January

The New Year comes with yet more rain. The garden is sodden, the water butts spill over the sides and I can no longer empty them into the pond – it’s all too muddy. I worry about the insects – wet winters are terrible for them because they can’t hibernate properly and also because they can literally rot. I check my red mason and leaf-cutter bee cocoons in the shed and, sure enough, there’s a light coating of fluffy mould on them. I brush it off and arrange them in a way that will ensure more ventilation around these precious parcels. I have never seen so much rain.

And then it turns cold again, as the jet stream wobbles to the left, forcing mild conditions south and locking cold air in the north. We are lucky this band of winds has just brought very wet, then very cold weather. In North America the jet stream delivered a ‘bomb cyclone’ that brought temperatures of -50ºC to regions as far south as Texas, and then three weeks of rain to drought-stricken California, bringing flooding and chaos. Meanwhile Europe has experienced one of its worst-ever heatwaves, with temperatures almost reaching summer levels in some countries. Poland’s capital, Warsaw, recorded temperatures of 18.9°C on New Year’s Day, more than 5ºC higher than the previous record set 30 years ago. Bilbao in northern Spain reached 24.9ºC and Switzerland saw 20ºC. It was barely reported on the news.

Here we’ve had flooding, along with ice and snow, but nothing too bad, nothing ‘extreme’. UK winters are always a slog, always dark and go on for too long. But this one has largely been uneventful, and I’m grateful.

I broke my toe in the first week of January and so haven’t been able to do anything outside. There have been no winter runs, no frantic bursts of exercise, no New Year promises to do more, be less. Neither have there been winter treks up the Downs. There has been very little outside for me at all, save for hobbled dog walks in the park behind my house.

I have taken the opportunity to rest, to stretch out the Christmas theme of putting my feet up and eating biscuits. I repot houseplants and sow chilli seeds. I clean and refill bird feeders. I plan my gardening year, sketching out beds and thinking of what could be done better, and look at photos from last summer for inspiration. I’m distracted by summery scenes, by leaves and insects and light. I shudder at the thought of drought. I eat biscuits and watch more TV.

The constant flux between mild and wet, and dry and cold is frustrating. I worry about the hedgehogs, wondering if they keep waking up and losing energy searching for food that isn’t there. Or is it there? Early one morning I walk into the garden and find mating earthworms. They, too, should be hibernating, tucked beneath the frost layer in a slime-coated ball. I keep the hedgehog feeding station out all winter, a small dish covering the biscuit bowl to stop mice from nicking the lot, but which would be no bother at all for a hungry hog to move. I check it daily and it’s not been moved, nor are there any hedgehog droppings nearby. I hope they’re managing to sleep.

I have seen no bees, and I am grateful for that. No butterflies or moths. Others do. Twitter is full of early bees and slow worms, of butterflies and hedgehogs. ‘Will they hibernate yet?’ some people ask. ‘Will they be OK?’ Others just write tirades of despair.

There are frogs in the pond, not in amplexus (the mating position) or showing any signs of mating, but in the pond nonetheless. I count five. Five frogs in water that keeps icing over and then melting again. I put the camera out, positioning it at one end of the pond, facing the wall, where they are congregating. On mild evenings they stick their heads out of the water, their eyes periscopes surveying the world above them. I watch cats and foxes paw at the mysterious shapes gliding beneath the surface. I watch ripples and bubbles of ‘activity’. Nothing significant; when it’s cold it’s colder than last year; when it’s mild it’s ‘a few degrees above average’. The frogs are later to get going this year and I’m glad. Still, I’m hopeful we are on track for a late-February spawning.

Red-tailed bumblebee, Bombus lapidarius

The red-tailed bumblebee is a gorgeous thing, all velvet black coat with a rusty red tail. The queens are large and have a deep buzz. Workers look like the queen but are smaller, while the males have a yellow band across their thorax and a beautiful lemon ‘moustache’. Short-tongued, they feed on rosemary and dandelion flowers in spring, white clover, bird’s foot trefoil, cranesbill geraniums and greater knapweed in summer. Some suggest they have a preference for yellow flowers.

They nest underground, beneath sheds and also walls, and there is anecdotal evidence that they prefer their habitats to be damper than those used by other bumblebees. It was a red-tailed queen that made her nest in the old duvet that had been thrown out in the yard all those years ago. The duvet had become damp and smelled mouldy, so it would make sense that a damp-loving bumblebee would choose it for her home.

It also makes sense that there are fewer red-tails where I live in the dry south-east than the wetter north-west. Of course, with climate change, the species is also moving northwards.

2022 was a bad year for bumblebees. Plants produce fewer flowers in a drought and flowers produce less nectar, so there was less food available for them. Also bumblebees overheat quickly and struggle to fly in temperatures above 30°C. As a result, during the heatwave, bumblebees couldn’t fly for large portions of the day and when they did forage they couldn’t find much food. This meant far less pollen and nectar will have been taken back to bumblebee nests to feed bumblebee larvae.

