I obsess over my new water butts – the one on the house that connects to the original one, which takes water straight from the roof, and the two I installed on either side of the shed. I watch droplets pool and fall from shed roof felt into gutter, lift water-butt lids and check for trickles. Can it not pour in? Will you please pour? Some of the roof felt is missing the guttering so I’m losing vital drops. But it’s 6.00 a.m. and I’m in my dressing gown, now’s not the time to climb on to the roof and adjust gutters. The house butts are better but too much water is sneaking out of the downpipe, into the drain. I fill the kettle for tea and, while it boils, fetch a plastic bag and block the downpipe so every last drop is directed into the water butt. I lift the lid – more than a trickle but it’s not pouring in. Not yet.
I take tea to bed and drink it while watching rain through the windows. I listen to cars drive through puddles, rain gurgling into the downpipe. I look at my rain app and it says there will be a lull, with more to come in half an hour, which means I have a small window to take the dog out. We go to the park, partly so we can run home quickly if there’s a downpour and partly so I can be with the park as it rains. Does that make sense? I want to hold its hand somehow, maybe feel its relief as the trees finally get a good drink. That little bit of rain, will it, could it, have made a difference already?
Tosca hates rain. She rushes out of the door and then backs up, wants to be indoors. ‘Give over, it’s only spitting,’ I say, and give her a treat for stepping out again. I once read that rain – or post-rain – is exciting for dogs as it washes all the smells away so all new smells are NEW, but I think we’ll need more before that happens. I wonder how much will be needed to rid central Brighton of its residual stench of beery piss.
In the park the grass is short straw but the earth is wetted and there are no puddles – must be all the holes dug by dogs. We have the place to ourselves. We walk the perimeter, me picking litter, Tosca sniffing. I have forgotten her ball.
I realise I am cheerful. I tell Tosca she is the best dog in the world, throw treats and watch her bound after them. I am excited, bouncy, pleased. As humans we so often cast rain as something miserable and ‘bad’. Try living without it. This water, which falls from the sky and which we all take for granted in the British Isles, gives and sustains life. That I am so cheered by it is the most basic of human responses. I want to dance, I want to sing, I want to spend all day just being in it. I wonder if I can take the day off work, to hang out in the rain.
We walk past the big privet hedge and a wren stutters to life, a machine-gun killing the silence. Further on, there’s a great tit ‘tee-cher’ing around the corner and a blackbird gurgling his sub-song. Could it be? No. The rain? I try to think when I last heard birdsong. Can’t. Birds moult at this time of year and keep a low profile so it was more likely moulting that made them quiet, and that now has come to an end. And, besides, their song is a statement of territory rather than joy. But it’s quite the coincidence that they’re singing now the rain has come. When did it last rain? A flash of hope half dreamed on the warmest night and before that, early June. Perhaps, and more likely, I have been so consumed by drought I just refused to hear them.
Tosca sits down and raises a paw that says, ‘Please, Mumma. Home now.’ I remind her that it might rain all day and she won’t get another walk. She looks at me with her great big eyes that say, ‘I have no idea what you’re saying.’ I throw treats and say, ‘Find it!’ and she finds them but with none of the usual enthusiasm. The paw comes out again. ‘OK then.’ We head back, the long way around so she can get more sniffs in, tire herself out a bit. We’re just in time – the heavens open as soon as we get in and we both stand at the kitchen window, transfixed, looking on to the garden.
I can’t stop checking the rain. I want to watch raindrops fall to earth, see the pond fill up, hear the smacking of droplets on leaves. I check water butts. Inside, I have the window open so I can hear them fill. In Zoom meetings I lose my train of thought as the intensity of the rain changes and I am drawn to look outside. The pond fills like a huge bath and I want to jump in it. I stand at the window and watch leaping frogs.
