back-garden lockdown scrapbook

I have a birdtable now. I put it in in the dead of winter, like you do, and by summer the sparrows have become impossibly feisty, you've fed at least two of them to the male Sparrow Hawk who (props to him) does an incredible attack run along the front garden bird feeders, they've had an enormous fight with the housemartins, and then in June, the rats start rising, and you think, hmm, maybe I'll stop bird feeding for a few months. But not before the birdseed has got everywhere and this sort of thing is happening in water trays:

I've started rewilding some of my plant pots. Well, to be fair, they started it first; random scrub tree seedlings started growing in the pots after about five years, like a diagram from an old biology test book. I've weeded out some but kept others. This pot, for example, is a great killer of petunia, fuchsia and geraniums. But this little wedge of grass is doing pretty well.

Sometimes one has to conclude that there is unhappiness. This little clematis that set up home in a hanging basket, every year it hits the bottom and goes into not-quite-terminal sulk. I don't even know what variety it is. It seeded itself (although I do bring a lot of clematis seeds into the garden, so it may have been present in compost) and has never yet managed to flower. Leaf miner this year. At least something is happy. The miniature Kleim's Hardy Gardenia is a little sadder every time I look at it. Should I feed it? Or will that just hasten its desolate decline? The orange Azalea hates being dry. It also hates being too wet, hates tap water, and hates cold water. It may also hate being too hot? Dusky Orange Abutilon has these leaves, that just look a bit sad. Or maybe they're just patterned that way. It's flowering very well, so I'm nervous about tipping the balance with a feed.

At the beginning of lockdown, I used to run round the garden hoiking out bindweed while waiting for my partner to finish his half an hour on the exercise bike so I could have my go. But then weeks turned into months and I started getting a bit sick of doing that, and there was usually something else to do. It's fair to say that the bindweed has largely won. My Oriental Poppy may have fallen victim. Among other things. It's such a strangler.

Months after the first blossom, when most of the fruit was setting, my apple tree had a second flush of blossom. I've put a lot of water on it this year, the nasty cold water that so many of my plants hate. Maybe I kicked it back into spring-mode somehow? Weird, anyway. Also; I didn't get gooseberry saw-fly this year! But I got scale beetle. It's always something with that gooseberry bush.

Finally, a plant that has gone onto my forever list for the garden. Muscari Plumosum. I was very sceptical when I bought it, thinking it would look a bit of a mess. But it actually combines a weird, unearthly beauty with the vigour and toughness of regular Muscari. About the height of a large narcissus, so rather larger than a regular Grape Hyacinth, it was also (improbably) popular with bees and pollen beetles and happily set seed, though how true that will come is anyone's guess (there are always other muscari around the place). I'll rebulb anyway; its worth it.

back garden fox encounter

I finally took one of those wildlife photos. You know the ones. All over the internet. Usually have the name of the person who took them in swirly cursive at the bottom right of the shot. Look at that! Adorable fox cub in the garden.

It's not my garden. In fact, I have suspicions of regular feeding, through the garden's owner was all innocence when asked. It's like when you see an animal on one of those wildlife shows, and the cameraman says, "normally these are really shy animals" and you just know that someone has been gently playing the habituation game. It certainly seemed to know its way round a pizza slice:




By way of context, I wasn't right up this fox cub's nose. I'm on my zoom lens. He was this far away:

This garden is a particular favourite of mine, there's always lovely things to see. I mean check this out: Agapanthus flowers sprouting from a split Agapanthus stem:

Weird, but also awesome.

Councillors' Memorial Garden, Blackbird Leys

It's always a bit startling to see a memorial garden to someone you knew, but I'm sure this is another thing my mum would put down to living too long in one place. This lovely memorial garden, set up in 2017, is looks a little frayed round the edges as a result of lock-down work pause, but it's still beautiful. Set up in memory of Councillors Val Smith, Barbara Gatehouse and Carole Roberts, a trio of practical and solid benches, now showing the weathered silver of old wood, surrounded by a shivering glitter of golden oats shot through with purple verbena and (I suspect invading rather than intentional, but none the worse for it) yellow thistle. Soft underfoot flexi pea-gravel paths are wheelchair friendly and well spaced. Trees are looking a little water starved this year; I've seen on the local groups, residents organising tree watering parties.


 
The chunky benches are the main attraction, rather than any kind of memorial, though a loose stone circle of Oxford golden sandstone dances roughly through the borders, Rollrights on a municipal scale. The tree are young and till in their deer cages; they'll emerge in a few years time, having settled in, and changed the biome from open grassland to small woodland patch.


 
Gardens like these are curious things. At the moment it feels like an act of will enforced on the open green, saplings ringing it like newly-launched satellites. But as the trees bed in, it will mature, the planting will change, it will become a place of dappled shade. It's already a place of rest and relaxation, a pause-spot near the leisure centre, a meeting place.


