About Me and My Garden

I grew up in the suburbs of Solihull, a metropolitan borough nine miles south of Birmingham. I never really knew wildlife until adulthood. Not ‘proper’ wildlife. Not the sort of species you see in old Ladybird books, not big birds of prey or badgers or moles or even swallows or house martins (although my granny, who lived in the countryside, would point them out on walks near her house). I knew blue tits and small tortoiseshell butterflies, frogs, worms and moth cocoons. I knew conkers and spiders and ants, pigeon feathers, slugs and snails. I didn’t really know anything wilder than that. But I’ve always craved it. ‘I always knew you’d end up working with the soil,’ says my mum.

Gardening was my way to wilder things. As a child I would lie on my belly and look deep into the thatch of the lawn, at ants crawling among the blades of grass. I would watch blue tits come and go from the tit box, I would move nearly dried-out worms stuck on the pavement, on to the soil (I still do). I have always been drawn to plants and planting, gardens, the outside. I had my first vegetable patch at the age of 10, a room packed with houseplants at 20, my first allotment at 24. But still there wasn’t much wildlife, or nothing that I’d really noticed. I guess it took a while for my eyes to open.

They were opened for me. A red-tailed bumblebee made a nest in an old duvet in my ex’s backyard, and her neighbours complained to the landlord. I searched online for how to move it and, with help from the Bumblebee Conservation Trust, managed to transport it – intact – to my former allotment. With just two stings to the face I fell in love, and suddenly a world opened up that I had barely known existed. I read bumblebee books, learned how to identify the different species (there are 24 in the UK), learned how they live and breed and hibernate. I would go out just to look for bumblebees, see if I could find them in early spring or still on the wing in late autumn. I would pick them up and stroke them, move them from pavement to flower. I would follow instructions on how to make a nest in the hope that, one day, a queen would return and make a nest in my garden. They never have. I’ve rescued and moved more nests since – nests made in walls that were being torn down or in compost bins that were tipped over, or in a bush blocking a doorway or in the ground too near a path. Many have been successful but most had already succumbed to parasites. But none has ever found her way here to breed in my garden. Yet.

I moved on to other species: butterflies, amphibians, birds, flies. I learned as much as I could, bought every book, absorbed every tiny detail of their lives and habits, their needs and … their declines. Most UK species have been in freefall since those days of lying on my belly looking into the thatch. Most have suffered the double whammy of changes in land use (building cities and towns, making farmland more ‘industrial’) and pesticides, including insecticides that kill insects, herbicides that kill the plants insects feed on, and fungicides that make the insecticides more potent. I made it my mission to create as many homes for wildlife in my garden as possible, to understand the needs of these species and use my position as a writer for a well-known gardening magazine to tell everyone how to do the same. I assumed that people, once they knew what was at stake, would want to help wildlife. That they would want to grow flowers for bees and erect boxes for birds. That it wouldn’t be long before we had streets of long grass and bird boxes, nectar-rich flower beds, hedgehog highways and native shrubs and trees. That there would be more wildlife. Cities of wildlife. That we would have more hedgehogs and more birds, more bees and more butterflies and hell, more spiders and earwigs and blow flies, why not? That one day there would be more, not less. Not even less. Not ever the quietness there is now. Because we knew about the declines and we had the power and knowledge to stop them. Why would we let things get worse? Why would we let species disappear?

In her 1962 book Silent Spring, Rachel Carson documented the chipping away of life at the hands of those who used the pesticide DDT, which not only killed insects but was also found to thin the shells of birds’ eggs, meaning few birds had successful breeding attempts. She died two years after her book was published and didn’t live to see DDT banned across the world (in the US in the 1970s and the UK in the 1980s). Neither did she live to know that it’s still used in some parts of the world today and persists in our oceans as a ‘forever chemical’. Nor did she live to see the continued destruction of the natural world, the habitat loss, the ‘progress’. I’m glad. To think her silent spring would have been so noisy and raucous to my ears some 60 years later is the cruellest irony. How would she have coped with the silence there is today?

