August in the Garden

I seem to have amassed a stack of gardening books, old and new, read and unread, which I love

to browse through, along with seed catalogues, imagining the riot of colour and perfume that I could create – only I spend so long looking at gardening books, there is no time left to do anything! Really though, they seem to lend themselves to the ‘slow read’ method, and perhaps I should like at them month by month, to see what I should be doing.

This month, for example, in The Curious Gardener, Anna Pavord begins by suggesting I should trim my evergreen hedges and reshape the topiary: since I have neither, I feel I can carry on reading with a clear conscience, unless I can stir myself to tackle the buddleia, which are not evergreen, and are not topiary, but they are striving for world domination, which is a problem in our tiny garden. So, being a curious gardener, I’ve just looked these up, and discovered I should have hard pruned them way back in March. So what do I do, cut them right back now and hope they survive, or wait until next spring and hope they don’t grow during the winter?

Actually Pavord’s book is fascinating, with lists of tasks to be carried out each month, and a selection of short essays on plants, gardens, and life in general. August includes a moving account of how the ‘swoony’ perfume of sweet peas helped recover from an operation for cancer, and a discourse on the lengths some gardeners go to in a bid to attract butterflies to their plots. This last seemed a particularly apt choice of reading matter, since I spent a couple of days recently spell-bound by the kaleidoscope of peacocks fluttering around the dreaded buddleias, so maybe I’ll just let them be, because the butterflies are so beautiful.

Karel Capek, writing in The Gardener’s Year back in 1929, informs us that: “August usually is the time when the amateur gardener forsakes his garden of wonder and goes on leave.” He follows this with a detailed description of the many and varied jobs that must be undertaken by the friend of relative who is entrusted with looking after the garden. There is mowing to be done, watering, staking and tying, weeding… and finding suitable spots for the plants gathered by the absent gardener whilst on his holiday, and posted home!

But Capek has serious points to make about our lives. According to him: “All year round is spring, and all through life is youth; there is always something which may flower. One only says that is autumn; we are merely flowering in other ways, we grow beneath the earth; we put forth new shoots, and there is always something to do.”

Capek was a Czech playwright and novelist who, apparently, invented the word robot, and I must read some of his fiction some time. Meanwhile I am enjoying his gardening book immensely. It is easy to read, and is a light-hearted look at gardening, which captures the joys (and the frustrations) of ordinary gardeners, and the little line drawings which are scattered throughout (by Josef Capek, who I assume was a relative), are an absolute delight.

I also took a look at the wonderful Katherine Swift, who I’ve written about before. She is probably my favourite gardening writer. I love her prose style, and the way she mixes information about her garden with thoughts about life, medicine, herbal lore, ancient myths and legends, history, geography, great gardeners of the past and all kinds of other topics. The pieces gathered together in The Morville Year were all originally published in The Times, and are informative and entertaining – a combination which is not always easy to achieve. For August, you’ll find entries about raspberries, climbing plants, summer pruning, dew, the dog days (so called because Sirius, the brightest star in the sky, rises and sets with the sun at this time of year), and bees on lavender.  Did you know the Latin for bumble-bee is bombus? The word, she says,’ perfectly conveys the sound - a deep resonant hum – as well as their bumbling progress from flower to flower’.

She describes six different types of bumble-bee feeding on her lavender, including the wonderfully named little lion-maned Carder bee, and the large red-tailed bumble bee (they have red tails, like foxes, and ‘huge shiny black transparent wings like glossy fifteen-denier stockings’). Unlike honey bees, bumble-bees don’t store honey – the colonies die at the end of the year, apart from the young, mated queens. I’d already decided that I’m planting to attract birds and insects, and after reading this I’m even more determined. How could I resist when there such are wondrous creatures in the world? For next year the buddleias stay, and I’m planting lavenders alongside them, different species to flower from May right through to the autumn frosts. And Swift says if you are trying to encourage bees into a garden it helps if you are not too tidy, and I am certainly not, so I’ve got a head start there!

A Kaleidoscope of Butterflies!

A Peacock butterfly perched on a white buddleia - isn't he glorious?

