Following is a selection of wildlife gardening articles that I wrote in 2007 and 2008 while living in West Cork. They were all first published in the then West Cork Advertiser magazine. For anybody wanting to add wildlife interest to their garden, they may offer useful tips and suggestions.
January in the Wildlife Garden
The Hazel catkins are one of the few signs of life in the wildlife garden this early in the year. The long male catkins, or lambs-tails are the obvious flowers of the hazel. Despite being more colourful, the small size of the female flowers makes them less conspicuous. They are not dissimilar to the sea anemone found in the rock pools along our coast insofar as the flower looks like a small bundle of red tentacles. As a breeze carries pollen from the male catkins these ‘tentacles’ of the female flower catch some of the grains and fertilisation occurs. It will be the following autumn before the seed ripens as the hazelnut, but the process of another year has begun.
Cob-nuts, the cultivated Hazels, can be grown for their nuts here. In addition to the various insects and small mammals that feed on the pollen and nuts respectively, it is very satisfying to get some return of food from the wildlife garden for the kitchen. Choose you Cub-nut variety carefully to find the most suitable one for your garden conditions.
Keep putting food out on the bird table. Now more then ever, the birds that have come to depend on a regular supply will be relying on you. A bird seed cake can be made by melting some fat with nuts, seeds and dried fruit. Turn the mixture into a half a coconut shell or leave to set in a plastic carton and then remove and hand from the bird table or a tree. Finally, if you have a pond, keep the surface ice free in at least a small area for birds to drink from (if we get frost at all this year!). A small block of wood can be floated in the water and removed on frosty mornings to free up a small drinking hole without breaking all the ice.
February in the Wildlife Garden
The odd warm sunny day at this time of year will sometimes push aside the cold for long enough to bring out some early wildlife. Butterflies may be drawn out of hibernation by the weak warmth to look for food for a day. Robins, thrushes and blackbirds will be more active now as they begin to look for mates, and so starts the dawn chorus. Keep the bird table well stocked.
If foxes or badgers visit your wildlife garden, they may be seen around now as they too look for mates. As well as the stirrings of birds and mammals, frogs will be waking from hibernation around now if the weather is mild enough. These friendly predators of slugs and snails are always welcome inhabitants in any wildlife garden.
In the spring flowering lawn early crocuses, celandines and snowdrops will be flowering. Insects roused by any early warmth will be glad of the food these early flowers offer them. The dark bluebell leaves are up early this year, in anticipation of a carpet of blue beneath the trees.
Our native clematis (C. vitalba), Old Man’s Beard, can be easily identified by its long downy seed-head. Travellers Joy, as it is also known, is a common plant in the south part of Ireland, but rarer further north. It will climb up through trees or ditches, looking for all the world like a patchy fleece of wool draped over the bare branches of winter.
Another enthusiastic climber of the wild garden, and almost everywhere else that there is a tree, telegraph pole, or wall to support it, is ivy. At this time of year the dark ivy berries are a welcome source of food for birds. Caterpillars hatching early will value the new spring shoots, preparing for their butterfly lives later in the year.
This is the time of year for pruning, should your garden be getting a bit crowded. Wildlife friendly buddleia, dog rose, cotoneaster and others woody shrubs may benefit from being trained or restrained as meets the need of the garden. Knapweed, yarrow and goldenrod are some of the wild-garden perennials that can be divided now to colour up another part of the garden or to prevent overcrowding. Don’t over do the trimming of old flower heads, remember to leave stems for over-wintering insects, or at least remove them to a quite corner of the garden rather then burning them. All the better for plentiful wildlife later in the season.
March in the Wildlife Garden
Yellow is the dominant March colour. Daffodils are like the spring flag in the garden. Early bees and butterflies drink the nectar of primroses and lesser celandine, gorse and daisies. The more native flowers you can grow in your wildlife garden the more these insects will thrive. The insects in turn provide food for breeding birds, which are active now, searching tirelessly for food for their nestlings.
