Saturday 31st May, 2014
Last Monday morning I watched the great tit parents flying to and fro - frantically delivering small caterpillars to their brood in the nest box. Then I settled down at the far end of the living room to write about the week's events in the garden for the blog.
After finishing the post and clicking on "publish", I went to the window to check on them again and all the frenzied feeding had ceased. The birds had all gone. It was rather ironic that I was busy writing about how I hoped to see the babies launch themselves into the big wide world - at the exact time that they were busy leaving. It was disappointing to miss the excitement yet again, but I am glad that we no longer have to worry about predatory cats.
Tim took the box down and removed the old nest. He will clean it and put it up again at the end of autumn. Sometimes the small birds use nest boxes for shelter during the cold winter nights. I took a photo of the discarded bedding . . .
. . . and then left the nest outside the kitchen under the bird feeder. I didn't want to bring it into the house. Years ago Tim brought in some old nest boxes which needed to be repaired and we found they were infested with fleas.
Later we drove out to the Balladoole civic amenity site with garden refuse for recycling. The "green waste" is taken away and turned into compost - so I don't have to feel guilty about being too lazy to make my own compost. I was amused when we got home and I saw a little blue tit doing her own recycling. She was pulling carefully selected bits out of the old nest and flew off with her beak full of building supplies. It seems rather late for her to be starting on nest building. I wonder whether she is planning to have a second brood.
On damp mornings I have been wandering around the garden with a pair of sharp scissors hunting massive slugs. It is rather pointless because there must be another hundred lurking in the undergrowth for every one that I murder - but I am still in a bad mood about the red hot poker buds that are being destroyed before the flowers even have a chance to open. I admit that I am a hypocrite. I should treat all fauna with equal respect - not favour the cute furry and feathery things - but I will never be able to force myself to love slugs. I don't like to use poisons so I am following the advice (or rather the orders) of the Queen of Hearts and wandering around muttering "Off with their heads!"
While I was checking that quote I came across a couple of other amusing quotes from Lewis Carroll which are rather apt for my approach to gardening. “She generally gave herself very good advice, (though she very seldom followed it)” and “My dear, here we must run as fast as we can, just to stay in place. And if you wish to go anywhere you must run twice as fast as that.” I don't think I will ever "run" fast enough to catch up with everything that needs to be done in the garden. (Disclaimer: As they are taken from the internet those quotes may be a disneyfied version and not from the original text. Apologies may be due.)
The hawthorn flowers have already lost their sparkle and are fading fast - appropriate really because it is the end of May. Hawthorn is sometimes called the May tree and I have read that it is the only British plant to be named after the month in which it flowers. I took a larger than life size photo of some of the first flowers to open in the garden on the 15th of May.
I find the scent of the hawthorn flowers rather oppressive. It seems to appeal to some people more than others. A neighbour told me that she likes the scent because it reminds her of her childhood when it signalled the approach of summer and the long school holidays. Apparently the scent is a mixture of sweet perfume to attract bees and an underlying odour similar to decaying flesh which attracts flies. The trees certainly are successful in attracting pollinators because they produce good crops of berries for the blackbirds.
The wild flowers of high summer - the foxgloves - are just starting to open. Tim thinks we have too many foxgloves he is right. They do self-seed wildly. Their seeds are tiny and there are vast numbers of them in seed cases all the way up the stem. By the time the last flowers at the top of the spike have opened - the seeds at the bottom have already ripened. The bumble-bees love them and I hate cutting back flowers while they are still being visited by the bees - so I usually leave them too long and end up spilling seed when I cut back the old flower spikes. They come up all over the garden. I deliberately left a lot of seedlings in the bed in front of the hawthorns after Tim built a low wooden retaining wall behind the bed a couple of years ago. That area dries out fast in summer and I needed something tough there. Foxgloves are biennials and those plants will all flower this summer. When they finish flowering, I will pull them out and replace them with something else that enjoys well-drained soil.
Another summer flower is the ox-eye daisy. I was given a few plants by a neighbour when we were living in a rented house in Ramsey and I brought them with me to the glen. They have been coming up in various parts of the garden ever since but are not as invasive as some of the other self-seeders. They are fairly tall and tend to flop over. Before mowing last Monday, I cut back a stem which had fallen across the lawn, rescued a flower and a bud, and put them in a small vase on the kitchen windowsill. They have lasted well and would make good cut flowers - but I prefer to see flowers in the garden.