I will never know the abundance of life my parents and grandparents knew, which they probably ignored and took for granted. I wish I could go back to see the abundance of species in childhood because, even though I saw very little, I know now how much more there was 35 years ago. I fill my garden with plants for wildlife, make spaces for only the wild things. And yet still it’s quiet. Still, there are few flies buzzing around my house in summer, there are few butterflies on my buddleia. There’s an eerie quietness that goes with the realisation that you can’t hear bees buzzing. Where are they? Why aren’t they in my wildlife garden? I’m surrounded by concrete but some of us are growing flowers. Is it enough? Will there ever be enough?

I garden for the wild things, for my sanity, for the child with her head in the thatch. I want there to be more wildlife. I want swifts in my nest boxes, butterflies on my buddleia. I want ants and slow worms and earwigs and caterpillars. I want fat hedgehogs that are fat on beetles, not cat biscuits. I want a full clutch of tits in the tit box. I want abundance and noise and to stop worrying about every last quiet thing. Is that too much to ask?

Home is a small Victorian terrace built for railway workers, in Portslade-by-Sea, just outside Brighton. It’s urban with an industrial past; it used to be called Copperas Gap, owing to the extraction of stones made of iron pyrites (copperas), which were used to make sulphuric acid. There was a windmill at the bottom of my road until the 1870s. The Victorian houses that replaced it are lovely but – unlike West Hove, which butts up against Portslade via a busy high street – there are no street trees. Now there’s a busy port in place of a beach and cliffs, described proudly as ‘the industrial centre of Brighton and Hove’. It was its own urban district until 1974, when it joined the borough of Hove and is now part of the city proper.

Portslade is considered by some as the slightly rough-and-ready cousin of Brighton and Hove. It’s not as pretty or as genteel as its fancier relatives. But it’s cheaper to live here and much, much quieter. It’s close enough to the South Downs that I can walk there from my house. Plus, we have bigger gardens than those in the city centre, and hedgehogs.

When I moved here four years ago, the garden was a fairly standard 1960s design, with patios at either end of its modest 14 metres and a concrete path to one side of a tiny lawn, overgrown with enormous non-native shrubs like Japanese spindle and Californian lilac. Someone had planted a eucalyptus tree less than a metre from the back door. The small front garden was covered in weed-suppressant membrane and stones. I ruthlessly ripped out all the plants, shrubs and eucalyptus in the back, along with the back patio and concrete path. In the front I took up the stones and membrane, replacing them with a riot of pollinator favourites: viper’s bugloss, dyer’s chamomile, lungwort, primroses, cranesbills, knapweeds. ‘Oh, you live in the house with the flowers,’ say the dog walkers in the park. ‘I always cross the road so I can look at them.’

While the front garden bloomed I worked on the back: I planted native trees (hawthorn, rowan and silver birch), a tiny mixed hedge of hazel, more hawthorn and things like guelder rose and field rose, and then planted more guelder rose, hazel and European spindle as shrubs in the borders. Among them I planted flowers: honesty, foxgloves, snowflakes, hellebores, primroses. I laid wildflower turf – proper turf, with lots of lovely native grasses for caterpillars to eat, and wildflowers for bees and other pollinators to feed from. I trained climbers up to the tops of the walls for nesting birds and punched holes in the bottom of them for hedgehogs to travel through. Along the entire side of the shed I made an enormous habitat pile out of the things I had ripped out, which is now home to everyone except me. I drilled holes in the trellis for solitary wasps, I made a log pile in the spaces beneath and behind the bench.