Breeding frogs can be found at this time of year in ponds and pools around the county. Frogspawn and early tadpoles can be seen wherever conditions are right. Although the common frog is relatively abundant in Ireland they are internationally important, listed in the Irish Red Data Book of protected species.
A small frog pond is an excellent way to attract all sorts of wildlife to the garden. As always with open water, it must be in an area where there will never be unsupervised small children. In addition to the construction advice given in any good gardening book, there are a number of things to remember for making the habitat attractive for frogs. A muddy base and lots of water-plants are necessary to ensure an availability of food for the tadpoles. The pond must also be free of fish, which would otherwise eat them. As a final measure, put stones or bricks breaking the water at the edge of the pool or have shallow sloping sides to provide young frogs with a way to climb out of the pool to rest.
If you pond is close to your vegetable plot the frogs will feast on slugs and snails. However, be sure not to use slug pellets if you have frogs. All herbicides and pesticides should be kept well out of the wildlife garden, because they disrupt the natural predator/prey relationships, killing beneficial insects, like ladybirds, as well as the pests. Poisoning the pest species also causes harm to the birds, frogs and other animals higher up the food-chain.
March is a time for seed planting, so while the vegetable seeds are being set for the kitchen garden, sow some wildflower seeds in pots for transplanting to the wildlife garden. Be sure to buy only Irish sourced seed for native species, so that the flowers open and the seeds ripen in harmony with the times of insect and bird activity.
Another good wildlife plant to sow as seed now is Nasturtium. These are not native, but have good nectar-rich flowers for bees and other insects. Children love to grow these because the seeds are big enough to handle easily; they grow quickly; and have good bright orange and yellow flowers in the summer. To harvest healthy “greens” from the wildflower garden, the children can then pick the peppery flavoured nasturtium flowers for adding to colourful salads. Then they can save the wrinkly bean-sized seeds themselves in the autumn and continue the cycle next year!
April in the Wildlife Garden
April is renowned for its showers, but it is the sunshine between them that lifts this month out of wintry March squalls. Woodland walks beckon. Bluebells are in full bloom, so stop off wherever they are beset and bluest locally to enjoy them. Keep an ear out for an early cuckoo as you walk. Never was the arrival of such an antisocial being greeted with such enthusiasm. Their distinctive call is a real sound of coming summer.
In the wildflower lawn watch for grape hyacinths, cowslips and the chequerboard bloom of snakes-head fritillary. Different species like different soils, so read up to see what would suit your garden before planting. I prefer to keep bluebells in their own patch in a shady corner of the garden. Otherwise their dense leaves overshadow the more subtle species in the spring flowering lawn. Keep the mower at bay until the last bulb leaves have died away in June. If you have native wild garlic (Ramsons, Allium ursinum) in your spring lawn the green leaves make a perky addition to salads and soups. Be sure you aren’t just picking the cultivated white bluebell though – the wide ramson leaves will smell richly of garlic when crushed.
Still on the subject of food; nettles are a must-have ingredient in any wildlife garden. ‘Must have’ doesn’t necessarily mean with the gardeners consent. Nettles are valuable food for red admiral caterpillars and are also the plant of choice for Peacock and small tortoiseshell butterflies to lay their eggs on. Greenfly feed on the sap and are in turn eaten by ladybirds and their larvae. It is in April that nettles are first really ready for soup. Pick the fresh young leaves with rubber gloves or snip them into a large bowl with a scissors. Add washed leaves to an equal weight of onions sweated in olive oil. Melt down for a minute and add good quality chicken stock or a rich herb stock. Boil gently for only two or three minutes and liquidise. Stir in some milk and season to taste. Garnish with chopped ramsons!
