Notes from a wild-life garden: March 7th

March certainly came in like a lion this morning. I wore three jumpers under my coat to combat the wind-chill factor and was driven in by a snow-shower. (This garden, by the way, is in the south-centre of Edinburgh, Scotland.)

However, it was a pleasure to see and hear a good many frogs splashing and croaking in the pond while I got on with weeding and tidying the most managed of my wild flower beds. A robin came to assist. I suppose robins evolved to take advantage of places where big mammals turn up the soil, so it is probably anthropomorphic rubbish to call them “friendly”, but I like them a lot. I hope to be able to report on some successful nesting next month.

This business of managing a wild-flower bed may seem a bit odd, but there are some wild flowers I want here (campion, foxglove, poppies and so on) and some I do not (docks, nettles, dandelions, couch grass). This is a very arbitrary distinction, I admit, and the so-called weeds have other places to flourish in the garden, in the strips I think of as verges. The most arbitrary distinction is to like meadow buttercups but to root out creeping buttercups. The fact is that wild gardening is by definition interventionist. If I just left everything unmanaged there would soon be a thicket of nettles and brambles and hogweed, with ash and sycamore gradually taking over. This is good in places no doubt, but not in a small garden.

The ethical dilemmas involved in being interventionist loomed very large around the pond in February. What fun to see a heron on the water-margin. How much less fun to see it eat several frogs in a few minutes, on three days running. 

In the end I rigged up a system of coastal defences and boarding netting to keep the great bird away. I’m sure the frog population of Edinburgh is not going to be wiped out by herons, but I fear that the little breeding colony in EH10 might be. Anyway, on the one hand the heron got some pretty substantial meals at the end of winter; on the other there seems to be plenty of frog activity (though no spawn yet). Two years ago every scrap of spawn, and tadpoles, was wiped out by a pair of mallard. It’s tough out there.

At the other end of the garden there are four bird-feeders, devouring money and providing daily pleasure. If the person who gave me a feeder shaped like an apple in a Church Choir Secret Santa is reading this they may be pleased to know that, filled with sun-flower kernels, it is emptied every few days by a flock of siskins. What one might call “normal” garden birds appear most days – including plenty of sparrows, I’m glad to say. Their numbers have declined but our neighbourhood provides a lot of food and a lot of roosting space.

Meanwhile spring is busting out all over as far as plants are concerned. I love it!