For years I had a rather miserable sage plant in the shady front garden because I avoided planting culinary herbs in the back garden where the Schipperkes ran free and the boys lifted their legs against every convenient plant. Eventually the old plant blew over and I took cuttings from the remains and stuck them in the sunnier raised bed behind the kitchen. They were delighted and have grown so enthusiastically that they will have to be cut back - but I am waiting until the flowers fade.
Near the sage is a small clump of Snow-in-summer Cerastium tomentosum. It grows wild in SE Europe and is a popular rockery plant. I also have some growing at the side of the garage but it doesn't get enough sun to flower well. It likes to grow "in dry, sunny areas with poor soil" - so it might be a suitable replacement for some of the foxgloves.
I am rather embarrassed to admit that there is one more rhododendron in the garden - Rhododendron ponticum. This variety is frowned upon because it is one of the foreign plants that has escaped into the wild and become a pest. I don't think it is a problem on the Island although there are some old bushes next to the lower paths in the older section of Skyhill plantation. I haven't seen any seedlings amongst the trees near our garden - so I don't think our single plant behind the hawthorns poses a threat to the local environment. When we moved here, there was a huge specimen, the size of a small tree in the garden. Tim dug it out (with difficulty) when he built terraces at the south end of the house. Later I noticed the seedling and decided to keep it. Perhaps I made a mistake.
On Friday morning, after writing the previous paragraph, I did a bit of scary research on the internet and was nearly intimidated into going straight out into the garden to cut down the offending plant. But I decided to do the shopping in Ramsey first. I stopped on the glen road near Milntown (a local sort-of-stately home) to take a photo of the lovely laburnum.
Through the slats of the fence I could see a variety of different coloured azaleas and rhododendrons - and some of them looked exactly like my despised R. ponticum. Then I saw more specimens in every second garden as I drove down Lezayre Road. Driving back up the glen on my way home I could even glimpse the patches of mauve flowers along the edge of Skyhill plantation. They seemed to be more or less equally spaced, so I think they must have been deliberately planted. I calmed down and decided that my little plant, which was just one of many in the area, was unlikely to have any significant ecological impact. So it got a reprieve. We walked up the forestry path behind the house after I had unpacked the shopping and I took a photo across the Ballagarrow fields to the lower slopes of Skyhill.
I haven't seen the baby great tits yet but we have heard them - up in the trees in the next door garden. They chase their unfortunate parents around for a few weeks after leaving the nest - demanding food with continuous high-pitched shrieks.
The butterflies are still few and far between. The only ones prepared to pose for photographs are the little green veined whites.
Usually the birds distribute seed from our own shrubs and trees into various parts of the garden but occasionally they bring me a gift from a neighbouring garden. Some are not welcome - like the Himalayan honeysuckle (aka Pheasant berry) Leycesteria Formosa which is pretty but rather invasive. But I was very happy when I discovered a Japanese wineberry seedling (Rubus phoenicolasius) some years ago. A bird must have "deposited" a seed from a garden across the road. It is an attractive plant and is promising to get a small amount of fruit this summer.
While prowling around with the camera looking for an interesting flower to photograph, I found this white iris. I bought the rhizomes years ago and they haven't flourished - but every time that I think they have all died up pops a beautiful flower.
The oriental poppies have done well this year. Every time they are knocked around by the wind or weighed down by rain and look as though they are going to disintegrate into piles of soggy crepe paper . . . another batch of buds open!
I drove to Ramsey early this morning because the TT races start today and the roads close at ten o'clock. I stopped on the glen road to take another photo. Not the laburnum this time, just some "weeds". There was a pretty patch of cow parsley (aka Queen Anne's lace) Anthriscus sylvestris growing by the road. I have had a few plants coming up amongst the poppies and various wild flowers under the beech tree in previous years but haven't seen any in the garden this summer.
Ramsey has changed its character since yesterday. It is usually very quiet before nine in the morning but today there were queues at all the tills in the supermarket and at least half of the shoppers were wearing leathers. There were almost as many motorbikes as cars in the parking areas. I was hoping to get a photo of the crowds gathering in Parliament Square to watch the races but it was two hours before the first race was due to start and the fans were still riding around the circuit. I took this photo of a group of fans on their bikes turning into Parliament Square from Lezayre Road.
PS Parliament Square is not square and there has never been a parliament in Ramsey - but it is near the town hall. Perhaps that counts as a parliament.
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