Other than that, nothing. We don’t talk about it in the pub. Sometimes now, when they visit, they humour me: show us your garden then. And they say things like, Ooh, it’s coming on, isn’t it? Look at that wood. We return indoors and talk about music or film and I try to keep up. Occasionally someone will feign interest and I get to have half a conversation about it, like when I squeezed three people into my greenhouse and showed them my fasciated tomato flowers. How are your fasciated tomato flowers, they would ask, teasingly, in the weeks that followed.
We are still young, or so we tell ourselves, children of baby boomers. Few of us own our homes, least of all have gardens. Most of my friends are only just coming round to the idea that there’s more than one type of bird. But they are coming round, some of them, slowly.
Where possible I hide it away, keep it to myself. I prefer it that way. Best done when I’m alone and the neighbours are out. Just me and the birds. Me and the hangover. Me and the soil and the spade and the overflowing compost bin that needs emptying and its contents sieving and spread on the borders. That’s my favourite job. The dirtiest but most rewarding job. Shiny brandling worms glistening against black soil; compost so alive it’s writhing. A beauty known only to gardeners, that I save for my alone time. I don’t see friends when the sun shines.
The sky inks over and everything becomes still. A hundred herring gulls glide overhead, like fighter planes, towards the sea. Should I call someone? Starlings whistle to each other, forming small gangs to embark on their race to the pier. Even the birds are dancing.
On I press. There are so many bits of wood. So many little pieces full of nails, some of it rotten and compostable, others firmer, usable in some way. I chop up the best bits, bag it and leave it out for neighbours to feed their wood-burning stoves. With the rest I make my own flames.
Some of my best childhood memories are of roaming in my dad’s part of the garden, his world of vegetables and cow parsley, of runner beans and raspberry canes, of the pumpkins he grew for Halloween, of cricket balls found in the undergrowth, which had come over from the sports club on the other side of the fence, of the swing I would stand on, one foot either side of Ellie, as we tried to reach the sky. Mum dealt with the ornamental side of things nearer the house: flowers, well-weeded paths, colour and orderliness. The back of the garden, the vegetable patch, was ours. It was a mess. But in the neglect there was magic. Here was a huge overgrown broom, a climbing frame. Foxes lived here, birds nested, I played. It was a wilderness, with long grass that towered above me, a clapped-out greenhouse sheltering a huge grapevine that had escaped through a broken pane like a triffid, and tomato plants that could take your breath away just with the smell of their leaves.
On summer evenings Dad would start a fire, and we, his two toddling daughters, would be allowed to stay up late to ‘help’ him. As he cleared ground for crops and piled waste onto the pyre, we would gather things to burn – a twig here and a fallen plant stem there – and we would throw them into the fire, without getting too close. The fire, a living, breathing, eating thing, with its roaring flames and trail of smoke that drifted off into the distance, was the highlight of our summer.
From our garden you could hear the Birmingham Superprix which, for just four years in the 1980s, raced around the streets of Birmingham on hot summer days. And yet, in this semi-urban habitat, with Red Arrows and airships flying above us, the din of the city just a few miles away, here was where I learned to love. Where I roamed, bare-chested and muddy in my outfit of green velvet shorts and oversized wellington boots, wielding sticks and mud pies, and where my dad, Ellie and I made flames. In 1980s Britain this was my access to nature. It was more than most of my friends had.
It didn’t last. At some point my dad moved out and his overgrown vegetable patch was given over to wilderness. Between the ages of five and ten I tried, hopelessly, to restore it to its glory days of grapevines and gooseberries, hacking away at cow parsley with a stick, piling it up, asking Mum if we could have a fire (No), wondering why the weeds returned, thicker and faster, three weeks later, like creeping vines smothering our broken hearts. It became so overgrown I was no longer allowed to venture there; my mum liked to see me from the kitchen window. It became a forbidden realm, like the air-raid shelter we could no longer get into, such was the impenetrable wall of ivy.
