I would love to mulch the soil or tickle the surface with my three-pronged cultivator to make it all look fluffy and nice but that would kill the mystery seedlings, damage emerging bulbs and potentially disrupt hibernating insects. I would love to mow the lawn to make it all straight and neat. I would love to clear the shady side of the garden, too, clear leaves and sticks. I am eager for spring, for new growth, for the garden to be mine again. I resist; it’s still so early, just some gentle cutting back will do for today.
While I potter, Tos helps herself to sticks. She takes fresh twiggy stems from my clippings bucket, partially composted prunings from the rough mulch I laid in autumn, entire branches from the habitat pile. She prances around with them, then lies down to chew them for a bit, and then abandons them in scatters on the lawn.
‘Tosca,’ I say helplessly. The new and composted prunings are soft enough but I confiscate the branches in case she splits them while chewing and splinters her mouth. She then finds a champagne cork, which, again, is partially decomposed and has come from the patch of mulch I am suddenly regretting not sieving. We play with it for a while, me throwing it for her to chase and then drop at my feet, until it disintegrates into so many pieces that it, too, is confiscated and returned to the compost bin.
‘Woof,’ she cries.
‘I know, life’s tough,’ I reply.
It’s not just the rough mulch where there are sticks and stems to find. The whole garden is ‘littered’ with planty remains. They seem ungainly now, with so little else to draw the eye, but they’ll soon disappear beneath foliage and flowers, beneath the paws of hedgehogs and foxes, beneath new leaf litter, where they will slowly rot as nature intended. Tosca will find some, of course. And so will the birds: every spring I watch gulls gathering beakfuls of my sticks and flying them to the rooftops; I see house sparrows and starlings taking smaller, twiggy stems to the nooks and crannies of holey houses; magpies and crows taking them to the large sycamores in the park, the magpies returning to take pond mud to make a nice deep cup (I admit to wishing they wouldn’t). Wood pigeons labouring over the perfect stick. This one? No. This one? Still no. Funny how they’re so fussy with their stick picking but use them to make the most ridiculously flimsy nests.
Tosca watches me from the bench, which is now, after months of darkness, in full sun. In summer there’s a bench cushion, which inevitably she has claimed as her own and she lies sleepily on it, watching me garden. She stands now on the hard wood as if to say, ‘Bench cushion, please,’ and I pretend I haven’t noticed. I collect her discarded sticks from the lawn and return them to the habitat pile, along with my bucket of old plant stems and soggy rosehips. They go to the open heap rather than the closed bin in case they are harbouring insects, although I checked them as best I could when I cut them back. How awful it must be to wake from winter sleep to the dark, damp tomb of a closed compost bin, with no means of escape. Any insects in today’s prunings still have their shelter, just a few metres away from where they intended it. When they wake they will be able to fly away or move further into the heap if they want to. They’re protected from rain under the lip of the shed roof, from wind and frost and snow. They are safe there. Safe to sleep and wake and fly and simply get on with the business of being insects. Even after I’ve done a little tidying.
It’s my birthday and I have snowdrops and hellebores to plant. I hack into frost-kissed soil with a hand fork and make space for bulbs and rootballs and fill them in and water them. Not ideal conditions but never mind, they’ll be fine.
It’s gone cold again, as the weakening jet stream brings more Arctic weather south of where it should. Temperatures here are dipping to 7ºC (feels like 0ºC), but in California again temperatures are plummeting to -18ºC as ice storms bring snow and flooding to a region already hammered by ‘once in a lifetime’ weather events over the course of winter. Here, I worry about the frogs, about the bumblebees I have already seen out of hibernation, about the hedgehogs. Again, the up-and-down cycle of mild then cold weather is no good for wildlife. If we have a deep freeze, how will I protect the frogspawn?