I’ve neglected my garden shamefully, and it’s terribly overgrown and out of hand, so I’ve been out there this week trying to hack back the jungle. And on Wednesday my efforts were reward by the most beautiful and amazing sight – butterflies! Hundreds and hundreds of them on the buddleias. It was absolutely magical. Every bloom seemed to have two or three butterflies, and the air was full of them, flapping and fluttering and flying like a flock of birds, and they seemed huge. Mostly they were large whites, which were most uncooperative about being photographed, and spectacular peacocks, which were a little more helpful, but still jolly difficult to capture on camera. According to Webster’s online dictionary and thesaurus, there is a choice of collective nouns for groups of butterflies. They suggest a flight, a rabble, a flutter, a swarm or a kaleidoscope...so I thought I’d settle settle for kaleidoscope because it sounds so nice. 

And another Peacock butterfly, showing the underside of the wings. 

I have a couple of buddleias in the garden, which I acquired under the misapprehension that they would remain a manageable size – their nickname of butterfly bush lulled me into a false sense of security but they are not bushes at all. They are not small, and they are not slow-growing, as you might expect with a shrub. They are rampant, and have aspirations for the high life, and grow into tall trees, and spread, and spread and spread... not suitable for a small garden in any way, shape or form, but I am reluctant to cut them down because they are such an attraction for wildlife. And squeezed into the narrow space between our fence and the new housing development at one side of the very end of the garden are masses and masses of these monsters,  with flowers in all shades of lilac, purple and creamy white, and they were absolutely smothered in butterflies, and the air around them was thick with the insects.

Basking in the sunshine. The outspread wings of the Peacock
butterfly have the most incredible markings.

Sadly the trees on the other side of the fence were far too tall to get any pictures. I suppose you would need a telephoto lens for a successful shot, though I did consider getting the stepladder out, but I’m terribly clumsy so it seemed to be asking for trouble!

This small butterfly on the golden hop is a Comma.

Anyway, I did get a few decent shots of Peacock butterflies on the smaller buddleias in the garden, and I managed to get a picture of a small orange and brown butterfly basking on my golden hop, which I bought because a) It looks like sunshine, and b) It is really called Humulus Lupulus, which I think is such a wonderful name. Anyway, I had quite some problems identifying this butterfly, so in the end I copied the photo, and blew it up as big as I could, and then realised the lone visitor has the distinctive raggedy wings of a Comma. And, just to clinch matters, the larvae feed on Humulus Lupulus (among other things).

I've tried to crop the photo to get a bigger image, so you
can see the raggedy edges of the wings.

The glory in the garden lasted a couple of days. from early morning until dusk, when the butterflies were drowsy and bumbled through the air as if they were drunk - and perhaps they were, drunk on all that nectar they'd consumed! There were lots of bees as well, all collecting pollen, but they were a bit overshadowed by the butterflies. By yesterday (Friday) they had all disappeared, the blooms had turned brown and were obviously dying, and the weather had taken a turn for the worse, damp and cloudy, with an almost autumnal chill in the air. I suppose the insects are laying eggs ready to be transformed into more of these beautiful, delicate creatures next Spring, and the trees will produce seeds which will be scattered and fall to the ground to produce new growth... so the cycle of life continues!

Bee happy... Hopefully, this is a honey bee, but I don't know
enough about them to even guess at the species.

Saturday Snapshot is hosted by Melinda at West Metro Mummy.

Gardens and Wild Places

Two reviews today as I'm still trying to catch up on posts. The reading is more or less on track, but the writing isn't! There's a link of sorts between these books, since they are both about about the environment, with reflections about man's place within it, and both authors are intelligent, articulate, passionate about their subject, and excellent writers.