Eventually, my mum, sister and I moved to a small house a couple of miles away, with a tiny, well-tended garden, a pocket-sized path and a collection of shrub roses. And the people who moved into my former territory, who replaced me in My Natural World, razed my forbidden realm and put a tennis court over it. I know because I once sneaked into the sports club on my bike and scrambled up the fence and peered over. To see a world, my world, buttoned up, buried like that, destroyed me. That vision of my childhood lost beneath asphalt has never really left me. It may even have something to do with why I’m here now.
I start my fire. It’s a damp, dark evening, with raindrops hugging the air. I build a small pyre, which I add to in the dying light as my fire replaces the sun and engulfs the garden. I add bits of wood, supporting beams the decking was laid on, and fetch twigs and fallen stems, which I throw on without getting too close.
Scattered ruins reveal a life unravelled, a gardener without roots: kitchen scraps waiting for a compost bin, grow-bags of tomatoes I carried from place to place, bits and pieces I should have thrown out but kept for a rainy day. Three bee hotels. Stones, decking, mud; other people’s litter.
The bee hotels. I haven’t done anything with my bee hotels.
The concept of a hotel is a most un-bee-like thing. It suggests bees are as fickle and temporary as we are, that they want clean towels and soap wrapped in cellophane, dressing-gown and disposable slippers in the wardrobe. That they might stay for a few nights or a week, breeze in, breeze out. But they don’t. They live there, some spend their whole lives there. There are around 250 species of bee in Britain. Just one of them is the honeybee, which makes honey and lives in enormous nests, mostly in hives managed by a beekeeper, though occasionally you find them in the wild. Then there are around twenty-five species of bumblebee, most of which make nests underground, in old mouse holes or under sheds; others nest above ground in long grass. All other bees are called solitary bees. Theirs isn’t a matriarchal society like a honeybee or bumblebee colony; there are no enormous nests with a queen and workers and drones. Each bee is out for herself, solitary.
There are lots of different types of solitary bee but the ones that use bee hotels are cavity nesters. They’ve evolved to nest in holes in dead wood made by wood-boring beetles, and in the spaces in hollow stems that appear as plants rot away. But in our gardens dead wood is a health-and-safety issue, and broken plant stems are consigned to the compost heap. So a bee hotel it is – every garden should have one. South-east facing, morning sun. Can’t go wrong.
Imagine a box filled with bamboo stems cut to fit the depth of the box and packed in tightly. A box of holes, essentially. This is your most basic bee hotel. You can use a variety of other materials – wood, paper straws, hollow plant stems, mud – but let’s stick with bamboo for now. Having mated, a female will choose a bamboo stem and claim it as her own – from now on it’s her nest chamber. She’ll line the far end of the chamber with cosy material for her baby. Some types of bee use cut leaves or flower petals, others use mud. Then she’ll gather pollen and nectar and make a sort of cake, which she will place within the lined chamber. Eventually she’ll lay an egg on the cake and then seal the nest with more material (leaf, petal or mud). She has now created her first nest cell within the chamber. After this she will create a second cell, add another cake of pollen and nectar, lay another egg. By the time she’s finished she will have filled her bamboo cane with a row of nest cells, each containing an egg and parcel of pollen and nectar. Each bee hotel can cater for many bees, all creating their own, individual nest chambers: red mason bees arrive in May and June and seal their cells with mud; leafcutter bees arriv
e from June to August and seal their cells with cut leaves. Blue mason bees come along sometime in the middle, and chew leaves into a sort of pulp. Use bamboo canes with different-sized holes (the smaller the better) and you attract a wider variety of bees.
I have three bee hotels: one consisting of an old champagne box filled with bamboo canes, another box filled with hollow stems of garden plants. The third is fancy – consisting of a purpose-built wooden block with nest chambers carved into it behind a Perspex screen, housed in a wooden box with viewing panels. You can open the viewing panels to see the nests the bees have made (best done in the evening so you don’t disturb them). Trust me, it’s better than telly.