Smack in the middle of the garden I dug a pond. It’s big – some might say too big – but I wanted something that would bring lots of wildlife and, as a general rule, the bigger the pond, the more species it attracts. It’s kidney shaped, with a maximum depth of 60cm in the middle, graduating gently to shallow edges, as a good wildlife pond should be. It has a ‘beach’ of stones at either end, for birds to bathe and tadpoles to congregate, and hedgehogs to enter and exit easily. It has natural edges planted with grasses, primroses and trefoils. It has a dragonfly perch (a strategically placed stick for dragonflies to perch on) and a range of aquatic plants growing beneath, on and above the surface.

Some wildlife came straight away, and most of it came for the pond. Water bears and other microscopic life I couldn’t see, but then masses of flies mated and laid eggs on the surface, followed by water beetles and backswimmers, dragonflies and damselflies. One day I came home to find hundreds of backswimmer nymphs bobbing about in the water, and I watched them grow into adults and stay to lay eggs of their own. Other days I’ve watched egg-laying blue-tailed damselflies, mating common darter dragonflies. I’ve seen a sparrowhawk breakfast on a goldfinch at the pond edge, red mason bees take pond mud to line their nests. I’ve rescued half-drowned male wool carder bees that were fighting for territory over nearby bird’s foot trefoil and had accidentally fallen in (or been pushed?). I’ve seen bathing birds, from blackbirds, house sparrows and robins to goldfinches, chiffchaffs, crows and herring gulls.

One day I caught sight of a frog hanging at the water’s edge, as frogs do, for insects. I was so excited. I had high hopes of frogspawn the following spring but nothing came. They took a chance the year later, spawning for the first time the night before my 40th birthday – the best present I could have woken up to. And it wasn’t just a few; as if from nowhere, masses of frogs took to the water and spawned in great vigorous parties. I watched them through binoculars from the kitchen: frogs arriving to the pond and being ambushed, males fighting for females, the slow queue to the perfect spawning spot. I couldn’t count the clumps. After about two weeks they were spawning on spawn, completely filling one shallow ‘beach’ and then starting on the other. I’d never seen anything like it.

Summer was a riot of jumping froglets. They were like fleas, hopping about everywhere, in the borders, in the grass, on the patio. I was terrified of standing on one, of disturbing them. But I was so happy they were using the garden.

There are toads here, too. The first one I found was dead, lying on its back with its tongue hanging out. I’ve since found them in the habitat pile at the side of the shed, and occasionally they turn up on the night camera. Once, a neighbour brought me one she’d spotted in the road and thought it ‘must be on its way to your garden, Kate.’ It wasn’t, I popped it at the bottom of the habitat pile where it remained safe for the day, and then set the camera on the back gate to see if it would pick it up at night. Sure enough, as night fell, the toad headed out of the garden. Where was it going? There must be another pond somewhere. I scoured Google Earth to see if I could spot one in neighbouring gardens, and came to nothing.

The trees I planted were tiny whips but they have grown and now don’t sway when birds and squirrels land in them. The hawthorn and rowan bear blossom and berries, the silver birch catkins and seeds – all food for different species. There are bird boxes for nesting tits, although they have nested with me only once, and there are kitten biscuits for hedgehogs. There are bee hotels and hedgehog boxes and a bat box and swift boxes. There are neighbours with paved gardens but I’m working on that.

Because it’s not just my garden that matters, or my garden alone that can make a difference. I’m grateful for the alleyway (known in Sussex as a ‘twitten’ but you may know it as a ‘ginnell’) that connects my garden to eight sets of neighbours, a whole other road of gardens and, eventually, a small park. It’s quite brambly in places and some people use it as a dumping ground – both those who live here and those who don’t. But this is how the wildlife gets in. The hedgehogs, frogs, toads and slow worms all enter and exit via my garden gate and travel by stealth along a century-old coal route, in and out of the wider landscape.