The rain has softened the soil so I set to work on moving the meadow to the front. I start by digging up winter honeysuckle and other bits and pieces still in the ground, and hoeing away honeywort seedlings, which I have to do often, before raking the soil. In the back I dig up meadow cranesbill and divide the rootball into three pieces, along with a bit of meadowsweet that has grown away from the main rootball and was ripe for picking off and moving elsewhere. I bundle them into a bucket along with my pots of ox-eye daisies, red and white clover, knapweeds and yarrow, and thickets of grass that I dig up from gaps in the patio. I take it through the house into the front and plant it all, haphazardly but with some sense of order – daisies will look nice here; yarrow will survive better there. I scatter my saved seed of greater knapweed, grasses and ribwort plantain from the garden, and wild carrot and salad burnet from up in the Downs. I chop heads off the echiums and lay them in spots where they haven’t yet colonised. Finally, I plant the winter honeysuckle and some rooted ivy cuttings in the gap on my side of next door’s hedge. The honeysuckle should fill the gap while providing winter forage for bees. The ivy should, eventually, grow through everything, adding diversity and perhaps even slowing the growth of the existing forsythia and Japanese spindle (a girl can dream). I imagine it’s quite hard to slow Japanese spindle growth, but if anyone can, ivy can. As ever, I have high hopes for my little cuttings.
I water everything using grey water saved from the dog’s bath, which I collect into the watering can and walk down the stairs in many, many visits. It looks terrible, little scrappy bits of this and that surrounded by mud and dying honeywort. It will be a while before it pops up and greens over, before it grows into itself and starts to look like a meadow. In a few weeks I’ll scatter seed of red poppy, which will brighten the display while the perennials get going. And then yellow rattle, the semi-parasite of grass, which should subdue grass growth and allow the wildflowers to flourish. I have my eye on seeds of this and that growing beyond my garden, which I can legally take small amounts of to bring a piece of the wider landscape home. It will be good, eventually, I know it will. Just not now.
Or anytime soon.
In the back I work around the pond, which had become so overgrown the sparrows had stopped bathing in it. The Kilmarnock willow (RIP) had grown so big it was shading out a large portion of the pond while the meadow, although completely dead across the rest of the garden, had made a comfortable buffer zone for itself around the pond edge, its yarrow, red and white clover, ox-eye daisies and knapweed making the most of the extra moisture available. The beach area – stones laid over mud to deter plants from growing – has all but disappeared under seedlings of water figwort. It needs a good haircut.
With the meadow plants safely ensconced in their new front-garden home, I can see the shape of the pond edge for the first time in ages. I sink big rockery stones into the mud and weed out one of the beaches before re-laying the stones in a much less orderly way than they had been laid in the first place. I sink my hands into the water and retrieve stones to add to it. The other beach has been colonised by bird’s foot trefoil and I quite like it, so it can stay, I can live with just one pond beach. I fill holes made by removing plants, smooth mud around the top. I empty pots of old compost on to the grass around the edge and tamp it down to make it level. Finally it looks better, finally it resembles a pond.
It’s still quiet compared to previous years; there have been no dragonflies or backswimmers recolonising the water, few midge and mosquito larvae. The habitat has returned but there’s little living in it. I so hope they return next year.
Hummingbird hawk-moth, Macroglossum stellatarum
The hummingbird hawk-moth is a curious thing, a day-flying moth that hovers with wing beats so rapid they hum. If it stops for long enough you might notice its brown, white-spotted abdomen, brown forewings and orange hindwings. It has a long tongue, which it uses to probe flowers such as buddleia and red valerian, as it darts from bloom to bloom. To the untrained eye it looks just like a hummingbird, hence its name.
A resident in southern Europe, it used to be a rare migrant to the British Isles but has gradually become more common. It usually arrives in June, where it mates and lays eggs before dying, its young returning to the Mediterranean in autumn. It could not overwinter in the UK. But in recent years it has proved that it can, and in spring I spotted a newly emerged and mated female laying eggs on my cleavers.
To garden for this climate-change refugee is to grow flowers with plenty of sweet-smelling nectar – buddleia, red valerian, honeysuckle, jasmine. But you could also grow food plants for its caterpillars to help it breed. These include lady’s bedstraw (Galium verum) and wild madder (Rubia peregrina), but cleavers do just as well, so the easiest thing to do would be to avoid weeding them out. The caterpillars are chunky and green with a yellow stripe down each side, and like all hawk-moth larvae they have a ‘tail horn’ at one end. They pupate in leaf litter near their food plant, so letting leaves accumulate in corners would also do well for them.