Towards the end of summer, eggs of daughter queens hatch into grubs and the workers gather food to feed them. As adults, the daughter queens and new males mate, before the daughter queens hibernate and the original nest dies. If there was less food available then fewer daughter queens would have been raised, so fewer may emerge from hibernation in spring. Perhaps the damp-loving species struggled the most in the dry weather – results from bumblebee monitoring surveys may offer some clues.

Numbers may bounce back with favourable weather conditions, although these are never guaranteed these days. But we can all step up to give them a helping hand: grow their favourite flowers and keep them watered in dry weather (save rain water in water butts and use grey water when you can). Create damp habitats for them – perhaps make a ‘bumblebee nest’ (find instructions online) in a damp or shady part of your garden. Like many bumblebees, the red-tail queen digs herself into the soil to hibernate. If you and your neighbours reduce the amount of hard surfaces in the area, the soils will be less likely to become waterlogged in wet winters, so more hibernating queens will survive. We can’t adapt our way out of everything, but we can understand the needs of the species who live among us and give them the leg-up they need to survive.

February

I take Tos to meet her best friend Alfie in the park. I chat with his mum, Rhi, while Tos and Alf chase each other around, Tos biting his legs, Alfie weeing on hers. Another dog joins the melee – it’s Twiggy! I will ask Twiggy’s mum if she has a pond.

We talk about dogs for a while and then I clear my throat. ‘I’ve been meaning to ask, do you have a pond?’ She says no, and I start gabbling on about toads and how I heard squeaking from the direction of her house, and how I thought I’d ask because ‘you have that lovely mixed native hedge in the front and anyone with a lovely hedge like that is likely to have a pond.’ She says next door had a pond but they filled it in, but she finds toads by the shed sometimes.

‘Should I bring them to yours?’ she asks.

‘Oh no,’ I reply, ‘they’ll find their own way; they can smell algae from the water from miles away.’ We talk about frogs and I start describing the difference between the two species and realise I have to stop now, while I’m still only just ahead. She is a nice woman, and tells me her name is Rachel. She will look out for toads for me, and let me know if she sees any.

At home I look on Google Maps and Rightmove to see if I can find the neighbour’s filled-in pond in the ‘sold house prices’ section. I do – it’s tiny! A small triangular thing wedged among a sea of decking. I can’t imagine toads would have chosen to breed there. But they might have, I suppose, if there were no other options. There must be somewhere else.

Later, I bump into Johnny from over the road, and the conversation turns to ponds because he has an allotment pond that he has been meaning to clear out for the last three years but still hasn’t got around to doing it (he tells me about it every spring). It’s full of leaves and algae, he says, again, and he doesn’t think he’ll get any frogspawn this year, although he always does. But his neighbours dug a pond and got frogspawn straight away.

‘WHAT NEIGHBOURS?’ I ask.

‘My next-door neighbours,’ he says, not on his allotment but here, on this road. He tells me they had their whole house done up and as part of their renovations they made a pond with a little water fountain and got frogspawn immediately. I am delighted.

‘I’m pleased, Johnny, I’m so pleased you’ve told me about that pond!’ We chat about toads for a while and the mystery of where they came from. He says he has definitely had toads in his garden, which is currently paved but is soon to be un-paved and planted with trees and shrubs. ‘We will have a hedgehog hole,’ he promises. He tells me to get on to Google Earth to see where other ponds are, and I tell him I have, obsessively, and not found any. I tell him about a house I viewed on the adjacent road five years ago, which had an enormous fish pond in the back. ‘It was horrible,’ I say. ‘All decking and then this huge pool. But it could have attracted toads.’

‘Wouldn’t the fish have eaten the toadpoles?’ asks Johnny, and I say no, and explain that toad tadpoles are slightly poisonous and therefore usually avoided by fish. I tell him that I have looked and looked on the sold house prices section of Rightmove but not found this house and I think I’m going mad. It must have been filled in, and the decking removed. But if it was filled in and supported toads then where are the toads breeding now? This whole thing remains a mystery.

I wake early and fumble my way downstairs to boil the kettle and let Tos out. She doesn’t come and I’m glad, for the door opens to a wall of sound, of frogs croaking in the darkness. I tip-toe out so as not to disturb them but I fail and they disappear with a splash into the depths of the water. Sorry, frogs. Still, by torchlight I can see the first glistening blob of frogspawn in the shallows. My heart!

I spend the day watching the pond through binoculars from an upstairs window. I count around 50 frogs, although it’s hard to say exactly as they’re moving around so much. It’s the usual, vigorous affair: males and females in amplexus, males trying to knock other males off females, males chasing anything that moves, in big, bubbly splashes. I home in on the expanding blueish balloons the males make as they croak, at the bubbles that float and pop on the surface, on the most perfect, stripy frog legs splayed in the water. I watch couples climb on to blobs of spawn as if to claim them as their own, I watch a frog leap into the garden and land in the pond with a splash (‘I’m here!’). I watch what I think is an actual blob of spawn being laid. I watch magic, it’s all magic.

And yet there’s an unease that comes with these things these days. Last spring was so dry and this spring seems to be going that way, too. After the sodden winter, we haven’t seen rain for weeks and the pond is already looking low. A low pond in spring isn’t normal – the whole ecosystem is set up so there’s water for frogs to spawn in, which remains there at least until the froglets emerge in early summer. I have water butts to top the pond up if I need to but it’s just another reminder that things are falling apart. It’s hard, sometimes, trying to enjoy natural, wonderful events, trying to keep the clawing sense of unease at bay, trying to ignore the new context of the story.

The frogs are also early. Not horribly so, but four days earlier than 2022 and nine days earlier than 2021. It’s only their third year of spawning, so it’s too soon to blame climate change. But a nine-day jump in three years seems a lot. Like the low water level in the pond, it could be nothing, but I feel uneasy. There’s still a lot of ‘winter’ to go. There’s still a risk of a late cold spell, of plunging temperatures and frozen frogspawn. Frogs have evolved to spawn in early spring, they can deal with a bit of ice, that’s why they spawn in the sunniest, shallowest parts of the pond – the ice melts here soonest after a cold night. But they can’t cope with a deep freeze. They can’t cope with massively fluctuating temperatures; early spring one day and deepest winter the next. They have not evolved the mechanisms to deal with this.

I’m determined to enjoy it anyway. I battle on, watching the spawn, watching the splashes, telling Twitter. And at night I stick to my plan: I have lived here for four years and the frogs have been spawning for just three, but I have established a new ‘tradition’, which is to sleep in the spare room when the frogs are spawning, so I can open the window and fall asleep listening to their croaks. I pretend everyone fell asleep listening to croaking frogs in the olden days, and that I’m channelling my inner early human.

I go to bed early so I can lie in the dark and hear them, willing myself to not sleep, not yet. My body is tense as I try to focus on the sound of frogs over people – the cars and the level crossing of the high street, the ships and horns of the port. It’s only 9.30 p.m. so there are neighbours about, too, talking, putting the bins out for tomorrow’s collection. Beneath this chatter and traffic is the low, constant hum of frogs. My body relaxes. I lie on my back so both ears can absorb the sound and I stay still so there are no rustles to interrupt it.

Despite my efforts I fall asleep quickly, but I wake periodically and am greeted by frogs. Unwavering, they have been spawning and calling the whole time, and in the dead of night the sounds of people are fewer and the sounds of frogs are greater. I would like to sleep in the garden in a tent but I worry about disturbing them. I would like to sleep in the garden in a tent but it’s February and I would have a horrible time. So I sleep in the bedroom that backs on to the garden and I listen carefully to the croaks, to this ancient sound that belongs in my human ears. Finally, I feel good.

What other sounds have we lost? Other sounds that used to help us tell the time – of the day, of the month, of the year? Sounds that used to be so ubiquitous, sounds that we don’t even know have gone? We still hear birdsong but there are fewer members of the chorus – both in diversity and abundance. What birds sang in these parts 200 years ago? Cuckoos? Nightingales? Curlews? Corncrakes? The buzz of a bumblebee, the snore of a hedgehog, it’s all so quiet these days. What does a badger sound like? I don’t actually know. I hate that we have evolved ourselves away from the very best of life. That we have replaced it with endless, pointless crap, and have the audacity to call this ‘progress’.

I still don’t know where the frogs have come from. Are there other ponds nearby they have ditched in favour of mine? Have ponds been dug and then filled in as the homes and gardens changed hands? I know of three that have been lost: the pond a few doors down that Twiggy’s mum told me about, and the dumped preformed pond I found in the twitten behind my house when I moved in. Another, two roads away, that was lost a few years ago. That’s the thing about gardens: the habitats are temporary. This isn’t necessarily a bad thing; wild ponds are temporary, too. But if the general trend is to fill in, rather than dig ponds, then the species that use them will suffer. The frogs and the toads, but also the newts and the hedgehogs and the bats, along with the thousands of freshwater invertebrates who call garden ponds home. I haven’t yet met anyone in the neighbourhood who has a living pond in their garden, besides my neighbour Kate, who dug hers a few weeks after I dug mine, and now the neighbours next to Johnny. Where were the frogs spawning before we turned up?

