the water.

The Cornfield Annuals

This looks as unprepossessing a bit of mud as you could wish to find in a garden. But in late summer, I hope it will be blaze of colour and humming with pollinating insects. Every Eastertide at our church we give out a teaspoonful of seed of wildflower annuals, roughly enough for a square metre.  (Scotia Seeds again; there is a lot to be said for getting fairly local plants if possible, and this garden is in Scotland.) We find that they self seed vigorously, so this area hardly needs new sowing. But they work well in pots too. This is what they looked like last summer.

The main work is weeding out those other self seeded plants which one happens not to want. There's no rule about this, of course.

Ivy

It is agreed by all the books that ivy is an outstanding plant for wildlife. I know this is true from my previous garden. Quite apart from invertebrates, birds eat the berries and find shelter, if not nests, in the foliage. It can also be a menace if it grows rampant and unchecked. Here I have, as you see, planted a couple of cuttings from a local park. But the main point of the trellis is so that every tendril that strays outside it shall be ruthlessly cut off. We shall see if this works.

The Almost Hedge

One of the things I liked most in our old garden was the wild hedge. (It was not, in fact, a boundary.) About ten metres long, and with seven or eight varieties of native trees, some bought (hawthorn), some grown from seed collected by the wayside (guelder rose, oak and beech) and some just turned up (ash and elder and hazel).You can see in the photo what I have here. There is a discrete pile of logs, with some magnificent moss. Because we decided against a compost heap - a matter of space, and we do  buy bags of compost made from our Garden Rubbish collection - I made a little cylinder of chicken wire and fill it with leaves, twigs, rotten apples and so on. The shrubs on either side are not "wild", but the birds who perch on them don't seem to mind. The bramble just turned up, and is not allowed to wander far.

Those of you who have read this blog from the beginning with know that this series of posts was inspired by one sentence from Colin Stafford-Johnson in his "Wild Gardener" programmes on BBC2: "Anyone who's got a little bit of land can make the land better for nature." I hope these introductory posts have seen that even without much space, and a good deal of that given over to lawns, "exotic" shrubs and so so, you can still try to make it better for nature. If you never use pesticides and herbicides, and provide a bit of water, you are unlikely to go far wrong.