There would be a lot to protect; the frogs have almost completely filled the pond now. I’ve lost count of the number of blobs and there’s no way of knowing, congealed together as they are. After seven days there are still around 50 individuals going at it, with yet more arriving to the garden. I watch them land in the pond with a muted splash and then burrow through spawn to reach water. Mated females have left the pond already but many of the males have stuck around. This means there are now more males than females, which means mating balls are starting to form. Mating balls occur when two or more males cling to a female in the hope of being the one that gets to spawn with her. Science suggests this could be in the female’s best interests, as only the strongest, most determined male will win, and she may even encourage them to compete for her. But it often backfires: in an attempt to unseat their rivals, the males make the ‘ball’ roll around and around, often with long periods under water. She can drown.
I see two legs poking through pondweed and spawn, which don’t look right. I sit on the bench and watch. Sure enough, the legs are part of a mating ball, which is frantically being rolled by at least two males, it’s hard to tell. The female is dead; it is her pale, stiff legs I spot in the water. The males, I expect, are young and overexcited. I fish her out and they quickly jump off her. She’s been dead a while, poor thing, her tongue hanging out and the skin of her legs and belly rubbed clean off. What a way to go.
I think there’s another mating ball but it’s so hard to tell, with everything else that’s going on in the water and the floating mass of spawn concealing everything. I anticipate, with sadness, fishing out more dead bodies.
I feel like the season is coming to an end, that most frogs have been and gone, that the garden is emptying of them. At night I still steal into the spare room and open the window to listen to them, waking periodically to the comforting sound of croaks. Each morning I go out and mutter expletives at the sheer number of frogs and eggs, at what the garden might look like when the froglets start leaving the pond. At the falling level of pond water.
The pond is drying out, gradually receding with every frog splash. This, so early in the year, doesn’t bode well for summer. Many frogs have spawned where they usually spawn, in the far shallows where the sun hits the water first thing in the morning, but others have now spawned in what’s usually deeper water. I’m keeping an eye on it; I don’t want to fill the pond and interfere with the frogs’ intended placement of spawn, but I don’t want the spawn to dry out or freeze, either. So far I’ve added a bit of rainwater from my water butt, and used a rose on my watering can to ‘water’ the spawn gently, so it feels like rain. As the water recedes, the spawn becomes more exposed – my job is to ensure it remains just slightly under the surface.
As yet, there is no sign of toads. The next cold spell will last for a week and then afterwards, who knows? It might rain. It might be 20ºC. If they don’t come soon, then when?
Common frog, Rana temporaria
The common frog is the best-known British amphibian and is found throughout Britain and Ireland in almost any habitat where there’s a suitable pond to breed in. Gardens are extremely important to frogs, and many regional populations depend on garden ponds for their survival.
They’re funny-looking things, with smooth moist skin, striped legs (the back legs are longer than the front) and an angular head and body shape. They have large, goggly eyes on the side of their head and they usually have a black patch behind each eye, in which their ears are visible as black drum-like circles that pick up vibrations. They can be olive-green or brown in colour, but are sometimes found in shades of yellow, orange, red, green, brown and even blue. They can grow up to 9cm long.
They emerge early in the year, spawning from late winter, starting in the south-west of Britain, where it’s milder. The first frogspawn of the year is always recorded in West Cornwall in December. In Brighton they spawn in February, but not until April in the far north-east of Scotland. Frogspawn is laid in gelatinous clumps that look a bit like tapioca. It’s eaten by virtually everything, including newts, ducks and even foxes.
Frog tadpoles emerge black but soon turn brown and develop gold spots (unlike toad tadpoles, which remain black). They emerge as ‘froglets’ in summer, hopping about in long grass, trying to avoid the attentions of birds and other predators. Such a tiny percentage of tadpoles makes it to adulthood, there’s a lot riding on those first few days out of the pond.
It’s probably the easiest amphibian to cater for in gardens, as it will breed in a variety of water bodies. Frogs tend to favour small, shallow ponds (perfect for gardens!) with shallow ‘beach’ areas that warm up quickly in the late winter sun and mean there’s less chance of the spawn being lost to ice. Unlike toads, which seem to prefer larger, deeper ponds and remain loyal to the pond they started life in, frogs are more adventurous and will try new sites that aren’t always suitable – they often breed in puddles. So if you dig a pond, and you get the levels right (shallow, and gentle sloping sides are a must), you’re bound to attract frogs if they’re present in your area. And if they’re not in your area then dig a pond anyway – frogs and other amphibians can ‘smell’ water. If yours is the only garden pond for miles, it could provide any remaining frogs with a lifeline, and you never know who else might turn up.
