Through the Garden Gate June 2025

Although I'm no longer posting updates for the sake of it (posts about boilers and dog-friendly churches may follow), the heat will keep me indoors on this day off until I venture down to the steeple house for Corpus Christi and then to Malham church where the new incumbent is being installed; so thought a few garden snaps cheer up everyone, including myself. 

I thought this might be a new arrival, but in fact it seems just to be the Biting Stonecrop flower. It's just that the plant has never bothered flowering before!

Meanwhile, just above it, the bonsai-ed rowan is starting to look convincing and in very healthy leaf (provided I remember to water it). 

The same could be said of the slightly spindly rowan and the lovely red acer along the bank, which have to be watched in this hot weather. The acer was almost burned to death two years ago.

Meanwhile I can't work out how the old damson tree, with its split bark and powdery wood, survives from one year to the next. What's still alive? But yet again what's left of it is fruiting very well. Lady Arlen suggests I should save some stones and try to plant them, which I will. Meanwhile the roof of the Temple is rotten and needs replacing but finding somewhere that will supply the board seems less straightforward than one might hope! I can't fit a big sheet in my car, nobody will cut one in two, and delivery charges are steep.

The wildlife pond inserted into the midst of the big bramble bank is a great success, especially now I've managed to rig up a little pump fed by a solar panel on top of the damson, which circulates the water a bit. I often disturb a bird taking the water when I go to check on the pond. 

I am very glad to have seen off another incursion of the box-moth caterpillars - at least I haven't detected any for a couple of weeks - but the beautiful cinnabar moth caterpillars happily chomping the ragwort are far more welcome guests. 

Finally here is some hedge woundwort - stinky if you break the leaves, but fun to have.

Released Into the Wild

Every day at the moment I gather up from the indoor tanks a number of tadpoles that have turned into froglets, acquiring their front legs and gradually losing their tails, and transfer them to the pond outside. The greatest risk for froglets developing indoors is that they drown, unable to find their way to a rock or bit of weed poking above the surface of the water: this happened to at least one in the tank, whereupon its siblings ate it, an especially unpleasant thing to witness even though I only caught its later stages. So I'm keen gradually to get them to where they should be. 

However I do wonder whether I'm simply delivering nice packets of frog-shaped protein to the fish. I think the froglets are by the time they develop a bit big for the fish to tackle but who knows. I was going to close the tanks down and transfer all the remaining tadpoles out today, because apparently not all of them will ever metamorphose, and will remain as tadpoles; but now I think I may just leave them a little while yet. There are far fewer of them now so the remaining ones shouldn't be too stressed.

Abundance and Lack

Forget-me-not is clustered all round the bonsai-ed rowan tree, so much that you can't see its pot. There is a lot of forget-me-not in the garden this year; clouds throughout the beds, in the grass, under the trees. It looks stringy and insubstantial, but brave. Vetch is a wildflower I'm particularly fond of, and that's exploded this season, its lustrous purple flowers held aloft on spiralling tendrils above the grass. 

On Thursday I cleared out the pond, discovering sadly that there were only four remaining fish: one of the adult females had gone. That explains why they have been hiding despite the warm weather, though it still leaves me bewildered as to how a heron or some other predator can get at the fish despite the two layers of mesh, one string and one aluminium, over the surface of the pond. The blighters are, I know, persistent, but they would have to be preternaturally lucky as well to be around when a fish strays into the tiny unprotected portion of the pool. The water was full of clinging algae, but very little other life indeed apart from two frogs and a couple of pondskaters: not a single snail to be seen. I wonder how it has got so barren.

Spring, Believe It Or Not

It is cold and dry in the garden, and nothing seems very Spring-like. There are some bold primroses about and the daffodils are struggling to get going, but there has only been one camellia bloom and I wonder whether the buds will get beyond that.

In the pond, the fish continue to skulk around the bottom as it is too chilly for them to be very active, and this coming week is hardly likely to encourage them. There is frogspawn, and I'm considering whether I should take out a handful and rear the tadpoles indoors, not only because the cold could easily get to them, but because I don't fancy their chances once the fish do get active. 