Just one block from a busy high street in an urban, industrial port, with small gardens, many of them paved over or covered in plastic, you’d be forgiven for thinking wildlife doesn’t live here. But you’d be wrong: there are hedgehogs, frogs, toads and slow worms. There are birds and there are insects. There aren’t many of some species – songbirds are quite rare here, due, I think, to a dense population of cats, squirrels, magpies and crows; the nests always get predated. And I don’t know how well others are doing or how numerous they are but they are here, so I can help make life better for them. In my lawn there are nesting mining bees, in my long grass and knapweeds there are caterpillars. In summer a bat catches mosquitoes over the pond, in spring and autumn the garden becomes a stepping stone for chiffchaffs and willow warblers, on their way to and from their breeding grounds. Plenty of species either don’t live in the area or haven’t found the garden yet but I always keep an eye out for them. That’s half the joy of wildlife gardening: wondering who will turn up next.

In short, the garden is just beginning. By the time you read this it will be at least six years old, the trees and shrubs growing into the space created for them, the pond hopefully hosting a complex variety of life. I sit or stand at the kitchen window that looks out on to the garden and I watch and dream of wildlife. I imagine the space when it’s grown, make plans, see what’s working, laugh. Sometimes I cry and I sit on the floor, looking out until I feel better, until I see a frog or a sparrow, a butterfly, a hedgehog. The garden is a part of me as much as it is the wider landscape, and I am a part of it. We grow together but we struggle together, too. We help each other out, me providing water to keep it going, it providing life to distract me from The Big Things. I hope the wildlife will come to know my garden as a safe space, an oasis in a desert of plastic and concrete, amidst unpredictable weather and humans with their collective fist on the self-destruct button. I hope I can encourage my neighbours to do more for the species that live here, that we can all create better habitats, better connectivity and a better understanding of what is actually needed to save species and improve our world. I hope, across the whole country and indeed the whole globe, we can fall back in love with our environment and treat it better, through the simple act of tending the spaces outside our back doors. I hope, I hope, I hope.

April

My story begins in spring, 2022. So far, the year has mostly been dry and above averagely warm – we had the mildest New Year’s Day on record and less than half of January’s average amount of rainfall. I found my first paired-up couple of frogs on 26 January, which sent me into a meltdown because it was so horribly early, but my first snowdrop on 29 January, which is about the same as it always is. Conditions remained mild for February but grew stormy: Dudley, Eunice and Franklin all occurred within a five-day period, bringing strange purple but sunny skies, fallen trees, disruption to roads and railway networks and flooding to parts of the north. Here it brought enormous sticks for our dog, Tosca, who kept trying to bring them into the house but couldn’t work out how to get them through the door. Most of the country saw above-average rainfall during the storms but in Brighton it remained dry.

Spring is a time of greeting old friends: the first hairy-footed flower bee of the year, the first great fat bumblebee queen, the first butterfly, the first flute-like call of the blackbird on the roof. I press my ear to the trunk of my silver birch and listen for the rising of sap. I marvel at the mitten-like leaf buds of my rowan. I watch bumblebee queens taking baths in the bright orange pollen of crocus flowers, great tits gathering caterpillars to feed their young. Every day there’s a new friend to greet, a new bee, a wasp, a butterfly, a frog. I’m so grateful they survived winter. ‘Hey bee,’ I say, ‘you made it!’

And so it’s April. Still very dry but now cold. There are lots of bees in the garden and I’m grateful so many seem to have survived hibernation. There are fat bumblebee queens but also mining bees in the lawn and borders, red mason bees in the bee hotels, hairy-footed flower bees on the lungwort and primroses. They have everything they need in my garden, but only because I’m watering it. I’m so troubled by the lack of rain.

Spring is happening but it’s muted, it’s less than it should be. The ground is parched, the plants are stunted and there just isn’t the volume of insects I have known before. Everything should be lush and green. Caterpillars should be feasting on foliage, beetles scuttling among the thatch. And aphids, hoverflies, leafminers and millions of other critters that most of us never even notice, should be feasting, breeding and then being eaten by species further up the food chain. And they are, but there are fewer of them than usual, and they’re struggling.