March
It was cold for two weeks. The frogs stopped their shenanigans and bedded down in the depths of the pond while we humans that could afford to turned up our central heating. Before it turned cold it was warm – really warm. I took Tos up to the Downs on Valentine’s Day and wore a T-shirt. I found my first slow worm of the year and my first buffish mining bee, Andrena nigroaenea, feeding from snowdrops in the front garden. I saw bumblebee queens out of hibernation, the odd bursting of buds. And then it was winter again: frost on the shed roof, ice on the pond, hard, dry, ground. We can put a jumper on; what do the bees do?
While the frogs slept through the cold spell, my focus switched to hedgehogs. Suddenly the food in the feeding station was being taken, and so I topped it up properly and found it empty again the next morning, along with my first hedgehog poo of the year. It makes sense that it came to my garden as temperatures dipped, as it knew there would be kitten biscuits to make up for the sudden departure of earthworms. I put my camera out and watched footage of a chunky male hog licking his lips as he left the feeding station, and another of him coming into the garden via the back gate. It’s always reassuring to see when species have survived hibernation, especially when the weather is so changeable – they can’t be hibernating properly.
Temperatures eased a little for a while and the frogs started stirring again. Nothing like the vigorous parties of mid-February, but the odd blob of spawn would appear here and there, as subdued efforts to party were rekindled. But then there were reports of more ice and snow to come, of an ‘Arctic blast’. It wasn’t known where exactly, or for how long, but it would come. I pushed all the frogspawn beneath the surface of the water and topped up the pond to create an insulating later of water above the spawn, to give it the best possible chance of surviving. I watered plants that were already suffering from drought and which I didn’t then want to succumb to the cold. I waited. On the morning it got cold I walked to the gym, and arrived with a bright-red face and no feeling in my hands. But then it got mild again, and then cold again, and mild again, and then freezing. But there was no snow. I watched the telly, bemused at all the reports of snow, and wondered if it would come here. I texted family, ‘Have you got snow?’ And they said, ‘Yes!’ and sent pics of it falling and landing in great pillowy heaps. Then one weather report made everything clear: it showed a map of the UK that was all icy blue except for a thin ribbon of yellow on the south coast. Ahh, that explains it. The Arctic blast had just missed us.
Instead of snow we have rain. Two days of glorious, life-affirming rain. I take Tos out in it, wash my face in it, open the window so I can listen to it. I rejoice at full water butts and then half-empty them again so I can water the hedge by the wall and the bit of lawn beneath the shed roof. In the front I water the pots and the rain shadow of next door’s hedge, where very little grows. I stand at the kitchen window and watch raindrops land in great splashes in the pond, filling it to its absolute limit. Through binoculars I watch frogs. Lots and lots of frogs.
I count 30 frogs in the pond, just two weeks after around 50 of them had made their enormous spawn cushions. Thirty frogs leaping about, chasing each other, laying spawn. ‘They’re back,’ I say to Emma, and immediately ban Tosca from leaping around the garden. ‘They’re back and they’re spawning and my god, what are all these frogs going to look like in summer?’
I resume my little vigil at the bench, in the dark. It’s raining and the water is running down my back. I move to the edge of the pond to make myself slightly more comfortable, and shine my torch on amorous couples, of males jumping on females, of males biting the back legs of others who were already coupled up. On a newt. A newt? A newt!
She’s sitting at the edge, like she has always been there. A gravid female (full of eggs), she’s ignoring the frogspawn and eating a worm. A newt! In four years and two months the garden has its first newt. For a moment everything is perfect.