Ambushed

One of the things occupying my attention during the few days I have off this week is the annual Great Prune of the garden. Later today this will mean, most specifically, cutting back the laurel and fir which occupy the area to the left of the steps leading to the upper part of the garden. It was to some horror a little while ago that I came across this photo of Dr Bones and the late Boots on their visit to Swanvale Halt Rectory just before I was inducted in 2009. That fir and the laurels beside it are about four feet high: now, they have managed to reach three times that height. Each year I have told myself, 'I'm really going to cut everything back this year' and somehow I chicken out. As far as this laurel is concerned, I've tried hacking back the tall stems a third at a time but somehow that hasn't reduced the overall height of the bushes at all and they are now massive. My ambition now is to take down at least three feet off the top of the bushes, which will reduce them to head height at the top of the steps, and about nine feet further down. 

There is a metaphor here. In the same way that the growth of the bushes has been imperceptible until I look back at some old photographs, so habits and patterns of thinking can overtake us without us being aware, and it takes some startling event to reveal the truth to us. The hacking-back of those is harder work as it can't be done with saws and secateurs. But I'm not at work so don't expect anything more profound than that!

Ta-Da!

This flower has appeared in the garden as a welcome distraction from anything else that might be going on and a reminder that the earth will spin on, carrying out the Lord's instruction to be fruitful and multiply, no matter what we manage to do to it. This stuff is bergenia, and heaven knows how it got into the borders of my lawn, just in front of the camellia. 'Pigsqueak' and 'Elephant's ears' it's apparently called, so symbolically it introduces not just colour and delight but an entire, if small, menagerie.

Animal Behaviour

Yesterday morning I was pretty sure the goldfish were in spawning mode. The remaining adult male fish was chasing one of the females around persistently and aggressively. He's a bit of a bully anyway, but that normally comes out at mealtimes when he will attempt to drive the other adult fish away from whatever food I may have put in the pond; similar behaviour early on Spring or Summer days is likely to be related to spawning, and sure enough the female fish looked fat and full of eggs. 

We've already noted what bad parents goldfish are: they view both eggs and fry as extra protein and will gaily eat them if they notice them around, which is why my two juvenile fish have done pretty well to survive to the point that they are too big for their parents to gobble up. I gather the reason why some goldfish go black until they are big enough not to be treated as a foodstuff by the adults is that it makes them harder to spot. But goldfish romance leaves much to be desired, too. If females have eggs to lay, the males will chase them around the pond or tank to 'encourage' them to do so, and this encouragement is quite rough. The females will be bumped and butted, knocked against surfaces, nipped, and chased to exhaustion before they finally lay their eggs ready for the males to fertilise. Presumably the reason why the female doesn't just save herself a lot of trouble by laying as soon as any male fish show an interest, is that a male capable of chasing her around for hours is likely to make a genetically sounder mate. I don't think the males get much out of the process either, as they always seem pretty worn out after it's all over too.

Just before heading down to the church, I went back outside to see if I could take a photo of the fish, but they were all calm by then so I imagined the eggs must have been laid, not that I can see them anywhere. In the process I managed to sit straight in a pool of pigeon guano on the surround of the pond, even though I'd noticed it earlier on. The natural world had its revenge.

Early Summer Garden Notes

For days I have found no caterpillars on the box hedges, and there seems to be a good deal of new growth on the plants which bodes well; I’m told you should give the hedges a bit of a water at the base if they are to recover from an infestation. I did find a moth yesterday – it fluttered out of the bush straight into my hands where, I’m afraid, it met its end. The pheromone trap has also captured a couple. It does seem that this infestation is over, but box moth is endemic to southeast England now so they will almost certainly be back at some stage.

Meanwhile my three remaining adult fish are now massive, and I am wondering whether I will need a bigger pond! The water has gone bright green, but the fish don’t seem to mind this; in fact I think they may quite like it as they are venturing out a bit in the daytime, perhaps feeling a bit more secure in the murk than they would if the water was nice and clear. It means that I don’t know where the two juvenile fish are, and I don’t want to clear the water out until the Autumn when – if they are indeed still there – they may be a bit bigger and I won’t miss them!

When people talk about planting more trees to combat climate change I always reflect that my problem is stopping them. My garden is perpetually in danger of being overrun by unplanned hazels, oaks, ashes and sycamores. There is no tree I love more than the rowan, but that seems to seed in the least convenient places too: the other day I pulled one out of a crack in the tarmac of my drive. I’m going to leave the copper beech seedling near the top steps: it’s made quite a journey to be there, as there aren’t any copper beeches anywhere nearby.

