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.

The leaves of the rose are on the turn, yielding the first autumnal hints of russet and amber. Through the binoculars the chiffchaff is the perfect yellow-green and the combination of the two has me awe-struck. I curse myself for not having a fancy camera but remind myself I am looking in real time through binoculars. Savour the moment. I watch, intently, as the chiffchaff picks aphids from the underside of the leaves, moving delicately up the stem until its weight causes the stem to bow down and it flies up, startled. It does this a few times, before I wrest myself away and back to my desk.

The chiffchaff (Phylloscopus collybita) is a summer migrant, a small, insectivorous warbler named after its repetitive summer call, which sounds like it’s saying its own name over and over. It doesn’t chiff chaff at this time of year, though, it hweets, from every tree.

Its scientific name (Phylloscopus) means ‘leaf seeker’ because it likes to eat insects such as aphids, caterpillars, gnats and midges from leaves, like my roses. This is why, as I keep telling anyone who will listen, we shouldn’t remove insects from our plants, we should always celebrate the fact that they are food for other species. What would the chiffchaff have to eat if I had removed the aphids? Or worse, what if the chiffchaff ate poisoned aphids that had been sprayed but not removed?

It’s olive green, with a pale eye stripe and a darker ‘eye brow’. It’s almost indistinguishable by sight from the willow warbler; they’re much better told apart by their different songs – the willow warbler has a watery warble rather than the obvious chiff chaff. Their contact calls differ too, the willow warbler’s is more of a hu-weet than a hweet. I see and hear willow warblers in the garden, too, but they are gone by this stage of autumn.

Both species breed in the UK in summer, and overwinter in southern and western Europe, southern Asia and North Africa (although more recently, thanks to climate change, some chiffchaffs avoid the long journey to overwintering grounds and remain here). Birds of wilder spaces, I see them only in spring and autumn, presumably just after they arrive and again before they leave – on country walks I hear them calling from the tops of trees but never catch a glimpse of them. My garden is a stepping stone, a place to spend a few days after making landfall following a long journey, and again to fatten up and gain strength before heading back. These fairy-like birds, which glide from tree to bush and make calls I usually hear only in the countryside, mark the seasons.

There have been other migrants of late, too – swallows and house martins in their hundreds. I watch them flying over the garden, in the park, on the high street. Like the chiffchaff, they also head south for winter, travelling great distances to reach their African wintering grounds. House martins do sometimes nest in the suburbs, but swallows, like chiffchaffs, are countryside birds. It’s strange watching them now, in such an urban setting. Strange watching them above the traffic and noise of the urban sprawl of Portslade. What are they doing here? The same as the chiffchaffs – flying south from wherever they nested in the UK; Brighton is the last bit of land before they cross the Channel. They need insects to fuel their journeys, they need our gardens with leaves and trees and an absence of bug sprays; we gardeners can help them on their way. In the park, with the dog, I watch a lone swallow quarter above ground, navigating around children playing football and dogs being idiots, a random dumped armchair, the scout hut, litter. It goes round and round and round, jerking left here and right there, avoiding this and that or moving suddenly for a morsel of food. Tosca and her best friend Alfie gambolling in the background, Alfie’s mum Rhi and I chatting about our days. I think about the land the swallows used to find here. Before the park was a park it was a landfill site and before that ‘waste land’, a brick pit, fields. When did this parcel of land last have nesting swallows? Last have nesting chiffchaffs? Will it ever again?

Little nephew Stanley has discovered the allotments in his village. He and his mum, Ellie, walk past them on the way to the park and he asks to stop and look at the vegetables before playing on the swings and slides. Ellie texts me a video of him wandering around the beds, pointing out ‘pumpkins’ (winter squash), runner beans, a large white butterfly laying eggs on nasturtiums.

‘Where are the tomatoes, Stanley?’ Ellie asks.

‘I think they’re over here,’ he replies, running off. ‘And here are the big pumpkins,’ he says, which of course are a different species of winter squash. ‘They’re beautiful!’

