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.