Flaming May

Not everything I try in the garden works, but my Japanese acer is doing what I intended, providing a flash of fiery red amongst the greenery:

But over on the box hedges I am losing the battle with the caterpillars. What has become a more or less daily disgusting task of squishing them never seems to reduce their numbers; I see other box bushes around the area (including one at the church) reduced to sticks by their attentions. Left to their own devices, the beasts will carry on until the box is destroyed completely, and any other creature that might use it will be bereft, including the box moths themselves. Just like human beings in our relationship with the earth as a whole, perhaps. I am investing in a pheromone trap to grab the adult moths and break into the cycle: that will, all being well, deal with cydalima perspectalis, but what might manage homo sapiens?

Spawn of Different Kinds

It is good to be able to send out a report on the garden which doesn't involve unpleasant death. Trying to get a good view of one of the fish who seems to have been in the wars yet again - it's the one who has been in and out of the quarantine tank with illness and then apparently savaged by something-or-other more than once, why it's always him who gets damaged I'm not sure - I spotted some unexpected new arrivals. There is one frog in this composite photo, but in fact two are present; and then there are two new fish! The pale one is very, very tiny, barely an inch in length, while the black one is perhaps a little less than twice that size. How long have they been there? I only noticed the adults spawning in the Spring a year ago, but can the pale one really be as much as a year old? Given the disparity in their sizes, can the large one be as much as two years in age, and been lurking in the murk of the pond all that time? I would have thought that the more likely explanation is that the adults spawned early one morning when I didn't notice, and these fish are the result of a Spring and a Summer round of spawning. Either way, they've done pretty well to get this far, surviving in a relatively small pond with four adults rampaging around. Goldfish are very bad parents, and happily gobble up their own little fry when they catch them. Apparently most small goldfish go through a black stage before they turn orange, but the only other fish I've ever seen spawned in the pond didn't - it stayed pale, like the little one in this picture, and never developed much pigment.

It's often said that goldfish grow to fit their numbers and environment, which is sort-of true, but they shouldn't - they have a natural size and only fail to achieve it if they're constrained, meaning they're not very happy. The ones I have ought to get to about seven inches in length, and the older among them have, but if I want to keep these two as well, I may have to get a bigger pond!

Garden Massacres

Pass this post by, if you are of a squeamish disposition!

Last year I realised my box hedges were under attack from box moth caterpillar. I have tried spraying them with supposedly eco-friendly anti-bug stuff but there is no sign that this particular liquid has that much effect on them. I experimented by taking a caterpillar away and spraying it in a pot: it died, but I suspect that it may have drowned rather than suffered any chemical effects.

A gardening website suggests ‘physical removal’ is the only way forward: you take the caterpillars away, and dispose of them. I quickly decided that physical removal, putting the insects into a bucket and, I don’t know, pouring boiling water on them, would be a bit of a waste of time, and I am afraid I have taken to squidging them in situ. If they have to die, squidging is probably quicker and more humane than the chemical or boiling options, and it helps that they don’t get bigger than about 15mm long. They are not hard to spot, although I rarely see them out and about, as they mainly stay secluded in their little webby shelters made by fastening leaves together. I don’t know why they bother doing this until they are ready to pupate, as one of the frustrating things about box moth caterpillar is that they have no natural predators: their green-and-black bodies are full of toxins which make the birds avoid them, when they would otherwise benefit greatly from the easy-to-eat protein crawling everywhere across the hedges. Possibly the funky smell that arises from crushed caterpillars gives a clue to their unpalatability. There would be enough to feed quite a few hungry birds.

It's all very unpleasant and not something I really like to admit doing; perhaps I rightly ought to let the caterpillars reduce my box hedges to bare sticks, which they will happily do if allowed. I do apologise to God, or nature, before beginning a few minutes’ murderous work over a lunchtime. At least, given the caterpillar numbers, I will not be stuck for a garden job for some time to come.

Interloper

Last year I caught sight of a flash of red in the branches of the hazel tree just where it shouldn't have been and kept telling myself I would investigate it properly, but by the time I got around to looking the hazel was in full leaf, the red had gone, and there was a little leafy twiggy plant poking out of the wall which gave precious little clue as to what it might be. Yesterday I sa w the red again and this time managed to get a proper look. 

