Your GARDENING FORTNIGHT
Val explains how undisturbed areas, though they may look messy, can provide a home to an exciting array of wildlife.
Like many mothers, I look back at having young children as the best part of my life. My two daughters were both born in the mid-1970s and they grew up in a small, remote village in Northamptonshire, midway between Banbury and Daventry. The garden opposite my cottage was owned by a ninety-year-old widowed lady. It hadn’t been tended for over twenty years. It was a thicket of brambles, overgrown hedges, conifers and, of course, weeds.
This bothered some of the villagers, although it didn’t bother me and I was her nearest neighbour.
You see, that untidy garden had a fantastic upside. Treecreepers visited my south-facing cottage wall on a daily basis. They were residents, not the usual winter migrants and they would have found plenty of suitable nest sites in that overgrown garden, along with lots of insect food. These insignificant brown birds, which Mike Toms describes as mouse-like in his excellent book Garden Birds, use their amazing feet to cling on to surfaces, as they hunt through probing in nooks and crannies.
Their favourite tree is the Wellingtonia, Sequoiadendron giganteum. The crevices and fissures on this tree’s bark are the perfect place to find insects and the birds also roost in the larger crevices in hard weather. My south-facing cottage wall was pitted with bee holes and there were climbing roses and chocolate vine, providing plenty of nooks and crannies. Swallows and martins used to loop and swoop over my garden all summer long. They would gather on the overhead cables every September, just before flying south.
That overgrown garden was a magnet for birds
Pied flycatchers and their young would use the cables as perches, darting into the air, although not as often as spotted flycatchers tend to. The pied flycatcher is smaller than a sparrow and, when it moves, you see flashes of black or darkbrown and white. Although considered birds of mature woodland from the western side of the UK, I definitely saw them in rural Northamptonshire between 1978 and 1984.
Eventually, the cottage was acquired by a young couple and the jungle-like garden was cleared, paved and lawned. The treecreepers and pied flycatchers sadly left as soon as the work started. I’m not suggesting that you let your garden become an overgrown jungle, by the way, I’m just pointing out the value of undisturbed areas, even though they might look messy.
Brownfield sites, often left for many a year following the closure of a mine, factory or some such thing, are often thought to be perfect sites for building new homes. However, a recent The State of Nature report found that around 15 per cent of nationally rare and sca