September
Sometimes I sit in the garden at dusk, waiting for the hedgehogs to come. I perch on the hedgehog feeding station itself, which is sturdy enough to take my weight and which, I think, the hedgehogs don’t mind me sitting on. I bring my knees up to my chest so the box takes the whole of me and I wait, quietly, as the sky reddens and dims, as the birds hurry to their roosts, as seagulls fly overhead, like fighter planes, to the sea.
I don’t like dusk so much. There’s a nervousness, an anxiety, about suddenly not being able to see. My eyes struggle to adjust to the changing light and my world feels smaller, somehow. But there’s an unfolding quietness that I love. Suddenly you can hear snails scratching over leaves. A gentle rustle in the border reveals a frog or a distant bark tells me the foxes are about. If it’s damp I might be drawn to a worm pulling a leaf into the soil or a field mouse popping its nose out to see if the coast is clear. It’s never long before the hogs come, it’s never fully dark. They charge through the borders like elephants, always from one of the hedgehog boxes near the house, another from the habitat pile to the side of the shed, and sometimes a neighbour coming through the hole in the wall from next door or under the gate from the twitten on the other side.
I’m sure they can smell me. I’m sure they know I’m sitting as quietly as I can on top of the wooden structure in which they find kitten biscuits. They don’t seem to mind, ‘Oh there’s Kate,’ they seem to say, ‘the one that fills the bowl.’ They trundle along, climbing the big stone step to get up to the station, sniffing the air constantly. Are they sniffing me? What can they smell? They squeeze themselves into the cat-proof hole beneath me and I wait for that first, tentative crunch! Sitting in near-darkness on a box in which a red-listed mammal is eating kitten biscuits beneath you is really quite something.
On the wildlife camera I have picked up Minnie, who is smaller than other hogs and has helpful birthmark-like growths on her nose that make her easy to spot. She is, inevitably, always followed by a gang of males, who push each other around while sniffing out the new girl. I don’t get to see much on the camera but I know Minnie has found the feeding station and ‘bird bath’ (and presumably the pond, too). I know she hasn’t strayed far from the garden and I know she’s getting a lot of attention from the males.
One male started to join her in her nest box, and so she moved to the other box and is now busy collecting leaves to add to the masses of straw I had packed in there. It’s highly likely she’s pregnant but she could just be gathering leaves for hibernation. Either way, Minnie has settled in. I text Ann, who thanks me for the update.
I can rarely identify the hogs when I’m outside with them; they always seem so much smaller than they do on the cameras. Even Doughnut appears to have lost enough weight to have blended in with the others. I don’t pick them up or touch them to find particular identifying marks; I stay out of their way as much as possible. To spend time with them like this, crashing through the borders as snails scratch over plants and worms steal leaves into the soil, is all about the magic of being among them. And I love it, hanging out in near-darkness with the hedgehogs. I love it.
The pond is full now and there are water butts on standby to fill it up when it threatens to disappear again. I squat at the edge. Kelp-like curled pondweed has started to recolonise, while little sprouts of water soldiers are popping up in the margins. I see a ramshorn snail move slowly across the clay bed. There are mosquito larvae, water hoglice and tiny whirligig beetles. Life. There are still no backswimmers, no dragonfly larvae. I’ll have to wait until next year for them. At night, frogs sit at the edge and catch flies.
The garden looks better since the rain, the grass is green again and thin new shoots are starting to fill gaps. But it’s still not great. Gardens can look wonderful in September – a last burst of colour and light before everything dies back again. The existing border is OK but a bit gappy and the new border is too new for it to do much. Still, there are things I can do. I make notes and then take them to the new garden centre up near the woods.