The hedgehogs are struggling, too. Rescue centres are filling up with dehydrated and hungry hogs who can’t find enough natural food – typically caterpillars, beetles and earthworms despite their reputation for eating slugs and snails (they do eat slugs and snails but far fewer than we would like them to). I’m keeping a close eye on them. I have a small trail camera, which I position by the hedgehog boxes or by the feeding station, or looking out over the pond or a bit of grass, or the bird bath that has become a de facto hedgehog watering hole, and each morning I drink tea and watch hedgehog videos in bed, a ritual I have come to love since moving here. I live in hope that I might spot them mating or bringing hoglets into the garden – the closest I have got is seeing a male circling a female as a precursor to mating but the camera shut off before I could find out if he was successful. Still, without mating (which, I realise, is an odd thing to obsess over at breakfast time but is a nice distraction from the weather), I can see how the hedgehogs are doing. I can watch their gait for limps, count ticks, see if their eyes are OK, see if they’re drinking and feeding enough. It all adds up to monitoring the population, even if I’m probably monitoring the same ones several times a night.

There are two hedgehog boxes filled with straw in the side return, partially hidden by pots planted with hazel, ivy, wildflowers and herbs. At this time of year there’s always lots of activity here, as the males search for females to mate with (often while maintaining huge erections). I watch them trundle down the path, looking in one and then the other. They use the boxes as sort of ‘bachelor pads’, sleeping in them for several days at a time and then moving on to another den somewhere else. The boxes are usually empty in winter, so apparently not good enough for hibernation, and I’ve never had a female make a nest in one. But they seem perfect for nomadic, horny males.

On the cameras today is a hog carrying dandelion leaves into one of the boxes. I can’t see if it’s male or female but I watch it collect leaves from the dandelion patch I left on the patio, and my heart soars. I hope it’s a pregnant female, taking a chance on the bachelor pads for the first time, but if it’s a male just making his home more homely that is also wonderful. I am horribly, achingly worried about the dry weather, which no one is yet calling a drought but clearly is, and the impacts this will have on wildlife, on those that need water for drinking and bathing, for raising young. I’m anxious about the rivers and the trees, about all life that is being pushed to the limits of its own existence. But the hedgehogs will be OK. These few who use my garden will have water and food for as long as they need it, and nest boxes to bring dandelion leaves into. And I can watch them – it’s something I can do while we all wait, desperately, for rain.

It’s sunny but cold, the sky a child’s drawing of yellow ball suspended in deepest blue, the occasional fluffy cloud in the distance. Traces of frost remain on plants still in shade and ghosts of ice haunt the surface of the pond. Bees take cold nectar from spring flowers: brrrrrrr. The dog and I potter in the sun while the shade sleeps.

I plant out sweet peas and clear some of last year’s stems from the border, which I had left intact over winter so insects had somewhere to shelter. I top-dress potted plants with fresh, home-made compost and water them with grey water (recycled water containing biodegradable soaps and detergents), remove weeds from some areas and allow them to remain in others. I sweep the patio, deadhead daffodils, I tie rose and clematis stems into the trellis.

I put the bee hotels out – two in the back and four in the front, of different types, made using different materials and with different-shaped holes (square or circular). The bees have their preferences but these change every year and I like seeing which ones they go for. I fill one of the release chambers with last year’s red mason bee cocoons, as it won’t be long before they hatch. The leaf-cutters I leave in the shed, as these can be predated while in their cocoons and it’s safer to keep them locked away for as long as possible – they won’t fly until June. Sometimes, if I’m working at home a lot, I let them hatch out on my desk with the window open, so I can not only watch them emerge but see them safely into the sunshine, too.

