I finish my chips, ball the paper up and shove it in the compost. I fish out the secateurs and a little Tupperware box, cut down spent foxglove stems and shake the seeds into the container. Some end up scattering themselves on the ground and others are helped over the fence. But there’s a fair amount of seed for raising more plants if the others fail, for working into other gardens, for creating more habitats.
We’ve come full circle, the garden, my mum and me. All of us broken, none of us quite fixed. But we’ll get there, as Mum always says, we’ll get there. Until the next thing happens, the next bucket of cement is poured over the living.
Once upon a time I lived in London. I rented a basement flat for six months while Jules and I looked to buy. The ‘garden’ was a patio – front and back. It was bare when we arrived but I grew tomatoes and sunflowers in pots, composted in a bucket. In the back yard we found seven frogs living in the drain. I asked the neighbour upstairs if he knew why they were there and he told me he’d filled in his garden pond when his daughter was born. Those frogs in the drain must have been searching for moisture in the hot summer, or perhaps they had grown from spawn laid there in desperation – they were all babies. The drain took water from the neighbour’s kitchen above, which would often be coloured from paint from his daughter’s play time, or contain soap from the washing machine or dishwasher. I made a pond for the frogs using a tub trug and a flower pot, which I placed inside, upturned and weighed down with a stone. Packet-bought watercress made adequate plant cover. The frogs remained fond of the drain, but one by one they found the tub trug. They would sit on the upturned pot and catch flies, and then at dusk disappear down their bespoke flight of steps to their evening quarters. They seemed brave for frogs, unlike others which shy away from humans, plopping into the pond at the first sight or sound of us. But then it was pointed out to me that, in a bare strip of patio, with no plants or anything else for shelter, there were few places to take refuge – they merely appeared brazen but they probably weren’t. I made all sorts of piles for them then, using imported leaves and sticks, so they could hide. We saw less of them after that. But oh, did we love them. One of the frogs was bigger than the others and had a prominent hump on his back. We called him Humpy Back. In summer evenings I would take a bath with the back door open and listen to the slap-slap of Humpy coming in and exploring the bathroom and hallway.
The three-year-old daughter, for whom the pond was filled and the paint washed down the sink, ironically was obsessed with nature. She would beg her parents for a leaf or flower from my ‘garden’ whenever she went by, and I was happy to oblige. She liked tomato leaves best, soft and fragrant, easy to crush in a small hand. When we moved I gave her a sunflower that had managed to grow in a crack in the wall, and which the letting agents had forced me to remove to get our deposit back. The stem was prickly to touch and it towered above her but I like to think it opened a door to an unknown world she might one day want to explore.
When we moved it was only around the corner, and so I took Humpy Back and his friends with me. I couldn’t trust any new tenants to keep a container pond going. I gathered them in a Tupperware box and transported them in a borrowed supermarket shopping trolley, along with the tomato plants, sunflowers and mobile compost bin – we didn’t have a car and couldn’t afford to hire a van. All survived the move and settled in well. I upgraded their pond to an antique tin baby bath, to which I added native plants to complement the watercress. The new garden backed onto the living room, so I would lie on the settee with the back door open, listening to the slap-slap of Humpy on the wooden floor. Sometimes, when it rained, I’d make myself a nest in front of the window and watch four or five of them on the patio, shoving worms into their mouth.
I think about Humpy Back a lot, about how long that pond had lain untouched in the garden above the basement I found him in, how many generations of frogs before him were able to breed successfully yet suddenly weren’t able to. How unlikely it is that another garden would have a pond in that built-up area of London, that someone would come along and dig one. The garden has already been churned up, already a fence separates it from the basement. And if the house were further divided into flats, would a fence be erected, apportioning different ‘outside spaces’ for each floor? Fencing, decking, fake turf, bean bags, a ‘garden room’. No habitat for frogs or means for them to reach it. Nothing green, nothing useful. How many years does it take to destroy a garden? For a population of frogs to die out? How many generations of chipping away so that, by the time everything has died, no one really notices?
In the 1980s my dad would clean insects off the bonnet, windscreen and headlights of his car. He did this religiously, worried the bloody, splattered carcasses would ruin his precious paintwork. When did you last clean insects off the bonnet of your car, Dad? Thirty years ago, he says.
Thirty years ago, our insect populations had already suffered a crash, after the drought of 1976 caused caterpillar food plants to shrivel and die and stopped flowers producing nectar. The ecosystems were already depleted, already broken, and some insects have never built their numbers back up since. We naturalists hark back to our childhoods as some rose-tinted vision of an insect-rich past. We are all David Attenborough talking about his buddleia. But in reality we are harking back to damaged goods, to things not right, to sustained, aggressive declines. We write about averages but we barely know what they are.
Thirty years before that my mum and her siblings played in a garden, around the corner from where I grew up. They found woolly bear caterpillars and collected frogs in buckets. They broke into the field at the bottom to ride Tiny the pony, and beyond that into the mere to collect frogspawn, sticklebacks and leeches. By the time I came along the garden had become a car park. Thirty years ago my mum would take me on walks around her Memory Lane, me on my bike, my Spokey Dokeys clattering noisily as I practised wheelies and tried to run over my sister, blissfully unaware of Mum’s loss.
Thirty years before that, clouds of pipistrelle and Daubenton’s bats would rise at dusk from the bridges of the Thames, black clouds of them hurtling around insects in the fading light. Now? ‘Under favourable conditions,’ writes Sladen in The Humble-bee in 1912, ‘humble-bees store honey, the flavour of which, as most schoolboys know, is excellent.’ Do they?
The further back we go the more wildlife we find. In Aix-en-Provence in southern France in 1608, residents found ‘blood’ on the walls of buildings and the local cemetery. Many believed it to be the work of the Devil but some suggested it was caused by butterflies. Further back in time, in 1553, naturalist Philip Henry Gosse described in his book, The Romance of Natural History, that hedges, trees, stones and people’s clothes were sprinkled with ‘drops of red fluid, which was supposed to be blood, til some observant person noticed the coincident appearance of unusual swarms of butterflies.’ Some summers I gather caterpillars from stinging nettles and raise them in my kitchen. When they emerge from the chrysalis, they appear to bleed; it’s a tiny amount, nothing more than a droplet. This bright red, blood-like liquid is meconium, described as ‘a metabolic waste product from the pupal stage that is expelled through the anal opening of the adult butterfly’. Nice. How many butterflies would be needed for a whole village to think the Devil was at work? More than I will ever see in my lifetime. More than my great-grandparents ever saw in their lifetimes. It was called Blood Rain. It means something completely different now.
Thirty years ago I grew up in a garden that shaped me, made me. I played with moth cocoons, worms, pigeon feathers. I gathered runner beans and sneaked up on baby birds while their parents gathered food for them. I was photographed in front of naff 1970s shrubs and colourful butterflies. I sat among ants and made collections of leaves. I threw mud pies at my sister, climbed trees, learned to love.
In thirty years’ time many children of today will not remember insects because they did not know insects. They will not remember butterflies because they did not know butterflies. They will look back o
n indoor childhoods, on screens and social media, on merchandising, on the park being too unsafe or rundown or unknown to play in. Insects will become extinct without them ever being seen, a door closing another inch on the natural world.
Every thirty years a little bit of land is ramped down, paved over. A new driveway, a garden office, a five-bedroomed house built in the gap between two others. A little more land is locked up, a new fence erected. Fences that deny children the right to explore and make mischief, fences that stop hedgehogs in their tracks. Like a waterfall, through which everything can travel freely from A to B, our gardens are gradually freezing over as winter sets in. We, the people, are winter. Will there ever be a thaw?
Each generation of naturalists harks back to their childhood, baselines shifting every thirty years. There was more wildlife in the Good Ol’ Days, but there was also more squalor, cholera, infant mortality, feudalism and a deep-seated fear of the monarchy and God. Can we have enlightenment and health and insects? Can we have Democracy, Queer Rights and Women’s Rights and insects? Must witches be burned at the stake for us to have insects? Can we reverse what we’ve broken without reversing what we’ve fixed?
Thirty years ago I read Tom’s Midnight Garden and now I’m reading it again. I cry for the lost garden, the friendship between old and young, the shared love of a beautiful garden surrounded by fields that was long ago carved up to make houses and roads and driveways and creosoted fence panels. The garden will always be there, says Hatty, says Tom. Only one of them knows it would last only in dreams.
Thirty years ago I had the opportunity to ask my granny questions but I didn’t. Instead she taught me things I took for granted then, but which I hark back to now. Since the morning she terrified me, in 1989, I’ve not heard a dawn chorus to match the one I heard with her. I wonder if it’s as loud there now. It won’t be.
I don’t know what my garden looked like thirty years ago. It may already have been decked, depleted. Thirty years before that it might have been beautiful. A lone box bush, once probably clipped to a ball, suggests others might have existed in the space. The house was built in 1875. Before that it was fields. Before that woodland. At one stage there was a dairy and a baker’s and, until quite recently, a farm. I wonder what lived and roamed here, and what will do so thirty years from now.
Jacques Cousteau said people protect what they love. But in thirty-year cycles we are forgetting what we love. This genetic imprint of woodland, wildflowers and the animal kingdom that we rely on for health and happiness and memories, which makes us human, is gradually being eroded. And with it, so is our wildlife.
A bumblebee lands on the wall, stops awhile, combs the hairs of her thorax with her little brush legs. She’s a red-tail, all crushed-velvet black coat and bright-orange bottom. She’s perfect and beautiful. I pretend she’s a descendant of long-gone Adrienne, coming to tell me they’re OK and thank you after all. I take her as a sign, a talisman. It’s a warm day and I wonder if she’s hot, busy from gathering pollen for her siblings. I check the bird bath for water, make sure there’s a stone in it for bees and wasps to rest while they drink. We sit together in the sun, she combing her hair, me watching.
Adrienne’s daughter stops combing, settles, as if thinking, as if pondering what to do next. I suppose I might have a drink, she says, I suppose I should get back to work. She half-heartedly gets up and buzzes, lazily, to the nearest borage flower, has a drink of nectar, moves on. She buzzes among other bees, from the borage to the honeywort, the chives to cranesbills. Only the last of these blooms remain, globe artichoke and agapanthus almost ready to take over.
She returns to her little bit of wall, bit of shade, returns to combing. I wonder where her nest is. An abandoned garden maybe, a bit of brownfield land, an allotment. Perhaps celebrated in a well-tended and loved garden – we’ve got bees! Yes! I hope so. Red-tails can nest in walls, under sheds, in old mouse holes, an old duvet thrown out into the yard. If you build it they will come, if you don’t they may come anyway.
But it would matter hugely if we gave them a helping hand. If we stop razing gardens and paving them over, drowning what’s left with poison and suspicion. What could this land become if we just let things be? If we learned to love a bit more, to let things work themselves out. If we outlawed slate chippings and weed-suppressant membrane? If we grew out of this horrid obsession with ‘outdoor rooms’, paved-over front gardens, fenced-off land, convenience. How happier we would be – look after the bees and everything will follow. Everything including us.
Mum called me today. For a chat, she said. She’s not eating enough vegetables and she wants me to bring some from the garden on my next visit. She wants to eat some fish. She’s doing so well but I wish she could see it. She’s 80 per cent fixed but sees 20 per cent still broken. She’s beating her friends at Scrabble again, completing the hard Sudoku. She’s amazing. The doctors and nurses are amazing. The resilience of living things is amazing. Today I understand half of what she says. I correctly guess a quarter and pretend to know the rest. I’ll get there, she says.