Every summer I sit in front of my bee hotels and coo over bees. Red mason bees always; blue mason bees sometimes. Never leafcutter bees, sadly. At times, these bee hotels have been my world. I’ve lost days staring into them, watching the comings and goings, the carrying-in of a bit of mud. I know everything. I know which species uses which hole. Which are dummy cells designed to fool predators, and which are bursting with new life. These boxes of summer bring me such joy. I can’t believe I’ve just dumped them outside with everything else.
My hotel of hollow stems is more successful than the rest. I made it last year; it attracted red mason bees within a week. I had temporary sleeping quarters on a friend’s sofa; the bees had a permanent home in her garden. It’s seen better days. Opportunistic spiders have spun webs in front of the holes to catch the bees unawares and it looks a mess, but it’s been in continuous use for two summers. The bees must be attracted by the smell, it must stink of bee. My friend, Cara, lives only around the corner, so I brought the hotel with me when I moved here. I’m not messing too much with the ecosystem by moving bees a quarter of a mile from where they started nesting. And I can look after them better in my garden.
Except they’ve been outside since September, with the junk and the kitchen scraps and the wood and the stones. All activity has stopped now. The eggs that were laid in spring and summer will have hatched into grubs, which will have eaten the little cake of pollen and nectar left for them by their mother. In late summer they will have pupated, as when a caterpillar turns into a butterfly, their tough red cocoons protecting the grub as it metamorphosed into a bee. And these bees are just sitting it out in the box now, outside with all that rubbish, waiting, like me, for the sap to rise.
Most people leave their bee hotels outside all winter but it’s a good idea to take them down and pop them in the shed to keep them cool and dry. If they get wet, they can develop fungal diseases, which can kill them. Also, tits and woodpeckers have learned that bee hotels are home to a great number of nutritious insects, a winter bounty, and they can raid them, destroying a whole generation, and weeks of hard work, in a matter of minutes.
I like to ‘harvest’ the bee cocoons and clean out the bee hotels. I do this in winter when the bees are fully formed inside their cocoons, so there’s no danger of causing horrible mutations while they are metamorphosing. Harvesting helps to keep parasite numbers down, but I do it for the process. I get to count the bees, clean everything up and get it ready for spring. It’s no more difficult than cleaning out a bird box. And, if I ever lived somewhere for more than five minutes, it would enable me to measure the growth in my garden’s solitary bee population. You can plant flowers and create habitats, but only when you count each bee that’s been laid in your bee hotels will you know if the population is growing, if the things you are doing are working.
I know, it’s not for everyone.
It’s dark already. I’m sitting on my dad’s old sofa trying to watch the news. I’m feeling guilty about my bees. There’s no outside light. But it’s time, I have to do this. I haul myself up, fire up my phone torch and open the back door. They’re not hard to find. I grab the box of hollow stems first, followed by the other two. I brush them free of cobwebs and woodlice at the back door, bring them in.
I boil water for a night-time tea and clear a space on the floor – move the rug out of the way and pile two cushions in front of the settee. I make my tea and carry it over with the hollow-stem hotel. I tease out the stems and then gently pull the occupied ones apart, releasing the cocoons. There are woodlice everywhere, spiders; the floor is alive. But there are forty-seven bee cocoons, forty-seven parcels, each containing an adult bee sitting out winter, ready to emerge in spring. Most are red mason bees – the larger ones female and the smaller ones male. Some are blue mason bees. There are no leafcutters here, which makes me sad – I’ve never been able to attract them. I gently brush frass (bee poo) off the cocoons and place them in a bespoke ‘release chamber’, a little drawer purpose-built into the fancy hotel. This I will keep cool and dry in the porch until I have a shed, and then they’ll live in there until the sap rises. Only in March will I fix it to the sunny back fence so the bees can wake up in the newer, smarter hotel, which is far less likely to attract spiders and woodlice, and hopefully return to nest here, rather than in the knackered old hollow stems they’ve been using for two years.
I replace the hollow stems in the box and put that in the porch as well. Just in case I’ve missed anything. I sweep up the woodlice, which have now worked their way to every corner of my living room, and take them outside again. My tea’s gone cold. But the bees are OK. My bees are OK.