In the pond little commas of tadpoles wriggle gently on fallen willow leaves. These sit just beneath the surface and provide a microhabitat, not only generating warmth as the sun heats small amounts of water above them but also food, as they’re covered in algae, which the tadpoles eat. I crouch down to watch them in their vast watery world. There is still some frogspawn left and the newest tadpoles stick closely by, some of them nibbling the jelly around their unhatched kin. Some have only just hatched and appear to lie on their leafy beds barely moving, with just the occasional wriggle of the tail. Others are older, bigger, and are using their tails more vigorously, swimming strongly in the shallows. Those older still are on the other side of the pond, feeding from algae growing on stones. All are vulnerable; it’s thought that just 1 in 50 tadpoles becomes a frog, the rest are eaten by other tadpoles and aquatic larvae, by birds, by newts. There’s enough here to feed everyone, enough yet to become plenty of frogs. Just as long as the pond remains a pond. I fetch the hose and connect it to the water butt and release my precious store of rainwater into their home. Just a bit. Just enough to keep a reasonable level so the tadpoles can swim freely.

Tosca growls, gently, for attention. The scruffiest of mongrels, she’s a mix of 13 different breeds largely made up of border collie, Labrador, springer spaniel and Pomeranian. She looks like a skinny little collie with an enormous Pomeranian tail, black with a ridiculous white bib. She’s bald on her back due to colour dilution alopecia, a genetic condition that comes from humans tinkering with the colours – the hair grows and then breaks off. She’s clever and funny and makes an excellent gardening companion. Mostly she lies on the bench while I potter, occasionally coming over for a cuddle. Other times she will fetch things from the habitat pile and scatter sticks and wine corks and pieces of root all over the garden. Or she will demand that I play chase with her or drop things at my feet for me to pick up and throw for her. When she gets what she wants she gambols around the garden, like a show pony jumping high over the long grass, pretending she will ever let me catch her. She has this wonderful way of purring while growling, which she reserves specially for play. Sometimes, I’ll be on my hands and knees planting or weeding something out, or lost in tadpoles or other pond magic, and she will creep up behind me and purr-growl for me to play with her. I turn around and she’s holding a toy in her mouth, hopefully.

Today she has a ball, which she drops as I turn around. Her big hazel eyes look at me, willing me to play. I stop gawping at tadpoles and throw the ball for her, and she brings it straight back and drops it at my feet again. I throw it again and she keeps it. At this time of year she can run around the pond, there’s not enough foliage to stop her, and so we play a futile game of chase; her leaping around the pond, daring me to catch her with the ball, and me unable to follow because I’m worried I’ll fall in.

The tadpoles continue to warm up and feed from willow leaves, the bees continue to visit lungwort and primroses. The birds stay away but only until we’ve finished running around. I get less done when I’m in the garden with Tos but my heart is fuller. And she makes me a better wildlife gardener, she always stops me doing too much. The blackened rosehips will be pruned another day, some of last year’s stems continue to provide shelter. I clear up the sticks she has scattered on the lawn and clear spent plant material into a heap, which I transfer to the habitat pile so any insects still using it can move on safely. There will be time again for gardening.

The walls of my garden are only waist high, and so trellis makes up the height to what I suppose is an acceptable level of privacy in this age of not talking to your neighbours while living on top of them. On the south-facing side the trellis runs the whole length of the garden but on the north-facing side, closest to the house, there are three fence panels that conceal the wall entirely, with trellis covering the rest of it at the far end.

The trellis supports a range of plants: rambling rose and clematis on the south-facing side; honeysuckle, hops and golden clematis, or Clematis tangutica, facing north (although they poke through the gaps to next door and get a fair amount of sun). Along the fence, which gets barely any light at all, I planted six little ivy cuttings that my neighbour Kate, two doors down, gave me when I first moved in.