 
A scatter and scuff of beer cans, lottery tickets and snack-wrappers nestle in the beds, testimony to the lock-down walk-outs, breaths of fresh air and teenagers meeting up to stretch the terms of their social distancing rules. Opportunistic weeds sprout among the planting. The fancy grasses, as grass is wont to do, have somewhat taken over. It needs to be freshened and given a haircut, like we all do. But we're in lockdown, and it's doing its bit, meeting the needs of the community, the best it can.

willow fuzz season

The fuzz has landed!

Outside the boathouse, the retaining grid on the gravel has caught weeds and fluff alike:




Passing cyclist, boat-houses. May is peak Oxford, although silent this year; no students, no eights.

Just the willow fuzz, blowing on the breeze around the empty river.

oh allotment fox, what is this?

So I was weeding my potato bed and found what I thought was a clump of earth. Turned out someone had been caching picnic leftovers:



And when I say someone, I mean allotment fox. I had a word with S-who-hooked-me-up-with-the-allotment. "Oh yes, she said, and what's worse is, some people feed them. And there isn't anything we can do about that. And then you get rats."

So now I have an alternate theory. Allotment fox is trying to attract allotment rats so he can feed on fresh rat rather than manky old cocktail sausages and pork pies. Though I suspect that the ultimate benefactors will be my surprisingly savage allotment ants, as while foxes cache food, they also forget to to some back to it a lot of the time.

Still really tempted to get a trail camera up there. I've met allotment fox, allotment kites, allotment crows, allotment magpies, the robin-who-needs-your-worms, Allotment Cat 1 (Black & White, red collar) and Allotment Cat 2 (Handsome tabby, bit of a mover) who are sadly massive enemies of each other and also afeared of people (suspicion: they've been chased around for pooing on asparagus beds) plus sundry blackbirds, goldfinches and various little brown birds, but I do have badger suspicions because I have a nice trundle-path straight across my allotment, and I've seen torn-up grass suggestive of worm-hunting.

I haven't seen the rats, but I'm a realist. They will be there.

orange hanging basket kettle 2020

I've had a Le Creuset kettle dangling off a hook outside my door for a while now. It dates back to when I favoured a stove-top kettle, back in the 90s, having come off years of a cheap electric kettle that tasted increasingly of burned plastic. At around this time I saw the movie Shopping, which was about ram-raiding. In one of the scenes, while clearing out a shop with an equally young Sadie Frost, a very young Jude Law yells "99 quid for a kettle!" and tosses it across the shop. Later, in a scene where Law's caravan gets torched (sorry, spoilers -though it's really more of a mood piece), the kettle is the only thing pulled from a wreckage. You can see it here, briefly, being improbably brought to the boil over an open fire in Sadie's rather nice squat:


It's the Alessi birdwhistle Kettle, a design classic. That's not immediately obvious from that shot, as it's lost the whistle. (You don't need to watch the rest of the video - Shopping was an early film by the director of the Resident Evil films, so there are quite a lot of videos of confused/amused Resident Evil fans watching the film, and giving it good marks despite the lack of good action scenes.) But to me it was a revelation. I had had no idea that people still made metal kettles you could heat up on a stovetop. I went to our local everything store, located and bought a cheap aluminium stovetop kettle.

I burned through them rather fast, as it turned out, so a housemate bought a Le Creuset one "for the household" that wouldn't die even if I boiled it dry. It looked a little incongruous on our crappy rental gas stoves - like it was pining for an Aga. But it did last (mostly - I managed to melt the whistle) and when he went to America, it stayed behind. I've had it ever since, though it's long since retired from the kitchen, had its bottom drilled, been filled with soil and set to guard the doorway.



It makes a pretty good hanging basket. This year it overwintered a petunia!

three thickets and a scrub-bush

Our local nature reserve has some lovely thickets.



Rumour has it that you can sometimes see a cuckoo perched on a dead branch poking out of one of them. We've not seen it yet, despite a lot of looking.



As spring starts in earnest the thickets green up, gather a gaudy spackle of fresh green leaves.



this one's a bit smaller, and in a mowed area, but still. Anything could be in there.



Still very much feeling the #loveyourthicket vibe. Though thistles and brambles in my own own back garden and allotment still feel like a step too far.

the joy of hellebores in seed

People complain a bit about how Hellebores look scruffy out of season, but I actually really like how they look at this time of year. The seed pods are fantastically sculptural, and the leaves (which I leave, eschewing the fad for snapping them off for tidiness) provide shelter for the soil and numerous tiny beasties.





The large singles seem to produce the best and biggest seed pods. I've photographed a couple of doubles; see how the pods are smaller, or entirely absent. The seeds germinate well, but the plants take a long time to mature to flowering. The leaves are very attractive when they're young though so I find myself transporting seedlings about the place for the sake of their little glossy leaves.

As you can see, the snails do move in eventually and make lace of these fat flowers in the end. By September, any left will have dried to crispness and I can just snap off any remnants, or leave it for the wind to tidy. And even then, as wholly dead flowers, they will still look good.