Two hundred

Believe it or not, this marks the blog's 200th post. A lot has changed on the property since we started the project just over three years ago. The garden had been neglected for many years, and was little more than a few scattered trees and some overgrown shrubs (none particularly good for wildlife) with a scruffy lawn and a giant pile of woodchips left from a recently-removed Leylandii hedge. Here was the first bed we planted, the first year we lived here. We'd had to whack back a lot of very vigorous Greater Periwinkle (Vinca major) before we started.

And here's that same bed today, though from somewhat a different angle; needless to say, things have filled in a bit! The number of pollinators we get these days can be truly awe-inspiring. Mike counted 25 Peacocks on one Buddleia bush the other day (53 in the whole garden), for example. Our Elegant Deutzia (Deutzia x elegantissima) hosts hundreds of bumblebees at a time when it's flowering, and we regularly see uncountable swarms of hoverflies.

Mike's been hard at work establishing new beds as well, and they've come along leaps and bounds this year. These are on the shadier side of the garden and contain plants that can tolerate a bit less sun. The Common Foxgloves (Digitalis purpurea) were particularly spectacular this year.

And of course, this year we finally added the longed-for pond, which has brought a whole host of new additions to the garden. As the movie tagline says "If you build it, they will come!" Among our favourites have been the plethora of dragonflies and damselflies that have chosen to lay their eggs here, and the baby Smooth Newts slowly growing to adulthood among the water plants.

We're creeping up on 1200 identified species for the property, with plenty of photographed 'mystery guests' still to puzzle out. We've even started to tackle some of the trickier groups, like aphids and woodlice. We hope you'll continue to share the journey with us. As I said in our 100th post, there's still plenty more to discover out there!

Ch-ch-ch-ch-changes...

A sad job

Sadly, many of our plans for the garden changed in one fell swoop last Friday. A freak storm centred over the North Sea brought nearly 24 hours of 70+ mph winds and another day of 50+ mph winds. Those gales brought down two of the bigger trees on the property, and badly damaged several others. We're hoping that the damaged ones survive, but we have another big storm brewing for this coming weekend, and that might be enough to bring them down as well. It's been a bit soul-destroying, to be honest. We've gone from having a nice mix of sun and shade, with some sizeable mature trees to having a very open garden with almost no shade at all. Yes, we'll plant some new trees next year, but we're not likely to live long enough to see them match the size of those that fell.

Mike's put in some hard graft over the past few days. We'll supply several friends with many yards of logs for their fireplaces and wood stoves, and we'll burn some of the branches in our fire pit. And some will undoubtedly make nice homes for overwintering hedgehogs.

Our 'John Downie' crab apple is looking pretty sad at the moment. The trunk has gone from being straight and true to leaning decidedly to the south-east, with previously unseen roots now visible near the base. Blasted, dead leaves hang from its branches — where they haven't been stripped off completely — and the entire crop of apples has been sprayed across the lawn. The Eurasian Blackbirds and Song Thrushes spent today bouncing around in the grass gobbling up what they could find.

The winds blasted one side of the cherry, stripping the leaves (and some of the branches), and putting the whole canopy "on the huh", as they say here in Norfolk to indicate something off-kilter. Fortunately, the buds look like they've survived, so hopefully it will still give us a great flower show next spring.

Some of the other plants suffered too. Our three Echium plants are looking decidedly worse for wear. Can you tell which direction the wind came from?

Regular change is a constant in gardening, and we'll certainly see some changes over the next months and years as a result of this storm. At least it will be easier to figure out where to put the new pond, now that we no longer have to worry about it filling up with fallen leaves.

On to 1500!

A view across one of the flower beds

And just like that, we've hit our second goal — 1000 species recorded in the garden! It crept up on us a bit, to the point that we were actually well over the benchmark before we realized it. A bunch of new plants (including a pair of Common Spotted Orchids that recently emerged among the rank grasses on the bank), a night's mothing that netted us a handful of new visitors, a few additional hoverflies identified, and suddenly we're at 1050.

One of our recent visitors: a Comma (Polygonia c-album) on a Shasta Daisy (Leucanthemum x superbum)

We've been enjoying the sheer volume of insects in the garden lately. Hundreds of bumblebees and hoverflies swarm across the flower beds, scores of ladybirds trundle up grass stems (and their pupae cases dot the nettle leaves), dozens of grasshoppers rasp from our pocket meadow, and butterflies play tag over the garden. The only thing we're wishing weren't quite so common are the flies that make their way into the house and buzz around the place trying to get out again. Can we get to 1500 species? Follow along and see!

Another bed view

One hundred

This marks the 100th post about the garden and our slow process of converting it to a wildlife haven. We've made some good progress over the past couple of years, adding lots of pollinator-friendly plants, leaving sections of grass to grow long (leading to an explosion of grasshoppers) and coddling along some of the native flowers that have returned to the property.