‘Plants for a Future’ author Ken Fern calls nettles “one of the most undervalued of economic plants.” He lists a wide variety of uses including food, fertiliser, fibres, medicinal and wildlife values. Among the thirty or so insects that feed on it is an aphid that is specific to nettles, which is active early in the year. This gets the aphid predators off to a good start in the garden. Later they will work on greenfly patrol on your other plants. I make a liquid fertiliser of nettle roots and stems steeped in a barrel of water. The resulting contents, if somewhat pungent, make an excellent plant food, diluted to the colour of weak tea before use. This also serves the valuable function of killing the nettle roots removed from those parts of the garden where they are less welcome. While the bright orange roots and purple shoots look striking against rich black composted, they are a tad tenacious for adding to the vegetable beds.
So spare a thought and some space for nettles and their wildlife this April; and feast on nettle soup!
May in the Wildlife Garden
Wild Cherry, ramson flowers and hawthorn blossom provide the white palate for this month’s colour scheme. Hawthorn or “May” blossom even takes its name from the month. The young hawthorn leaves have the common name bread-and-cheese in some areas because they were “traditionally eaten by children on their way to school” according to Roger Philips’ book, Wild Food. By the time the May blossom is out, the leaves have got a bit tough, so they are better picked in April when they still have a nutty flavour. Later in the year the berries can be harvested for making wines and jellies. For this month let us just enjoy the blossom and the summer that it heralds.
This year, however, the May blossom is well behind the weather. All my predictions for April showers were based on centuries of tradition and observations of the weather. All for nothing it seems, up until the end of the month anyway, when the showers eventually began. We had a straight four or five weeks with not a drop of rain; quite out of character. It shouldn’t be particularly surprising though. This was the first year that Norway got no snow for New Years Day in living memory. The last decade or two have seen the hottest, coldest, wettest, driest, windiest and generally most out of character weather since records began. We may be enjoying the early summer here, as well we might after the wet autumn that went before it, but it is a sure sign of climate change.
“If this is what climate change is, bring it on” I have heard people say. Yet melting glaciers and ice caps are already causing problems for wildlife. I grew up living on the coast, and in a not-so-very-long lifetime have seen changes to the sea level there during spring tides. This sea level rise is set to continue, apparently to the point where most major cities will be totally or partially flooded.
One measure that we took to reduce our carbon footprint was to use solar panels and a wood burning stove for hot water and space heating. A benefit of the warm clear weather has been an abundance of hot water without having to light the fire. Compact Fluorescent Lights, bio-diesel, good insulation and double glazing are all ways to minimise our carbon footprint. As fuel prices rise, it is getting easier for people to make these changes. But one difficulty is that the people who produce the most carbon dioxide, namely us in the northern hemisphere, are the ones to suffer least from the changes. A hot dry spell is a boon for us, whereas for farmers in Africa and Asia it can mean a complete failure of crops. We may have to retreat a bit from a rising sea, but Bangladesh is likely to be completely erased from the map.
So what has this to do with the wildlife garden? Changing seasons pose problems for wildlife too. As flowers and seeds ripen at earlier times, the insects and birds that rely on them miss the glut of food they need to thrive. So this month the only task for the wildlife garden is to minimise your carbon footprint.
June in the Wildlife Garden
Having waxed lyrical on the beneficial uses of nettles in the spring wildlife garden, June seems to be the month for pulling them up. I have been out with gloves and long sleeves before they go to seed everywhere. Nettles are great. I wouldn’t be without them (if I wanted to, I couldn’t be without them!). But not in the vegetable beds, the raspberry patch, the children’s lawn, and in great abundance throughout the Jerusalem artichoke bed. The theory goes that if you wait until they have flowered and then cut them back hard for a couple of seasons, the energy goes out of the roots and they die. Maybe my lack of faith is hampering my chances of success, but at least if I pull them up with a bit of root to boot, then they will not spread far from their strongholds.
Two immediate benefits of nettling are that there are a few early raspberries from last year’s un-cut canes to nibble on the job, and there will be nettle tea for feeding the tomatoes. A week or so steeping in a barrel of water will make the fertiliser and an extended soak will kill off the roots.