First up, The Morville Year, by Katherine Swift. Her earlier book, 'The Morville Hours', which charts her creation of a garden in the grounds of the Dower House, at Morville, in Shropshire, is a superb mix of gardening know-how, history and folk-lore, with a rich appreciation of the natural world and the passing of the seasons. 'The Morville Year', which is every bit as good, is a selection of the weekly articles she wrote for the Saturday edition of The Times between 2001 and 2005. She writes about the weather, her work in the garden, taking up bee-keeping, buying a motorbike, local places events – and, most of all, the plants themselves. In her introduction she explains:

When I began the research that would underpin the garden, I found that every plant had a story – who first grew it or collected it from the wild, gave it a name or painted its picture, wrote a poem about it or used used to cure some ailment? Every one came trailing clouds of glory.

That urge to discover everthing she can about each and every plant makes for some fascinating reading. On 29 January 2009, for example, she discusses the weird world of lichens: there are 1,700 varieties in Britain, and each is made up of two organisms, a fungus and an algae, living in perfect harmony, since neither can exist without the other. And did you know that those bright, crusty-looking orange and yellow lichens, and the flat grey and white ones, only grow on alakine rock, like limestone? And the cushiony green and pink types thrive on acid surfaces like granite, slate and sandstone. And all lichens need a smooth surface – they won't grow on new, smooth, polished gravestones... and they need sunshine... and clean air. I never realised they were so interesting, but I've been looking at them in a whole new light since I read this.

Lichens on an old gravestone at Offchurch, in Warwickshire,
look almost like plants in a rock garden. There seem to be flat
and cushiony ones here, so I'm none the wiser about the rock.

And Swift makes some wonderful observations about plants and wildlife. In one of her October pieces she writes:

The search for hibernation sites is also on for the newly-mated queen bumble-bees and the big brown-and-yellow hornets (surprisingly pacific despite their fearsome appearance) – the Harley-Davidsons of the insect world, with a deep resonant buzz quite unlike the Suzuki whine of the black-and-yellow wasps which have terrorised us all summer.

The comparison may sound odd, but think about it for a moment, and you realise she is absolutely right.

Gardens are generally regarded as well ordered places, where man (or woman) has tamed nature, but Swift is concerned about the extent to which gardeners can relinquish control, stepping back to allow nature to take take a hand and create some wildness.

And it's wildness that attracts Robert MacFarlane. In The Wild Places he takes his interest to what many of us would consider to be extreme levels, for he searches out the most inaccesible places it the British Isles, so remote that the land remains untouched by human activity. Each site he visits has a different landscape – his journeys take in an island, a hidden valley, a moor, a mountain summit, a forest, and an ancient holloway.

Much of his exploration is magical. On the island of Ynys Enlli he watches seals and birds, finds a heart-sized stone of blue basalt, marked with white fossils, and sets 'a thin shell afloat, carrying a cargo of dry thrift heads'. But elsewhere the terrain is almost alien. When he tries to climb the Pinnacle of of Sgurr Dear, above Loch Coruisk, you sense that this land does not wan him there and MacFarlane – who is obviously an experienced traveller well able to cope in adverse conditions – is surprised by his reaction.

I stood, walked to the start of the Pinnacle's incline, and laid a hand against its rock. It was so cold that it sucked the warmth from my skin. But this rock had once been fluid, I thought. Aeons ago it had run and dripped and spat. On either side of the Pinnacle, the ground dropped immediately away. I took a few steps up the fin. Suddenly I felt precarious, frightened: balanced on an edge of time as well as of space. All I wanted to do was to get back off the ridge, back down into the Basin.

At this point he decides it not merely be dangerous to climb, but 'impertinent', which seems a strange word to use, but you understand that here is something powerful and ancient.

Like Swift, he's the kind of magpie author who gathers facts, and one piece of information leads him on to another, and another, and another... In the chapter on Ynys Enlli for example, he talks about the tide race, ancient Irish monks, the origin of the word 'pilgrim', the connection between inner and outer landscapes, George Bernard Shaw's trip to the Skelligs, boats, faith, the wildlife n the island, the word 'wild' and our reaction to wilderness, and the Chinese wanderers who wrote and painted, and believed there was no divide between nature and human.

That sense of oneness with the natural world pervades the writing of Swift and MacFarlane. The landscapes they inhabit may be very different, but each knows their place, and they recognise its importance. And each makes a plea for us to work with nature, nurturing and preserving what we have.