The bee stirs again, engages her flight muscles, lifts herself up and over the flowers, higher and away as a helicopter rising into the clouds. As she ascends I imagine her view; the garden becomes smaller and more far away, the walls irrelevant, unseen, the divided patches of land as one. Off she goes into the blue, high above the houses with people crammed in them, the roofs and chimneys with the seagulls, the mossy gutters, the laughing starlings, the jackdaws. What does a fragmented, fenced-off land look like from up there? What would it look like if we all made our gardens better, joined them together? Gardens linked all the way to the train tracks, the train linking Hove to Brighton, to London, to Mum, to the garden, to every garden I have loved and lost and every bit of land that’s ever been wild. Ever. Higher and higher she flies until all she can see is green, habitat-rich networks allowing all to travel, feed and breed. Life pulsing through Britain’s veins.
Far below her now the woman sits on the lawn in her little parcel of recovered land. Grass sways in the breeze, flowers nod to lure bees. There are holly blue and speckled wood butterflies, a lone red admiral soaking up the sun. Leaves hide hoppers and miners, aphids and flies. Above the pond a second generation of common darter dragonflies dances for a mate. Life. It just needs a chance. We just need to give it a chance.
Species list
Below are all the species I saw and was able to identify in my garden. There are a few leafminers and other critters I couldn’t work out, and the lack of moths and their caterpillars is more a reflection of where I was in spring and summer (Birmingham) than the actual number that visited my garden. But still, for a garden brought back from the dead, I’m quite pleased.
Birds
Blackbird Turdus merula
Blue tit Cyanistes caeruleus
Collared dove Streptopelia decaocto
Dunnock Prunella modularis
Feral pigeon Columba livia domestica
Goldfinch Carduelis carduelis
Great tit Parus major
House sparrow Passer domesticus
Robin Erithacus rubecula
Starling Sturnus vulgaris
Woodpigeon Columba palumbus
Bees and wasps
Blue mason bee Osmia caerulescens
Buff-tailed bumblebee Bombus terrestris
Common wasp Vespula vulgaris
Early bumblebee Bombus pratorum
Ectemnius wasps Ectemnius species
Furrow bee Lasioglossum calceatum/albipes
Garden bumblebee Bombus hortorum
Gooden’s nomad bee Nomada goodeniana
Hairy-footed flower bee Anthophora plumipes
Heath bumblebee Bombus jonellus
Honey bee Apis mellifera
Ichneumon wasp
Leafcutter bee Megachile centuncularis
Leafcutter bee Megachile ligniseca
Orange-vented Mason Bee Osmia leaiana
Plasterer bee Colletes
species
Red mason bee Osmia bicornis
Red-tailed bumblebee Bombus lapidarius
Toothed flower bee Anthophora furcata
Tree bumblebee Bombus hypnorum
White-spotted sapyga Sapyga quinquepunctata
White-tailed bumblebee Bombus lucorum
Wool carder bee Anthidium manicatum
Yellow-faced bee Hylaeus confusus
Butterflies and moths
(NB: comparatively few records due to lack of a moth trap)
Angle shades Phlogophora meticulosa
Brown-tail moth Euproctis chrysorrhoea
Buff ermine moth Spilarctia luteum
Holly blue butterfly Celastrina argiolus
Large white butterfly Pieris brassicae
Peacock butterfly Aglais io
Red admiral butterfly Vanessa atalanta
Silver Y moth Autographa gamma
Small tortoiseshell butterfly Aglais urticae
Small white butterfly Pieris rapae
Wax moth Aphomia sociella
Flies
Bluebottle Calliphora vomitoria
Broad centurian fly Chloromyia Formosa
Common drone fly Eristalis tenax
Crane fly Tipula paludosa
Greenbottle Lucilia sericata
Hoverfly Eristalis intricarius
Hornet hoverfly Volucella zonaria
Lacewing Chrysoperla carnea
Long hoverfly Sphaerophoria scripta
Marmalade hoverfly Episyrphus balteatus
Hoverfly Myathropa florea
Narcissus bulb fly Merodon equestris
Non biting midge Chironomidae species
Hoverfly Platycheirus peltatus
Hoverfly Syrphus ribesii
The footballer Helophilus pendulus
The Bumblebee Flies Anyway Page 19