meet the neighbours

in your wildlife garden

I have extolled the virtues of promoting wildlife in the garden enough times for my dear readers to know I regard my outdoor space as very much a shared environment, and look forward to seeing who’s out and about when I go outside. We have populated the borders with new plants, gifted from neighbours and from an excellent farm shop near us which supplies lots of British-grown plants in peat-free compost. Plus they do great cakes…

The focus is on pollinator plants but the shade and shelter of the leaves and foliage will be a home for numerous little creatures, and the edges are pleasantly scruffy and jumbled to provide a haven for the species which will be able to call the borders their home once the plants have grown up and spread out. In the bare spaces I have sown nasturtium and sunflower seeds, so hopefully they will start to sprout soon, and the hop is galloping away across the back fence, climbing up through last year’s stems which I remembered to not cut down. I want to get some vegetable seeds to plant in the borders – maybe some brassicas and rainbow chard. The repurposed recycling boxes have got potatoes, tomatoes, and now some beans which I planted from saved seed.

Meanwhile I am still mulling over the best thing to do with my illustrations. Here are some more:

I’ve not seen common lizards in the garden yet, but I live in hope. We have some broken slates (formerly the roof of the bird table) and the spiders love basking on them, and that sort of surface is great for lizards too as it gets nice and warm. When I kept bees, the lizards would snuggle in the top of the hive which always amazed me as the only way into the roof is through the entrance and up past the bees. Here’s a very pregnant female sitting on the entrance board of a hive: