It’s a wonderful ‘wild’ life in my busy garden

LAST

Sunday morning I threw open the dining room curtains to discover a life-anddeath chase under way. A mouse was making a run from behind a flowerpot to a clump of crocosmia, with the neighbour’s cat on its tail.

If next door’s moggy had been a tiger from the Sundarbans it couldn’t have been more dramatic and I watched as the cat stalked and pounced fruitlessly while the mouse remained safe beneath the thick blanket of last year’s dead stalks.

Just a few days earlier I had made a mental note to tackle the crocosmia before this year’s growth started to emerge, but then there had been a hard frost so nothing had been done. That cold snap proved to be a stroke of luck for the mouse, which eventually made a dash for the fence and disappeared through a tiny gap.

If I was a tidy gardener I would have missed the moment and probably those other encounters with moles and voles, hedgehogs and foxes, birds and bumblebees that are all part of daily life here. If there weren’t tasty shrubs hanging over the boundary, then I doubt the roe deer would bother grazing on the other side of my fence and if I netted my pots I wouldn’t see those tulip-stealing squirrels.

During the summer months my unsprayed roses are a magnet for aphids. Thrushes feast on snails, while the caterpillars on the nasturtiums are a running buffet for anything with a beak.

Nibbled leaves and spoiled buds are a small price to pay for a garden filled with so much life, even if quite a lot of it is the slimy sort.

The gravel strip beneath the kitchen window is a favourite hiding place for snails. I’ve come across dozens while clearing away dead leaves and

twigs. Slugs like to hang out beneath flowerpots, so if you’ve got a collection of these, or even a stack of plastic pots behind the shed, check them now and you’ll make a dent in the slug population before they emerge to start feasting on soft, spring foliage.

Fortunately, as I grow lots of them, slugs and snails don’t seem to have a taste for primulas. Perhaps the leaves are too tough or have an unpleasant taste. I’ve had primulas in flower all through the winter and now they are positively flourishing, brightening up the path that runs from the back door.

This is also where I grow hellebores and small daffodils and where I plant out forced hyacinths when they have finished flowering. This wasn’t planned as a spring border, but that’s what it has become and the effect of so many early flowers, all grouped together, is much more pleasing than if I had spread the same bulbs and blooms around the garden.

Now that I’ve started it I want to develop it further, so in March, when they are sold ‘in the green’, with their foliage still attached, I plan to add some snowdrops and there’s always room to squeeze in another hellebore or three.