It’s often the way. In the wild, new ponds are formed and the frogs typically find them before other amphibians, taking advantage of fewer predators than in established ponds. They spawn and spawn and spawn, and it looks like they’re never going to stop, that there’s going to be too much, that there’s far too much for that one pond to support. But, gradually, it all gets eaten, by beetle and bug larvae, by dragonfly and damselfly nymphs, by birds and, eventually, by newts. When the frogs started spawning in such unfettered abundance, I knew it couldn’t last. ‘There are no newts,’ I would say to anyone who would listen. ‘It’s a new pond and there are no newts and they’re just taking full advantage.’
It makes sense that the newts would wait for a good population of frogs to establish before laying eggs of their own. And so, after three years of absolutely enormous amounts of frogspawn and tadpoles, the frogs have met their match.
I had an inkling newts had arrived, in December. There were bubbles coming to the surface of the pond, along with flashes of movement that were too quick for me to get my eye in. So they could have been here for months. And for the first newt I meet to be a gravid female suggests there are males here, too. You wouldn’t turn up to a pond full of eggs with no one around to fertilise them.
Tos wakes up for a wee at 4.30 a.m., and we let her out as she refused to go at 10.00 last night. ‘I’ll take her,’ I say, which is only so I can gawp at frogs and newts while she finds the perfect place to pee. I open the back door and I needn’t step out, there’s enough to keep me entertained on the doorstep: two toads. Oh rain, how I love you and all that comes with you. Two toads on the patio, making their way to the pond, 30 frogs in the water and a newt full of eggs. It’s going to be a busy few days.
The man who flew a drone at lesser black-backed gull nests last year is at it again. The peace is destroyed up to four times a day by scared, angry gulls launching into the air and crying out their piercing alarm calls. It sounds like they’re saying, ‘NO! NO! GET OFF! NO!’ Over and over and over. They’ve only just returned from their overwintering sites in West Africa. They’ve been here five minutes and already they’re being harassed. The herring gulls haven’t started collecting sticks from my garden yet but they have established their territories and both species have returned to the same nesting sites as last year. Which means they’re in trouble. The same people in the Facebook group are up in arms. ‘I’ll dig out the number of the PCSO I spoke to last year,’ says one. ‘I’ve got more footage!’ says another.
I decide this year not to take a back seat, not to read without comment. I post on the page: ‘Hello, would anyone like to meet up to discuss if we can work together to help the gulls?’ Three people say yes and two can make it for a drink in the local pub. I meet Lorna and Lin. Lin tells me to ‘look out for a tired old goth,’ while Lorna I recognise as she often stops to chat when I’m in the front garden. They bring photocopies of emails and I take my notebook. We assign tasks, swap information, give the man a nickname: Drone Bastard. I confess that I don’t actually live on their road and feel like an interloper. They don’t seem to mind. ‘Can we call ourselves Gulls Allowed?’ I ask, and they laugh. I will try to fight this man with humour and love; I will try not to be upset by him. I will try to get the police to turn up. They have one job – for the love of all the things, please, just turn up.
I haven’t seen my little gravid newt since that first night, but I have been putting the camera out and the hedgehogs have set it off while the frogs have been croaking so I’ve been able to gawp at chubby hedgehogs while listening to frogs. It’s a nice life if you can get it. In one of the clips, above the snuffling of the hedgehog and the low croaks of the frogs, I could just make out the squeaking of toads. Or one toad? Naturally, I aim to find out.
I’ve seen three toads in the garden so far this year. They’re small, warty things, standing still for ages. Males only. They seem less eager to get into the pond, less frantic and desperate than the horny frogs. Watching leaping frogs through binoculars from the bathroom window was extremely amusing. Toads, by comparison, seem almost prudish. Perhaps they’re young, perhaps they’re shy. I really hope the females turn up this year and show them what’s what.
Twiggy’s mum, Rachel, said she would keep an eye out for toads for me. She seemed open to the idea of me inspecting the twitten at night with a torch. Bits of rain are forecast now for the next few days, so more shy, prudish toads will be on the move. I will be on my bench in the dark, waiting for them.
Mid-March and it finally feels like spring. The sun is shining, there’s a gentle warmth out of the wind. There are hairy-footed flower bees fighting over lungwort, the first Eristalis tenax drone fly basking in the sunshine. A bald wet alien climbs up a daffodil stem and later reveals itself to be a newly hatched narcissus bulb fly. There’s a chiffchaff on the shed roof, the first tadpoles in the pond.
I sit in the front garden and marvel at my new meadow. It’s nearly looking good: daffodils provide colour and height, above the snowdrops my sister Ellie gave me for my birthday, and the first of the bright pink lungwort flowers. There are large clumps of grass I can’t yet identify, which looked out of place a few weeks ago but now seem less so as everything has grown around them. There are clumps of other things emerging, too – somewhere some of the 50 snake’s head fritillary bulbs I planted in autumn, along with what looks like alliums I must have missed when digging up the herbaceous plants. (They might look out of place in a native-ish wildflower meadow but I can always cut them for the vase.) There’s purple toadflax, which seeds itself in and provides leaves for the caterpillars of the toadflax brocade moth, along with nectar for dozens of bees, butterflies and moths. There are primroses, which haven’t quite done anything yet, and primulas, which must be somewhere. There are the first lush clumps of mountain cornflower, the first new leaves of evening primrose. There are strappy leaves of greater knapweed, splayed-out rosettes of shepherd’s purse. I’m pleased to find the wall bellflower, Campanula portenschlagiana, is finally growing in the wall – after four years of trying I had almost given up hope. The sweet rocket is putting on growth and should flower for the first time this year. Above it is a large gap in my side of next door’s hedge, where I’ve planted winter honeysuckle and ivy, in the hope that something might thrive there. Eventually, I would like them to outgrow the forsythia and Japanese spindle. Just a little bit. Just enough so they still provide support for the ivy to grow up.
When I moved the meadow from the back to the front, I planted things into the rain shadow of the hedge to see if anything would survive. I’ve been emptying the previous night’s hot-water bottle on to it daily for the last few weeks and my efforts are paying off – the ox-eye daisies are putting on growth, along with the red clover and some sowthistle that had self-seeded. That area will always be drier than the rest of the garden and I’m hoping I can work out which species will not fare so badly there. There’s plenty of room for other things to seed in if they want to, otherwise it can just become an additional habitat for mining bees, many of whom nest in dry, sparse soil.
We often forget, as gardeners, that every single thing in the garden has the potential to be a habitat, like the leaves that were blown into the pond, which provided a microhabitat for tiny new tadpoles that sit in them and eat algae from them. The rain shadow in the front garden, where plant growth is limited because the hedge stops rain falling beneath it, could therefore be celebrated as a habitat in its own right. Rather than trying to encourage things to grow, rather than emptying endless spent hot-water bottles on to it, perhaps I should leave it bare and see which invertebrates use the expanse of soil, which plants seed in that can cope with the dryness. There’s another mini habitat here, too, a little pile of stones and earth beneath the gas meter that mining bees might nest in or a frog might take shelter beneath. Along the far side, beneath the hedge, is a tiny wall where the render has started to come off, revealing a mass of bricks with no pointing. Perhaps hairy-footed flower bees nest here, and there will be other insects and spiders taking advantage of the sunny crannies, too. Literally everything is a habitat.
The pots along the front path are coming along well. The tiny strawberry tree that will never be a tree, the mint and oregano that will soon be ready to harvest. The agapanthus, the lavender. Everything is so full of promise.
In the back I steal an hour to do some gardening. There’s not much to do so I sweep the patio and pull up the remains of last year’s sweet peas, and put the table and chairs back out. I cut back fern leaves, beneath which new fists of growth are punching through the soil. I pull out crocosmia seedlings and sweep bay leaves off emerging primrose flowers. I transplant clumps of grass that have seeded into the border to some bald patches of lawn, and use a fork to scratch the remaining bald patches to sow seed into. Rain is due tomorrow so I’m hoping the combination of moist soil, mild temperatures and a dog that hates being wet might just encourage germination.
