Accidental Gardening.

There are many uninvited visitors to my garden. Most of them are welcome; only a few are not.
I like to let things happen, to create an environment and stand back and watch.

These primroses crept in quietly last year; just a couple of tentative leaves in a sunny spot at the foot of a bamboo clump. A year later and they have really got their roots down and claimed their territory. By next year I hope their offspring will be settling in.
There are no other primroses anywhere near, so how did they arrive?

The opportunism and tenacity of many plants fills me with admiration. Some travel around the garden, from one side to another, from top to bottom, without any help at all from me. They grow in places that the gardening books tell me are wrong for them - too dry, too wet, wrong soil. No one told the plants, and they don't seem to mind one bit.

This happy combination of violets and cyclamen has tucked itself into the gravel beside the back doorstep. These violets (viola Labradorica) have a reputation for clumping, but have instead arranged themselves into scattered groupings with cyclamen hederifolium, which in turn have travelled around the garden, appearing in all sorts of unexpected places.




I couldn't have done better myself. Indeed, if I had tried to transplant and arrange them they would probably have died on me.

I admire the rampant sexualtity of geraniums (the perennials, not those half-hardy bright red pelargoniums at their best in public parks). They have wonderful mechanisms like medieval sling-shots, which catapult the seeds across the garden, making sure they reproduce themselves a hundred-fold. They are understandable, but I cannot understand how Solomon's Seal (polygonatum multiflorum) travelled from the back garden to the front, and having settled at the front, also moved across the garden from side to side. I'm delighted. I love the plant, but it comes in a big pot from the garden centre. It's a big plant. How does it saunter about like this?

Last year a wild orchid appeared in a patch of decorative grasses. An orchid! I don't know if it has survived the harsh winter, but I'm hoping. I'm hoping there may even be more than one.

We constructed a pond many years ago and watched as within a matter of days there were pond-skaters all over the surface. Within two months there were frogs, damsel flies, dragonflies, and a grass snake, and within three months the heron had found it.

Clever, opportunistic wild creatures as well as plants, watching our activities, biding their time, staking out their claims, and creating the sort of garden I could never make by myself.

Squirrel

This squirrel was sabotaging a squirrel-proof feeder in my garden.
He or she and his/her friends and family had previously trashed four squirrel-proof feeders. Look at the smile on its little face! They know they can win, every time.
I had not realised that squirrels smile until I saw this photograph, taken last year by my nephew, 'pohanginapete' on one of his all-too-rare visits to England.

The smile on the face of the squirrel raises some interesting thoughts.

My husband and I spent several years creating a wild-life garden. We entered a competition run by a national newspaper to find 'The Wildlife Garden of the Year'. We were glad we didn't win, because the first prize was £1,000 worth of plants, and our garden was already full of them (as were all the other competing wildlife gardens, I'm sure).

What the competition required us to do was to keep a detailed record of all the forms of wildlife visiting our small suburban garden for a twelve month period. This was the really valuable part of the exercise. We were amazed and gratified by the results.

The bird-life was richer and more varied that we had realised, the insects were wonderful. We had a grass-snake zig-zagging across the pond, hedgehogs mating with the most indiscreet noise and fuss beside the dustbins, and badgers at the bottom of the garden.
It was idyllic.

Then we had other things, as the word spread among the wild-life, and the food-chain extended upwards.

For several years we had free-range bantams trotting around; dear little characterful creatures. The buzzards found out about them, as did the foxes.

The birds flung their food around, and the rats moved in. The squirrels wrecked the feeders. Rabbits ate the new shoots in the herbaceous beds. A heron systematically emptied the pond of fish. Crows and jackdaws raided the bird-table in yelling hoards, driving smaller birds away. A sparrow hawk swept in regularly, picking its appropriately named sparrow snack from the bird-table without pausing in its flight.
There are infrequent but well-documented sightings of Big Cats in the area.

Where does a wild-life garden end? Should it ever contain squirrel-proof feeders, rat-traps, anti-heron netting, sonic devices to keep moles out of the lawn and bird-feeders that allow some to feed, but exclude others ?

When you invite wild-life in to your patch, encourage it, feed it, provide it with nesting boxes and little houses and nesting materials - can you then say, 'I'll have you, and you, but not you'?

The smile on the face of the squirrel is similar to that on the face of 'pohanginapete' as he studiously photographed the rats and the squirrels, rather than the honeysuckle, in which direction I was pointing him. We took him up on the hills. Did he photograph the panoramic views? No. He lay face down, lens trained on a particularly succulent orange and grey slug. What a lesson in total acceptance of the wholeness, the fragile interdependence of wildlife!

Beauty, appreciation and understanding is in the eye of the beholder. Squirrels continue to smile. They are safe in the garden (they have their own special feeder now, but still prefer bird-food) as are the herons and crows. The Big Cats are waiting in the wings.