The new garden centre has a walled garden you can walk around in, which I do, for ‘inspiration’. There are pollinator beds and dry beds, a rain garden and an ‘all seasons’ garden. Of course, I am most impressed by the compost bin in the middle, which is sturdy yet handsome, and full to the brim with garden waste that smells, richly, of autumn. It’s made from wooden slats and has three bays, presumably for successional turning. I have always coveted grand, centre-of-attention compost bins, and one day I will have one. Some people aspire to driving around in fancy cars, living in a detached house. Me? A really big, sturdy set of compost bays, please, ones that I can walk into and fork the waste from one into another. Wheelbarrow access a must, perhaps separate bays for leaf mould. The bays would be central to a ‘composting area’, a whole space dedicated to decomposition. I once tried making my own, using old pallets I’d collected in the street and dragged home. But the ground wasn’t level and the pallets were different shapes and, besides, I could never get them to stand up straight. There was no room for a wheelbarrow, let alone me. So I took it all apart again and settled for inferior plastic (just the one) with other waste making the habitat pile between the shed and the wall. It’s a fine system. But one day…one day …
I buy new plants – a Rosa rugosa called ‘Jam-a-licious’, which has nice single open flowers for the bees, big hips for the birds, floppy leaves for leaf-cutter bees and autumn colour for me; a big Shasta daisy and a couple of lady’s mantles for the shade. I bring them home, water them and try them out in various places before planting the rose at the side of the pond near the wall, where it should grow into dead space next to the ice plant. I chop the Shasta daisy in two with my bread knife, planting one half next to the new rose and the other half in a gap in the existing border. I move things around, weed out honeywort, replant bulbs I dug out last time and forgot to chuck back in the soil, and tickle the earth so it looks nice. It already looks better. It already looks ready for next year: buddleia at the back, ready to hide the water butt, salvias and geums ready to wow with their purple and orange combo, lamb’s ear for the wool carder bees; honesty for the orange-tip butterflies. I think it will look alright but I won’t find out for another nine months. Oh, gardening.
Like the Shasta daisy, one of the lady’s mantles has a rootball that can be easily divided; essentially two plants growing in the same pot. My bread knife comes out again and I saw the rootball in half, and then plant the separate pieces beneath things on the shady side. Now the grass will be shorter I need to add more depth to the borders – a few low-growing things here and there will do perfectly. I bury them in the soil and water them in, along with a foxglove that had seeded into the patio and deserves a better spot. I mow the lawn and empty the clippings into my small, plastic bin.
In the front the new meadow is slowly taking shape. I coo over seedlings of bird’s foot trefoil, ox-eye daisy, viper’s bugloss. I weed out honeywort seedlings into a bucket; there are so many of them they make a soft pile up to the top. I make a note to remove the last of the ornamental plants that I have yet to find a home for. I make a note to buy snake’s head fritillary bulbs. I make a note to summon the energy to cut my side of next door’s hedge.
I go in, make tea, put my feet up. Everyone says summer gardens are made in autumn, that autumn is the real beginning of the gardening season. They’re right. Some things are still flowering, eking out the very last of the growing season, but there are seeds of change elsewhere that I’m excited about. I am gardening in a still-temperate climate, pottering with plants and soil. There’s rain in the water butts, there are bees in the borders, a whisper of hope for the new season. If you grow plants, there is always a future.
For the last few weeks there has been a chiffchaff in every tree. I’ve caught glimpses of them in the park, heard their telltale short, sharp hweet everywhere from the seafront to supermarket car parks. I know they’ve been in the garden. They fly like Tinkerbell, moving around in graceful, giddy circles, here one minute, in next-door’s wisteria the next. They don’t generally stay still long enough for me to get my eye in. Finally, today, one hangs around in the garden long enough for me to gawp at it through the window of my study when I should be writing.
It flies into the garden with a leap, and then flies out in an instant, in a great arching circle, landing somewhere next door. Brownish but not a sparrow. Brownish but followed by six sparrows that fly in directly and land on the bird feeder and make me doubt myself. Am I mistaken? Is it a sparrow? I wait. It comes again, arching over the fence and back up into the climbers – completely different behaviour to any sparrow. ‘Chiffchaff!’ says my heart. I stay put and watch as it seems to pluck up courage to take a sip from the pond, darting down and then back to the safety of the climbers, a little olive yo-yo. I run downstairs, padding on the floor as quietly as I can, careful not to appear as a lumbering shadow against the window.
In the kitchen I stand and scour the garden. Where is it now? The sparrows remain on the feeder. After a minute it appears from behind a clump of grass at the pond edge. It has been having a drink! A chiffchaff has been drinking from my pond! I grab my binoculars and adjust the focus. From the pond it launches into the hawthorn tree, then the guelder rose, then the shrub rose, which has a long, rogue stem jutting out above the rest of it. I had been meaning to cut it back but it’s now sacred.
