Wildlife

The current popular opinion, if adverts and comments on social media are to be believed, is that a garden is a place that is managed or manicured, from end to end by the occupants of a house. Grass is allowed, or encouraged, to grow, but must be maintained at a certain length by regular trimming. The lawn mower is an essential tool for this, driven by petrol or by electricity (the days of pushing this device around by hand are long gone) and for most gardeners 'cutting the lawn' has become a weekly ritual. Invasive plants like dandelions or buttercups must be ripped out (or chemically poisoned) but the real horror is the dreaded moss. Chemical treatments abound for dealing with this plant no matter where it tries to grow and even if these are not your thing there are pages of guidance for eradicating it before it can overrun the garden. Around the 'lawn' (an area of soil-covered land planted with grass and other durable plants such as clover which are maintained at a short height) the edges must be trimmed neatly so that the growth does not intrude into the 'flower bed' that surrounds it, this being managed for other purposes such as for plants that are allowed (and expected) to produce blooms which can be cut off and displayed within the house.

If you have read this far then you may be thinking that we do not hold with the protocols described above. Yes, we do have a garden, an area of land outside the house, and yes, there is grass growing there in places.

There is also a healthy covering of moss, heather, reeds, daffodils and an assortment of plants I cannot name, scattered about in patches through which random shrubs poke out. Many years ago, before the house was built, the land here would have been forested. We know this because the tree stumps are still dotted about here and there with roots still buried in the soil. The result of this is that even though the trees are long gone the remnants of various forest dwelling plants are always trying to emerge into daylight. We find this fascinating. It is what we might call 'wild' but the important part for us is that is that the garden is largely unmanaged, despite this being totally at odds with the accepted definition of what should be done with a 'garden'. The lawn mower gets very little use. Maybe once a year it comes out of the shed but the uneven ground and the rocks randomly sticking out means it cannot go everywhere so often we simply don't bother.

We were delighted to discover that our unmanaged garden was attracting at least one nightly visitor, here captured on camera taking a stroll, and he has rather generously been leaving his droppings dotted around the garden. We don't complain if occasionally a fragment is stuck to the shoe when we come in from the garden.

These small black parcels do no harm, in fact they will probably add richness to the soil once they crumble away but there are places we would prefer the deer to avoid, like our fruit bush patch. We hope that the 'deer deterrent' fencing we have set up will have the desired effect. This is 'management' at a minimal level.

Other wildlife captured by the camera is somewhat smaller but sadly with such a fleeting glimpse as this we can only speculate on what it is.

Despite that lack of management from us the garden is not totally wild. We have raised beds in which we plant onions and garlic, a polytunnel for the more delicate herbs and for tomato plants to grow in and then there is the vegetable patch for the rhubarb and the potatoes. (Deer do not eat rhubarb.) Management of the whole garden consists of removing bramble shoots before they can get established and then trimming back any growth that seeks to flow over into the cultivated areas. Many would use the term 'weeds' for this and it is likely that most onlookers would use this term for the tall grass stems and the thick bed of moss that covers most of our garden. But a weed is a plant growing where it is unloved and unwanted. Everything growing in our garden is what we enjoy to look at and wander past.