INVITE AMPHIBIANS INTO YOUR GARDEN

Frogs need your help. Their various habitats have been largely lost to our developments, rural and urban, and they are facing other threats from the way we humans live. Species such as the Golden Bell and Australian whistling frogs need clean water – that is – water that is free of man-made pollutants including pesticides and herbicides, although their ponds need not look clear.

They need insects to eat too, so a habitat where insects are poisoned as a result of our need for unblemished fruit and vegetables is going to be unsuitable and potentially deadly to them. All things considered, a thoughtful gardener can easily establish conditions that frogs enjoy and so invite them into their gardens. I have little brown whistlers in mine (pictured) and more specifically, in the barrel that sits at the centre of my forest garden, partly filled with water and a skerrick of frog. It’s cool and clean and (I have to assume) full of insects, as the little frogs look well fed. If every gardener had a similar habitat in their own garden, there would be the possibility of froggy croaks all around town and that would be a wonderful thing – to my ears anyway.

This flowering herb can keep a gardener waiting for over a year for reproduction by seed, if those seeds are left to turn black and hard. Many of them will still sprout, but not until a long period of waiting has passed and the expectations of the gardener significantly fallen. In nature, such plants shed seeds en-masse and their replacement seedlings emerge quickly. Storing such seeds in jars for sowing the following year is the least effective method of keeping those species and varieties going.