The colour palate for the painter gardener this month is pink/purple. Columbine, foxgloves and dead nettle stand tall in borders of the spring flowering lawn. Lower down, French cranesbill and herb Robert mix native and naturalised Geranium species in the un-mown grass. Pink swathes are also on show around the county in wet grasslands and marshes with the blooming of ragged robin. By the coast, the theme is continued with the bright clumps of sea pink or thrift.
In the fruit and vegetable gardens, wildlife also abounds at this time of the year. Swallows have helped themselves to soil to make their mud nests, and are now vacuuming up flies and insects by the dozen. Blackbirds and thrushes are very much in evidence gathering food for nestlings. Of course, their quarry is less welcome. Slugs and snails are doing their thing with remarkable efficiency and have enthusiastically decimated ninety percent of my lettuces. Not wanting to harm the birds, frogs or hedgehogs with slug pellets, I have been experimenting with more wildlife friendly methods of protecting tender crops.
Towards the end of June it will be time to cut back the spring flowering “meadow”. Until now the leaves of bluebells, primroses and other spring flowers have been soaking up sunshine in anticipation of thick leaf cover in the trees overhead as summer progresses. At the month’s end, these flowers will have seeded and begun to die back, so the grass can be cut back and reclaimed as part of the lawn for the rest of the summer. Make the initial cut with a mower at a high setting or with a scythe. Leave the mowings for a few days to allow seeds and insects to make their way to the soil beneath. The clippings can be added in small amounts to the compost heap or used as mulch around young trees or shrubs to suppress grass and weeds and to conserve water in the coming summer. Leave the summer-flowering meadow alone until later in the season and enjoy the long grasses and meadow flowers in the growing summer heat.
July in the Wildlife Garden
July is a month for heady scented flowers and for butterflies. The buddleia is on full show this month. Its long drooping flowers have hundreds of tiny florets, each one providing a nectar drink for long-tongued insects. Butterflies love it. There are many different types of buddleia species and cultivars, but the most common is the purple Buddleia davidii. This is the species that pops up like a beautiful weed of waste-ground and is famous for colonising the bombed out parts of London during World War II. B davidii itself has many cultivars, ranging in colour from white to deep violet, taking in pinks, blues and purples along the way.
In the wildlife garden Buddleia comes into its own. It is described as an untidy bush, being somewhat unruly and enthusiastic. However I have never had a garden formal and carefully tended enough to find it out of place in the slightest. There are several criteria by which I grade plants in the garden: Usefulness, beauty, wildlife value and ease of propagation and cultivation. Buddleia satisfies all of these. Whenever its twigs are used as seedling markers in the vegetable beds (a somewhat poor description of the Usefulness category), they often take root and grow quite happily until I get around to transplanting them. As for wildlife – why else would it claim the nickname Butterfly Bush?
Look out for a whole host of butterfly species on your Buddleia. The Small Tortoise-shell is red/orange with black marks and distinctive blue spots at the edges of the wings. The Painted Lady is somewhat plainer, despite the name. Slightly larger than the Small Tortoise-shell, it has similar orangey shading with black markings, but lacks the blue border. The Red Admiral is larger and coloured dark brown, almost black, with clear, clean bright red and white markings. The Peacock butterfly has red wings with striking coloured eye-spots in blues, yellows and reds.
Whites come to the buddleia bush too, finding nectar to drink before bobbing off to lay their eggs on your prize cabbages. Their greeny yellow and black caterpillars are all too familiar with Brassica gardeners. The Large White even carries the name Pieris brassicae. This brings us neatly to the subject of “things to do” in July.
If you have brassicas, now is the month to pick off those caterpillars. It may seem contradictory to love the butterflies and loathe the larval stage, but there you go. Watering new trees and bushes is an essential task of the month too, if we are lucky enough to get the weather to necessitate it. Later in the month, mow the summer flowering meadow – Scythe to about four inches height after the flowers have seeded. Leave the hay for a day or so before removing, to let seeds and insects make their way down to the soil.