A compost bin, two bare-root roses, an apple tree, a guelder rose, a spindle. Infrastructure. Native plants to bring in native insects – moths, leafminers and those that eat them. Creatures that will return, like the sun and the soil, to the garden that yet will be a garden.
I’ve been shopping.
I bought two terraced nest boxes for the house sparrows. They like to nest in loose colonies, so six homes in a row should be lovely for them. Still they gather in the buddleia and holly in the gardens on either side of me. They fly from one safe space to the other, avoiding me, the sea, in the middle. I’m the crevice between two mountains, the valley of death. Stay away from there, say the house sparrows. Stay away from that woman and her mud and stones.
Among the mud and stones is litter everywhere: old plant pots, bricks and builders’ rubble left under the decking. Fag ends, chocolate-bar wrappers. It’s endless. Every day I bag it up, take it down the steps, through the flat, out the front door, up the steps, to the bins. I stop, sometimes, when I find nice things to do something with, like the bit of wood I drilled holes in to make a bee block. Something might like to live in it. I take small breaks to dig and weed. Dig and weed! Each slice of my spade is a sigh of relief, a creaking of old bones, an intake of air. But there’s earth, a whole chunk of it. Look at the soil, look at the roots. Look at it, look.
The soil is terrible. Dark and crumbly, a sort of silty clay, and it’s loaded with builders’ rubble. Tiny stones, bits of metal, lumps of earth, glass. I sieve it but soon realise I’m sieving out the goodness, too, those lumps of clay with all their nutrients. I make a note to find the nearest stables so I can bring life to this soil with manure.
There’s no sun in the garden yet. It will be spring before it hits this patch of earth. I work in the shadows, knowing that when the sun finally comes, it will be the first the soil has seen in thirty years.
I want to see my laughing starlings when they wake from their roosts beneath Brighton Pier. I’ve seen them dance at sunset so many times but never at dawn. I want to watch them celebrate the rising sun before they journey back to the roof of my house, heckling me as I unveil land that will feed them. The bastards.
Mid-December. The sun doesn’t rise until after 7 a.m. but I want to be there sooner. My alarm goes off at six. It’s cold. I dress in long johns and jeans, two pairs of socks, woolly hat and woolly gloves. I fill a Thermos flask with hot tea.
I step out of the flat and carry my bike up frosted steps. A blackbird gently practises his song from a rooftop aerial. Bin men work at the other end of the street, their creaking lorry lifting great metal bins into its mouth. I fiddle with my lights and then jump on my
bike, away from the bin men and blackbird towards Sackville Road and the shore. I can barely see through the steam coming from my nose and mouth.
There are fewer cars than usual but still too many, the street-lit seafront already littered with dog-walkers and runners – I had convinced myself I would have this experience to myself. Still, there’s a faintly nostalgic quality about it that reminds me of being on holiday, a newness I can’t put my finger on. Beach flags ripple in the wind before the hidden sea. It’s still dark but there’s a faint green glow where the sun will rise, just east of the Palace Pier. My Star of Bethlehem.
There are three degrees of twilight. Astronomical twilight is barely noticeable, the first hint of day, when the sun is between 12 and 18 degrees below the horizon. Today it starts at 5.54 a.m.; I have missed it. Nautical twilight comes after, when the sun is between 6 and 12 degrees below the horizon, from 6.35 a.m. This is followed, at 7.17 a.m., by civil twilight: daylight to my untrained eye.
The wind hurts my face as I ride against it. The nautical sky is inky blue-black and I can just make out wisps of cloud and aeroplane contrail, as darker shadows of herring gulls rise up from the even darker water. The odd star holds on to the lightening sky but the moon is gone. Bright lights from the road advertise less salubrious activities: Casino, Envy, Legends.
I lock my bike to the railings by the pier, retrieve the flask of tea from my pannier and crunch pebbles down to the sea. I want to get under the pier, beneath where the starlings roost. I fail. I look up into the girders and see nothing. Sensibly, they roost where people can’t reach them, further into the pier, above water. To reach them I would need a boat, or . . .
The Bumblebee Flies Anyway Page 3