A hundred years ago there were ponds in the park. It wasn’t a park then but a ‘waste ground’ left fallow after being used to mine sand and flints at the turn of the last century. Craters were left by the mines and, naturally, they filled with water. One of them was huge, over three metres deep, and was fed by a ‘natural spring’. (I am interested to read about the natural spring, and wonder if it can be revived.) This area would have been rich with frogs, toads and newts, perhaps even great crested newts, as the many craters would have been used as the ‘satellite ponds’ that this species needs. But in 1936, some kids decided to sail boats over the largest pond in the dead of winter, and one of them drowned. For completely unfathomable reasons that I suspect had everything to do with money and nothing to do with the well-being of the local community, the council decided to fill it in, not with soil but with refuse. Imagine turning up for your annual orgy to find your party site filled with glass and early plastics, like the first disposable razor blades (I may have gone down a rabbit hole of ‘refuse of the ages’ here.) The poor frogs, where did they go after their home became a rubbish dump?

Sometimes I wish I had been born before the Industrial Revolution but I’m gay and a woman so I would probably have been drowned (who am I kidding? I would have died in childbirth). But I can’t get past how noisy and colourful life would have been back then. How loud the birdsong and the frog croaks, the buzzing of bees. How thick the clouds of insects and bats, how full the summer skies of swifts and swallows. How many butterflies there would have been, dripping from wildflowers (how many wildflowers there would have been). How, when walking past a snoring hedgehog in summer, no one would have batted an eyelid. I could have lived in the woods! I could have lived in a little wooden shack at the edge of the woods and eaten porridge and leaves, greeted hedgehogs with big toothless grins. I could have moved frogspawn laid in puddles to my little garden pond. I could have grown herbs, a few vegetables, all to a soundtrack of song, of wild chatter. Life would have been hard, I don’t doubt that, but it would have been so full of life.

I do enjoy bits of modern life. I’m terrible at being a consumer, terrible at being anything other than scruffy. I rarely get my hair cut or buy new clothes. But I like dancing. I like nightclubs and festivals and bowling around with my favourite idiots. I love travel (although I’m conflicted about that these days). I love sleeping in a warm bed with the window open listening to frogs, I love that I don’t have to sleep in a tent. And I’m lucky. I know how lucky I am to have these privileges.

I am here and I am now on this little patch of land not far from the sea, where there were once meadows and a windmill and a fresh spring and who-knows-what-else, which is now a busy suburb of a high street, close to shops and a port. There are frogs. I have a pond and binoculars and windows. Times have changed, the weather is changing. But I can top the pond up if it doesn’t rain, I can raise frogspawn indoors if temperatures plummet. I can lie in bed and listen to the ancient sounds of our oldest friends. It will never be a cabin in the woods but if I close my eyes and listen I can make myself love now. Just for a moment, just for as long as the frogs continue to sing.

The sun is yellow and the sky is blue! How can I stay away from the garden? I steal an hour outside with Tos. We open the door to light and song, to whistles and clicks and stammers and wheeees, to a flock of starlings on the roof. There’s a blackbird nearby too, a robin and, somewhere, distantly, a dunnock. It feels like spring, it feels like hope.

Most of the garden has remained untouched since summer: it’s all seedheads and skeletal remains, piles of leaves and curiously untouched berries (even curiouser is that it’s just one stem of untouched berries, the rest have all been eaten). But there’s a whiff of new growth and life, of daffodil, snowdrop and crocus shoots, of buds revealing themselves in the still-cold soil. ‘Who are you?’ I ask the buds. ‘Who are you and when did I plant you and what will you become and will you look good?’ I’m going to find out so soon.

I allow myself some gentle tidying, just on the sunny side, so emerging shoots and buds have room and light to grow. It’s easy to come into the garden in late winter and clear everything away, but this removes shelter from hibernating insects. Gentle trimming is key, leaving plenty intact to protect the sleepy.

I start at the far end, the new border I planted in late summer. I clear old hellebore leaves to make more of the opening flowers, remove the underskirt-like foliage of foxgloves and rose campion, beneath which bulbs are trying to push through. I move, gently, towards the house, avoiding spikes of snowdrop and crocus flowers, smiling at buds of hazel and rose leaves.

I cut back stems of ice plant, catmint, penstemon and Verbena bonariensis. I prune out rosehips that, until recently, were being eaten by squirrels but are now black and mushy and seemingly not as delicious. I weed out crocosmia shoots (there are always crocosmia shoots) and a bit of spurge but not all of it; everything is allowed to live here in moderation. The sun has finally climbed high enough in the sky to warm a few inches of soil and there I find masses of new seedlings I can’t yet identify. I want them to be foxgloves or ox-eye daisies, bird’s foot trefoil or clovers, plants I can use in the borders or new meadow out the front. I’ll probably be disappointed. Still, I leave them to reveal themselves in time.