Other than that, sit back and just enjoy the produce in the vegetable garden and watch the fruit ripening and filling out on the trees and bushes. This is the month where the wildlife will take care of itself, and you can enjoy eating the fruits of your labours too.
August in the Wildlife Garden
August is the height of the summer. Enjoy these last few weeks of full bloom and full green because as the season moves forward a chill enters the air and the leaves will start to turn. In the roadsides the bright poisonous red berries of Lords and Ladies are on full show, glinting underneath the shaded canopy of their preferred woodland habitat. Ragwort too is in flower, glowing gold in any fields or waysides where it is allowed to thrive. This poisonous plant is a danger to horses if it becomes harvested within a hay meadow for feed. However it is the favourite food of the cinnabar moth caterpillar. This distinctive black and yellow striped caterpillar is almost a perfect match for the striped dark and yellow shapes made by the petals of the ragwort’s daisy-like flowers on the dark background of leaves and shadows.
Remaining with poisonous plants, Ken Fern’s fascinating book, Plants for a Future, says of Yew: “all parts of this plant, except the fully ripe fruit, are highly poisonous…” He describes the fruit as sweet and very tasty, as long as you spit out the seed, which is poisonous. To tell the truth, I have not had the courage (or perhaps foolhardiness) to taste it without the company of an experienced, alive and healthy Yew fruit chewer. Actually, that is a contradiction in terms, because the seed, if accidentally swallowed will apparently pass through you undigested, whereas chewing it will release the toxins. As with all wild foods, particularly potentially poisonous ones like mushrooms and yew fruit, only eat them if you are absolutely sure you have the right species and if you are completely certain of your references and trust the person showing you what’s what, literally with your life. A guide book (or newspaper article) and enthusiasm are not enough to stake your longevity on!
On to more a benign menu, the vegetable garden should be in full yield at this time of year. Holidays often interrupt the watering of the veg patch in summer but this year watering has not really been a challenge. Our newly installed rainwater harvesting system for watering the garden has been sitting full and quite idle for most of the summer. It got a drain down in April and has remained almost unneeded since then. When the main crops of veg are picked, consider leaving some plants in the ground to grow on for seed. Peas and beans are the very easiest to save for next year. Just leave the pods ripen until they are brown and papery before harvesting. Then dry the podded seeds on a sunny window sill until they are bone dry. These will keep for a few years in a sealed plastic bag, but are best planted in the next growing season. Parsley, chard, lettuce and radish are all fairly easy plants to save seed from, as long as you are not growing sterile F1-hybrids. For tips and pointers, and of course a supply of plant varieties that will produce viable seed as well as good vegetables, contact the Irish Seed Savers Association in Co. Clare. Not only will you enjoy the produce for years to come, but the garden wildlife will enjoy the work and rewards of pollination.
September in the Wildlife Garden
September is the month of bounty. This is the most productive month in the wild areas of the wildlife garden: with ripening food for insects, birds, animals and people. The ditches and hedges are weighed down with ripe fruit. Look out for blackberries, haw berries, damsons, sloes and rose-hips. If you can beat the rush and get some of this abundance before the birds, you can have tarts, jams, jellies and frozen fruit for the winter.
Of course, while the wild areas of the wildlife garden are overflowing with abundance, this does not lessen the contribution of the vegetable patch, the soft fruit garden and the orchard. Apples are beginning to come on stream now, along with autumn fruiting raspberries. These both make a delicious breakfast muesli, mixed in equal parts mashed raspberries or grated apple and rolled oats soaked overnight. Add a little honey to taste (and some cream if you are in it for the flavour rather than the health benefits!) If you use Irish organic oats you keep your food-miles good and low. Keeping your carbon footprint small has never been quite so tasty.