This little thing appears to be a Flowering Currant, of all things, wedged into a crack on the top of the wall. Flowering currants produce fruit which are edible but impalatable to humans but presumably birds like them, which presumably is how it got here, after an avian of some variety dextrously poo-ed in the gap or wiped its beak on it. It is a nice addition to the garden's flora, despite its unrealistic position. I wonder if I can retrieve a seed and grow it on.

A Tiny Treat

Part of the delight of the garden is that it often furnishes surprises: you can never quite predict what's going to be there. The other day I went out to trim a couple of errand branches from the bay tree and found a goldcrest flitting around the pond. Goldcrests, Britain's smallest bird species, are shy little things but this one was keen enough to get at the water to be relatively unbothered by my presence. Back and forth, back and forth it went, and was still loitering about long after I'd got a reasonably good photo.

Even the leucistic blackbird reappeared after an absence of a few months - I hadn't expected to see it again. 

Barely Tamed

The savaging of the old apple tree that threatened to topple over in the Autumn was accomplished a few weeks ago. My professional gardener friend Lady Quercus says it should be all right, but it may concentrate on survival rather than fruiting this coming year, and I will have to look out for lots of sudden new shoots which will need to be dealt with. But as soon as I took the tangled branches off the south side of the tree, the prop I'd put under it fell out, demonstrating how unbalanced it was. I did reposition it, just in case.

The other day I looked back through my old photos for images of Boots, Dr Bones's dog whose loss I described previously, and some of the pictures show the garden too. I see that in 2009, when Boots and the Dr visited for my induction, the gigantic fir and laurel hedge which leads along from the sleeper-steps was just a couple of bushes no more than two feet high. How did it get so colossal without me noticing? How did it creep up on me like that? I did think the winter pruning was all done, but only this week I realised that the laurel bush right at the top of the garden leading into Melpomene's Grove has also turned into a sprawling tree which really needs restraining or its lower bits, which is what I really want, will become ragged and disorganised. So the ladder, saw and pruner have been taken out again. One day I will reduce it all to order, I tell myself!

Apples and Gravity

The old eating-apple tree in the garden hasn't been that heavily laden with fruit this year and normally I wouldn't take it off for a few weeks yet. But having noticed its southward branches nodding unusually low, I looked it over and found myself treading on a raised hump in the grass just at its base on the northern side. It was being pulled over! I hastily relieved it of all the fruit I could reach, and now I have wedged a post under it so it shouldn't move any further for a while, but come the winter I think a lot of it is going to have to be cut off, and I wonder what that will do to it, poor thing.

Hortus Conclusus

In his phantasmagoric 1984 art collection Hallelujah Anyway Patrick Woodroffe includes the haunting image of the 'Hortus Conclusus', a ‘melancholy mediaeval prophecy’ depicted as a sprawling and ruinously ancient tree rooted onto a tower of rock, islanded above a cataract in a poisoned and desolate landscape. The real medieval hortus conclusus, in contrast, was the ‘Enclosed Garden’, a walled would-be paradise designed to recreate Eden for the delight of ladies in hennins and escoffions, but Woodroffe’s is – he has a learned and fictional folklorist declare – an apocalyptic vision:

When all things come to an end – as some day they surely must – then shall the very last man shut himself away in the Last Garden on Earth. There he shall hide and care for the last tree and the last flowers, while all around him the world shall be swallowed up. … And one day even the Last Garden shall be swept away and with it the very last man, and the Earth shall have no husbandman, and shall run savage like the Wilderness. And of Man there shall remain no trace, neither memory nor regret.

Sometimes, when it’s all in full leaf and hung with bees and butterflies, my garden feels like the Hortus Conclusus, as though nothing exists outside it but ruin; as though the waves of desolation are lapping at its walls (or chainlink fences overgrown with bindweed and bramble). The water trickles in the pond and the marjoram flowers provide multitudes of bees in umpteen varieties with plenty to keep them going. The burning world is a long way away.

