Tree of life In the last of his occasional series, Richard Mabey reflects on the garden as a stage, with stars ranging from slime mould to advenutrous grandchildren

In the last of his occasional series on gardens, nature and serendipity, the writer and broadcaster Richard Mabey reflects on how all life, from simple slime mould to riotous grandchildren, has a role to play in the improvised drama of his Norfolk garden

Most early autumns a curious yellow curd appears scattered across our meadow. The patches are frothy and shapeless and look more like some excremental fall-out than anything living. It’s called ‘dog-vomit’ fungus, but that is an insulting misnomer. I prefer to be reminded of lightly cooked scrambled egg. And it’s not a fungus or even a plant, but a slime mould, a kind of organism that is now on a branch of its own on the great Tree of Life.

Slime moulds are truly astonishing creatures. They spend much of the year as a swarm of microscopic, single-celled organisms browsing on yeasts and bacteria. Then in the autumn, or whenever there is an abundance of food, the cells come together and form the communal yellow splodges. At this point the aggregates metamorphose into something resembling a fungus, putting up fruiting bodies and dispersing cell-rich spores, so that the whole cycle begins again.

They have one other extraordinary property. During aggregation they form critically efficient channels between sources of food. In one recent experiment, scientists laid out oat-flakes (a favourite slime snack) in the geographical disposition of the stations on the Tokyo underground system. The slime-mould swarm scoped the whole area, then gradually began to refine the links between the flakes (along which food is shared) to echo the tracks of the underground train lines, sometimes finding even more direct links.

Slime moulds seem to me a metaphor for the social and ecological life of gardens. Plants and creatures and ideas swarm about in the ether and are then brought together in these foci of activity, and come into flower and seed, ensuring their own continuance. In my two columns earlier in the year I talked about how trees, planted and self-sown, form the architectural framework of the garden, which is both resilient and dynamic. Then how a legion of wild species – seeds borne on the wind, lurking underground, carried in on our shoes and car tyres from trips and foreign holidays – combine to form a rich, spontaneous subtext to the deliberate plantings.

In the autumn it is the turn of young human mammals to be the unpredictable garden intruders; the slime mould in its cell stage. Grandchildren swarm in the wood in this season, climbing trees, making fires and devising incomprehensible feats of orienteering and tricks with plants. Most of all they love feral cooking. I’ve taught them how to make what we called twists when I was a kid, shaving the bark off an ash or hazel twig, wrapping a ribbon of unleavened dough round it and baking it in the embers of the fire. Their patience and manual dexterity are not always great (their ages are six to 12) and their confections are often gobbled badly burnt or barely cooked, and covered in a relish of dead leaves, soot and soil. They eat them with an indiscriminate gusto unrecognisable from their indoor eating habits. Now they’re moving on to their own inventions, stuffing Bramleys with garden berries and golden syrup and baking them in silver foil.

We’ve not yet fire-seared the horse mushrooms and parasols that sprout under the cherry trees, but equivalents of the slime-mould’s fruiting stage are resplendent everywhere. Lichens effloresce on branches in the autumn rains, and the chrome-yellow Xanthoria parietina starbursts across the walls. Logs sprout bejewelled miniature toadstools – coral spots, dead man’s fingers and clusters of minute bracket fungi whose identity still have me puzzled. As for the piles of windblown twiggery we stack for kindling, anything can crawl out – stoats, hedgehogs, sexton beetles, sometimes a small child. Mostly they just hunch down, infinitely slow-moving statuary whose shrinkage shows that the capriciousness of decay echoes that of growth.

Autumn is the season in which our chief piece of actual garden statuary, the Hogtable, comes into its own. I’d long hoped for a birdfeeder that was bespoke to our house, not something off a production line, and dreamed of making one from recycled bits of old farm machinery, so that we could enjoy the poetic irony of birds gorging themselves on relics of the agribusiness that had so damaged their populations. It was too much for my limited craft skills but we were blessed with a fortunate family connection here. The campfire-loving children’s mum is artist Kate Munro, who was responsible for some of the wood and metal installations at the Eden Project. She came up with the brilliant notion of modelling the feeder on the giant hogweed that had graced our garden for the previous two years.

So for a week in summer she and her family became the artists in residence. She made the stalks from two debarked hunks of a sycamore that had come down in a gale. Then she sat among the meadow flowers welding together two giant umbels from an extraordinary collection of rural junk – spiral fence-posts, coil springs, harrow tines. When it was finished we installed it next to the pond, and it looked so beautiful, so exactly right among the skeletons of cow parsley, that I could hardly bear to disfigure it with fat balls and peanut bags. The very first visitor, a few hours later, was a female sparrowhawk, perched on an iron stalk and dreaming of prey to come…

The premise of this short series has been that gardens can be contrived as stages for improvised dramas, just as much as for shows meticulously scripted by the gardener. We’ve been lucky with the performances up here in Norfolk, with nothing truly malevolent abusing our hospitality. And we have a window on the fact that change and invention – the engines of the natural world – can be just as exciting and delightful as the long-settled or the minutely planned.

“Logs sprout bejewelled miniature toadstools – coral spots, dead man’s fingers and clusters of minute bracket fungi whose identity have me puzzled”