Food miles and carbon footprints brings us somewhat out of the wildlife garden itself and on to the wider environmental picture. With the aim of highlighting and promoting environmental change, many groups around the country have started to examine and implement ways to maximise our sustainability. In West Cork there are quite a number of local groups, each devoted to promoting greater sustainability through local projects. Sustain West Cork is the most westerly of these, in Bantry. Then Sustainable Clonakilty, The Bandon Sustainability Project and Transition Town Kinsale are all closer together in the east of the region.
The most recent meeting of the Bandon Sustainability Project was very much in keeping with the season and looked at Fruit – Cuttings to Jam. The talk, by Donal O’Riordan, looked particularly at how to have some fruit from your own garden (or the roadside) throughout the whole year. Starting with forced rhubarb in March and April, Strawberries in May and then on through the whole season to apple picking in September and October. Carefully stored, Donal explained how the apples should last through to the following March, closing the circle of the year. Jam making is another method of storing the fruit, so recipes and ideas bounced back and forth within the group. Tastings of Donal’s home-made jams followed, to close the meeting on a high note. So if you have not already done so, get out and busy – picking, tarting and jamming!
Elsewhere in the wildlife garden, the wildflower lawn needs a trim back around now. Once the seeds are ripe on the knapweed, trefoils and other plants, it is time to scythe back the lot. Leave the cut grass for a few days to let the seeds fall to the earth and the insects to climb down into the stubble. After that it is important to gather up all the trimmings to stop them from rotting back into the ground, enriching the soil too much. Because the seeds are ripe around now, it is also a good time to prepare a wildflower lawn. If you find yourself mowing an unnecessarily large area, designate a good swathe to wildflowers, and look forward to a more restful mowing regime next summer. Whether you start by seeding the area or introducing plants, be sure to use Irish sourced stock only. Good seed suppliers should have instructions on their websites to help you along the way (try www.wildflowers.ie as a first port of call).
Winter in the Wildlife Garden
The first frosts of winter have hit as a comforting reminder that global warming may be possible to overcome after all. The crisp cold weather has brought out robins, black birds and tits to the bird table, all searching for some treats to supplement their diet. With most of the vegetables up at this stage, and only stored apples and preserved fruit to remind us of summer, now is a time for reflection and planning.
If you are new to gardening, now is an ideal time to make your plans for the coming year – and beyond. For new gardens, observe carefully before putting spade to soil, and see what you have before jumping in. There are lots of things to watch for, but sun, frost, wind and water sum up the most important variables in any garden.
Watch where the sun falls throughout the day, and throughout the year. See what parts of the garden hold the sun’s heat, even at this time of year, to help keep the plants green and perky through the winter. These areas may be good sites for your vegetable patch, to catch every bit of light that is going for growing winter veg for the kitchen table.
Watch for the frost pockets and for the dark patches. Some parts of the garden just won’t see the sun at this time of year at all. These areas may be better suited to crops that really do their main work in summer. Fruit bushes or fruit trees for example will need sunshine and warmth during their growing and fruiting season, but not necessarily all year round. For areas in year-round shade see if the compost heap or rainharvesting tanks would fit there. That way you get to use these less productive parts of the garden for essential, but not sun-needy, services.
Take a stroll around most gardens in the height of summer with a spade for company, and the soil will most probably be light and airy. However, to really see where the boggy patches start and puddly parts get really wet, now is a perfect time for investigating. These wet areas are the bane of any gardeners looking for perfect text-book soil conditions. However they provide ample scope for interest and wildlife if you look at them with opportunity in mind rather than obstacle. If it’s wet, make it wetter. What better yield of flowers and vegetables in a damp part of the garden than a stand of magnificent wild yellow Irises and a crop of watercress?
Wind and shelter will also be important factors to consider in any garden plan. Tender peaches will not thrive, for example, on an exposed promontory, whereas you may be lucky in the odd season if you site them against a south garden wall. So, note your conditions well. Ideally make your notes for every month of the year, to see what is likely to work where. With observations in your back pocket, you are in a position to go to the library and take out all their books on organic gardening, wildlife gardening and permaculture. Happy planning.