The resulting increase in insects, birds and mammals visiting the property has certainly been encouraging. We've documented 905 species as of this week, with more to come as we comb through the lists to see what we've forgotten to add. The main thing we've learned though, is how much we don't know! There are whole orders of arthropods we haven't yet been able to wrap our brains around (ants, aphids and woodlice, we're looking at you).

Doing research for the posts has been good fun, and has led to us learning lots of new facts, even about species we thought we already knew well. We hope you'll continue to share the journey with us. There's plenty more to discover out there!

Escape

Common Daisy (Bellis perennis) and Sweet Violet (Viola odorata)

The garden lies just outside our windows, beckoning. Branches newly furred with breaking buds toss in winds that seem destined to blow hard for weeks. Emerald green grass stretches towards the sun, regularly flattened by passing gusts. Yellow Common Primrose flowers wink above their wrinkled leaves and golden Daffodils nod in sheltered corners. Spring is coming, and it's never been more welcome. In this age of uncertainty, when life as we know it is spinning into chaos, the mindless, relentless progression of the season is something to hold on to. Everywhere new growth is pushing up through the soil, shouldering away the remnants of last year's leaves and stems. Birds are shouting challenges at each other from treetops and television aerials. Fat queen bumblebees are lumbering through the flowerbeds, searching out the new blossoms. And every morning I'm thankful that we have this half-acre to wander in — a place where, just for a few minutes, we can forget the fear and the worry and the frustration and just... be. I hope that wherever you are, you have such a place as well. And if you don't, visit us here, virtually. Together, we'll get through this.

All a-buzz in the trees

While we are keen to have a garden that benefits wildlife, this does not automatically mean that all of the plants in it need to be natives. Of course we encourage natives, but the established garden already has a large number of non-native, woody plants in it, so we'll be working out what works for wildlife and what might have to be replaced with something better.

Right now, the Japanese Cherry that forms a centre-piece to the lawn area is a spectacular sight. Our plant is the cultivar 'Shirotae', a variety that forms a distinctive, broadly spreading parasol of branches and bears semi-double, white flowers. Double-flowered forms often have all of the stamens converted to petals and thus have a greatly reduced benefit to wildlife. However, semi-doubles typically just have double the usual number of petals, together with all the necessary bits in the middle - so they produce pollen and nectar in the usual way. Double-flowered forms might look nice, but they are of little or no use to pollinator insects.

So our cherry has the double benefit of bee-attractant, together with larger flowers that look spectacular. Right now, the bees are having a great time and I reckon at least eight different species have been visiting the flowers today!

Help for Swallows

Last year - our first summer at the house and so too for the neighbours - we had a pair of Barn Swallows hanging around for a number of days and looking as though they recognised the place. Neither we nor the neighbours could know if they had nested here in previous years, but I suspect that they had. Eventually they moved away and hopefully found somewhere to nest, but this year, we're trying to get ahead of the game by installing a starter home for them.

Barn Swallows make open-cup nests and prefer to build under an overhang so that they get at least some protection from the worst of the weather. So a quick purchase from the One Stop Nature Shop at Burnham Deepdale was in order and now I've just installed this purpose-built swallow nestbox under the back eaves. Barn Swallows should be back in the area within the next 10 days or so - so it's finger crossed time!

Making a Difference

In this blog, we aim to make a difference - it's a simple as that! As the British countryside becomes more and more impoverished by unsympathetic management and the increasing pressures of an ever-increasing human population, one of the things we can do is to abandon our thoughts of neat lawns and regimental rows of bedding plants and try to turn our gardens into more welcoming places for wildlife.

Just over a year ago, we moved into a property with a half acre of established garden. It's a lovely garden, with plenty of trees and shrubs and already quite a nice range of wildlife, but we aim to improve it. So this blog aims to highlight the species that we find on our half acre and hopefully over time, to record the increases in species that we find due to careful switching of habitat from fully ornamental (as it is now) to something more akin to a semi-natural habitat. We hope you enjoy the ride!!

So here we are, early January - out with the old and in with the new...

Nothing says 'out with the old' more clearly than fire. But this is a managed fire, to get rid of an over abundance of old plant material so that we can get on top of things a little. We'll never just set fire to piles of dead stuff either, as you never know who might be wintering there. Everything has been moved twice and well and truly shaken out, to spare as much as we can before the burn.

'In with the new' begins even before the turn of our calendar year - already our lawn area is sprouting a mass of crinkly leaf rosettes - Primroses will start off our plant species list!

And as for the old garden bench! Well, it's become an ecosystem in its own right now, to the point where we just can't bring ourselves to sit on it! Lichens are complex organisms, formed from a close association between fungi, algae, bacteria and who knows what else; each association gets given a scientific name - but I'll need to leave the identification to Megan!