‘Get off the mud, please, Stanley,’ says Ellie. Three years old and already in love with an allotment? No chance, sis. Absolutely none at all.

Stanley’s fondness for ‘pumpkins’ led to his parents taking him to a pumpkin farm to harvest his own Jack-o’-lantern for Halloween. I’m not sure how he managed it but he came away from the farm with eight pumpkins, one of which he carried around with him for three days.

‘Stanley’s in the bath with his pumpkin,’ texts Ellie. I beam proudly.

‘He’s one of us,’ I tell Dad on the phone a few days later. ‘He’s got the gene.’ Dad wasn’t around for long when I was little, but when he was it was me and him on the veg patch, me and him harvesting runner beans and puddling in leeks, me and him adding sticks to the bonfire on late summer evenings, me and him against the world. Suddenly Dad and I both know exactly how we’re going to spend our time with our little green man: outside, loving what we love, together.

Ellie doesn’t have that ‘gene’, the calling for the outside that Dad and I have. Just two years younger than me, she had every opportunity to develop the same love and wonder for the natural world as I did but it never happened. She feels inadequate about it but she needn’t, it just isn’t in her. But it’s in Stanley, which is both hilarious and wonderful.

‘Sis, how am I going to support him in this when it’s so alien to me?’

‘You’ll work it out,’ I tell her. You can develop an interest in gardening without being completely consumed by it. It doesn’t have to be all or nothing. You can learn enough to take joy from it yourself while helping to feed your child’s obsession. It needn’t be your everything, you don’t even have to be good at it.

They’re moving house soon and Ellie promises me Stanley will have his own vegetable patch.

‘Remember he’s only three,’ I tell her, and wonder how much Mum can be relied on to water things I plant for him. Or indeed if Ellie, pregnant with nephew number two, would know how to keep plants sated, if she even had the time to do so. It’s times like this I wish I lived closer. Or they did.

She sends videos of the new garden, which is mainly lawn but has a small greenhouse at the end and a sunny bed overrun with hypericum and euphorbia, which could make a nice spot for pumpkins. ‘Can we grow runner beans?’ she asks, ‘and sweet peas?’ We agree for me to go up one weekend in spring and set up some sort of veg patch. There are also roses to prune and a hedgehog highway to create, plants to identify. Mum has claimed the greenhouse as her own, which is a blessing as she will teach Stanley how to water, feed, weed and pinch out, and she will keep an eye on his veg patch when I’m not there. He’ll grow into a fine gardener yet.

Common darter dragonfly, Sympetrum striolatum

The common darter is a dragonfly that regularly colonises new ponds. Males are rusty red and females are more of an ochre, fading to a dull red as they age. They are narrow-bodied and ‘dart’ out to collect prey, which they take back to their perch to eat. The male will tend to use the same perch from which to defend his territory – if you sit and watch you will see him jump up to scare off a bumblebee or butterfly, before settling back down again to guard his space.

Climate change is, at the moment, working well for British dragonflies, which thrive in warm weather. The State of Dragonflies in Britain and Ireland 2021 report states that 19 species have increased their distribution since 1970, compared to five that have declined. We have gained eight new species since 1995 and two others have reappeared after a long period of absence. Most species are moving north and west into areas that were previously too cold for them.

The common darter appeared in my garden within weeks of me digging the pond. The following spring I conducted pond dips and found the chubby nymphs in my net, along with those of skinnier damselflies and mayflies. The nymphs eat tadpoles and other aquatic larvae before climbing up the stem of a plant growing out of the water and completing their final stage of metamorphosis into an adult.

When mating, the male and female form a ‘wheel’ where the male holds on to the female by the back of her neck with claspers at the end of his abdomen. If she likes him she will lift her abdomen up to the base of his thorax to allow him to transfer his sperm. They then travel together to the pond, where he holds on to her as she dips eggs into the water.