Ivy is amazing. Self-clinging, you don’t need to tie it in to anything; it will grow happily up walls and fences and it’s so shade tolerant it will practically grow in the dark. It has a reputation for destroying fences and walls and it will, but only if they’re damaged in the first place. Ivy will take advantage of the smallest crack or hole but if the structure it’s climbing up is sound ivy can actually protect it. Studies have shown that, when growing up houses, ivy acts as natural insulation, helping to cool them in summer and warm them in winter. Another study showed that ivy absorbs polluting particles and that, when grown along main roads, it can help reduce pollution (and therefore save lives). Ivy provides habitats for anything from nesting birds to hibernating butterflies, its flowers are visited by pollinators and its leaves are used as a food plant by several species of moth, along with the summer generation of holly blue butterflies (in spring they lay eggs on holly). Its berries contain more calories, gram-for-gram, than the equivalent weight of chocolate and, because they don’t mature until late winter, they help birds get into peak condition for breeding.

I strongly believe that ivy can be a significant tool in mitigating the effects of the climate crisis and indeed absorbing CO₂, that it should be grown up every house, every office block, every patch of city that doesn’t have space for a tree but does have room for a small trellis. Every time I see a fancy green wall on the side of a building, with its many pockets of plants that need regular maintenance and watering, I think how much better and easier it would be if ivy grew there instead. There’s no need to water ivy because it’s drought tolerant, no need for feeding or tying in. Yes, it needs pruning – about once a year to stop it covering windows and growing into the roof – but otherwise it would need little attention at all. It’s versatile, too: in larger gardens and wilder areas you can leave ivy to develop flowers and berries but in areas with less space you can cut it right back as a flush, lush, living wall, a wall that supports life, absorbs CO₂, reduces pollution and looks so much nicer than the bare bricks and faded fences we city dwellers are faced with at every turn.

I haven’t planted ivy up the walls of my house because they need repointing, but I did plant it along the fence, which was in good shape when I moved in and remains so now. I had visions of my little cuttings growing and knitting together, of watching birds nesting in them and holly blue butterflies laying eggs on the leaves. Of letting some of it mature and bear flowers and fruit that would serve pollinators and birds, but mostly of having a well-clipped, lush green wall, something living where previously there had been nothing.

Of course, the cuttings just sat in their little soily beds and sulked for two years. I would watch them impatiently, wondering when, if ever, they would start to climb. I counted the number of fence slats above the tip of the tallest stem to measure achingly slow growth, and obsessed over the gaps between cuttings so I could track the very moment they became one. I suppose it seems like an odd pursuit, tracking the growth of ivy up a fence. But when you’re obsessed with greening the grey, when you know how vital and life-giving this stuff is, there’s nothing more important.

The cuttings finally started moving properly last year, and I took photos of them to track their progress. In April, a flush of new growth finally took one plant to the top of the fence, just one rogue stem reaching above a slim triangle of leaves. Astonishingly, no sooner had it reached the top of the fence than it started to become a ‘habitat’. In the first week of May, as the first brood of sparrow and starling chicks hatched from their eggs, I watched their parents descend on the garden en masse, frantically turning every leaf, every blade of grass for a morsel to feed their young. I watch them do this every year but last spring was the first time they climbed the ivy, the first time they were able to rustle among its leaves and eke out tiny things – tiny snails, tiny larvae – to take back to their nests.

Starlings love snails. Last spring a whole gang of them brought their chicks into the garden and showed them where the snails were. I watched clumsy fledglings flying from the rowan tree to the neighbours’ flat roof and smashing the living daylights out of their newly found treasure. The song thrush is well known for its snail-eating skills but less so, the starling. They come for other critters, too: fat leatherjacket larvae, caterpillars. I love watching starlings murmurate above Brighton Pier in winter, wondering which of them are fuelled by my garden.

Another ivy cutting has made it to the top of the fence since, while a third might manage it this year (it has just five fence slats to go). The knitting together might happen soon, too. Three stubborn cuttings remain resolutely grounded but they are growing, slowly, creeping along behind plants that will soon have leaves. I try to imagine what it will be like when the whole fence is covered in a lush panel of ivy, when more than one sparrow or starling at a time can forage among their leaves. Will a wren ever nest here? Or a robin? Will holly blue butterflies lay their eggs? Time will tell; I just wish my little cuttings would hurry up and cover the fence.