As I sit at my desk upstairs, floor to ceiling windows wide open in the summer heat, my soundtrack is the lime tree. Filling my view, and soaring higher than our house, our triple trunked giant is in full flower. And lime flowers mean bees. The lower branches of the lime sweep downwards, skirts frilled with posies of blooms and bracts in the palest primrose yellow-green, and the air is filled with the light lemon honey scent which brings pollinators flocking.
The linden (lime) is revered in Europe for its calming properties, but in this country people seem more likely to turn to chamomile. I plan to snatch a handful of peppermint leaves and the same again of lime flowers and make a little brew to see if we can replicate that tilleul-menthe tisane magic ourselves. Meanwhile, the tree is for the bees, and it hums, a sonorous thrum that increases in frequency as the day warms and the demand for nectar and pollen grows. In a week, the flowers will be over and the tree will use those thousands of papery helicopter bracts to spin its offspring far and wide. Another magical moment in the natural year.
Go downstairs and step outside, and the second level of humming kicks in. Over a hundred catmint plants (nepeta Walker’s Low) fill the narrow ribbon bed about 15 m long which separates us (and my herb beds) from the lime tree and its greedy scarlet roots forever heading house-wards. Each catmint currently provides refreshment for at least 5-10 pollinators at any one time, from small hoverflies to basso profundo bumblebees. My perma-eco-crisis sensibilities have yet to drive me to tag a bee to see if it proceeds from the ground level catmint offering to the huge tree above them, but in a year when most people who care about these things were panicking that bee numbers had plummeted, this hive-level buzz from solitary bees is reassuring. As the catmint fades, the lavenders are coming into full flower, and so the banquet continues.
Once there was a time when gardeners’ anxieties amounted to what might be eating their precious cultivars - now for many of us the concern lies in whether we are growing a wide enough diversity of plants to support pollinators year-round. Gardens count. In some urban areas, hedgehog populations are increasing, thanks to people feeding them and making small portholes in fences and hedges to allow them to travel their normal nocturnal distances. Rural hog populations meanwhile continue to plummet, as habitat destruction continues. Contiguous gardens managed sensibly for humans and wildlife create extended corridors through which multiple species can move. These green jigsaws may be small or large, but they at the very least offer the non-human occupants of this planet a chance at survival.
Gardeners will tell you that you need a bird-defying mesh cage if you want to grow currants. Not necessarily so. Grow one redcurrant bush, and three pinkcurrant bushes nearby. The birds strip every redcurrant and ignore what presumably to them are the three never-ripening inferior pink bushes, allowing you to harvest strig (yes, that little dangly chain of berries is called a strig) after strig of perfectly ripe fruit. Same goes for whitecurrants - three plants laden with fruit, all ignored by raiding thrushes and their mates. It is not that I don’t like redcurrants - I would pick that jelly over mint sauce as the accompaniment to lamb any time, and at some point I will plant more - but right now, this is an easy route to copious currants. I would like to say it was a cleverly planned growing decision, but as with many gardening outcomes, it was a happy accident. And more serendipity from the fruit front: the two little gooseberry bushes which in year one were brutally stripped of their every leaf by the notorious gooseberry sawfly caterpillar are now putting on growth and even managed to fruit this year. The trick here was to surround them with alliums and camassias, whose scents of garlic and tuberose respectively are enough to outwit any sawfly. I am very conscious in writing this that even when we first arrived here, there was such a healthy population of amphibians and hedgehogs that we have never had any issues with slugs or snails. When we lived in Manchester, I remember the despair of walking out and finding every new plant eaten to shreds. I do get aphid infestations here sometimes - I found a dahlia yesterday drooping under the weight of blackfly - but I would never spray. The damage and death caused by the insecticides still routinely sold in garden centres is terrible. There is an extensive range of effective, non-chemical alternatives. Sometimes, a solution is already to hand - yesterday I grabbed a handful of lemon balm, crushed it, and rubbed off the blackfly - they still have not returned, with strong citrus presumably not to their taste. And for all our good fortune with flying and crawling visitors, we have yet to find a solution to the four-legged ones who have returned yet again to browse the young apple trees. So, not always lucky.
Away from the dramas of the potager, the borders are in full flower. The changes I made to the hot beds around the terrace are paying off, with crocosmia now blazing against dahlias, and three different varieties of salvias giving violet accents to a slope full of hot pink, orange and the chartreuse froth of alchemilla.
At the front of the house, the palest roses have been in bloom alongside huge white and pale pink peonies, scenting the steps down to the front door. And right now, one of my absolute favourites is out.
Gillenia trifoliata is a slender, unassuming little wand of a shrub, until it come into flower and creates the impression that a flock of butterflies is nestled permanently in your border. Gaura gives a similar impression later in the year, but can’t match gillenia’s height, here with 2m tall campanula “Loddon Anna”.
Comments