Of course it’s not. As the earth warms some plants will retreat and others will advance, and insects or birds we find familiar in southern England will be ousted in favour of others, new fauna which will cause us different problems. In fifty years, when I am long gone, my garden, if it still exists, will look different, and not because this little bust and the other statuary will be absent. A younger generation will accommodate itself to changes like this, and will mourn the past no more than I am especially affected by the lack of elm trees in the English countryside, which all vanished in my childhood thanks to ophiostoma ulmi. I fear that will not be the worst they have to deal with.

The Very Hungry Caterpillars

At first I thought it was box blight, but then decided it wasn't: mind you, it took cutting out a chunk of the hedge to work out. It is, rather, damage caused by box-tree moth caterpillar and the tiny pests did their terrible work in no more than a week. I couldn't see any of the culprits themselves, but that's who they are. At the moment the more important box hedges, the ones that form 'The Maze' (not a very difficult maze) are not very affected and I do hope the chemical treatment will see the caterpillars off. By the winter they are all pupating so that may be a time for another blitz.

Conversely the oak tree which I am concerned about on an ongoing basis seems to have quite good leaf coverage this year after all. It's right beside the box hedges and offers a contrast to their current poorliness.

How Many Lives Has A Goldfish?

Is there no end to the stress the pond can bring me? I went outside to feed the fish today and found one, the one who was savaged some months ago and spent several weeks recuperating in the hospital tank, on top of a stay there last year after its fins began falling apart, lying on top of the netting that covers the pond. Its head was still in the water so it was able to breathe but lay passively waiting for help. I scooped it up and put it back in the water whereupon it swum happily away. How did it get there? I can only imagine that it found its way into the little gully next to the plant pot which is not covered by netting, got stuck, and flipped itself out of the water trying to escape. Just as well no heron or cat was anywhere around as no fish could be in a more vulnerable position. I've now adjusted the net.

Last night, though, I managed to see two bats flitting about which has only happened once before. Every year I wonder whether there will be any bats and their reappearance is always a relief: I feel has though delight has not abandoned the garden.

Coming Up Not Quite Roses

To my amazement it was 2016 that I first noticed bugle coming up in the garden terraces at the Rectory. Every year since I have looked out for it and rejoiced a little when it has appeared, surviving again to add a little wildflower colour to the surroundings. This year there are loads of the little cones of purplish hue towering an inch or two upwards from the beds.

Another plant I have come to welcome is the Common Vetch, I think mainly because I didn't know what it was and took a while before triumphantly identifying it. This flower is both valued and scorned by farmers depending on what they are doing: it adds nitrite to the soil and is a good fodder plant for livestock, but you don't want it around once the crops are growing. In a garden, it merely straggles, coils, and flowers. Again, in past years I've had the odd stringy patch of it here and there, but this season it's all over the place. 

And thus the yellows and golds of early Spring - primrose and celandine - give way to the purples and the pinks.

All being well the roses will appear later on!

Demise and Survival

The pond and its residents have been a trial lately. Firstly I found a fish (the same one that was sick a while ago) with horrible wounds down its flanks: I couldn't see how it could have been attacked and did wonder whether it had got itself wedged somewhere and hurt itself trying to get free, so out of the pond and into the hospital tank it went for recuperation. There it remains, I hope slowly healing but clearly unhappy: the fish never like being in the hospital tank, tend not to eat anything and look very miserable during their exile. Then it became clear that one of the others was carrying eggs which it eventually laid, though being a young fish and having had them inside for some time they seem to have all been duff, which was a dreadful waste of energy on her part and that of the male fish who pursued her round the pond. Then a day or two later I found the female fish dead, with the same pattern of wounds as the sick one - less severe, but in her case apparently more deadly. Clearly something had happened as the pump had been shifted (stood on?) and the netting disturbed. I rearranged it so it is very hard to get anywhere even near the water.

But then I did a chemical test and discovered that the pH of the pondwater was sky-high, possibly because of the amount of algae present and/or a brick leaching lime into the pond. High pH makes goldfish very dopey and affects their ability to feed and so on. So I did a big clear-out, rearranging the pond's stones and scrubbing off as much algae as I could.

In the course of this I cleaned one of the plant baskets which holds some weed and noticed something that shouldn't have been there. It turned out to be a small cheap digital watch that I had lost some months before: I had had no idea where it was, and it had sat beneath the water all that time. It has lost about a minute and not long after I retrieved it the alarm went off. It does say 'Water Resist' on the front and so it has turned out!