Winter Wildlife Protection

Adventures With 007

Wildlife Hotel

      I still have an inflatable boat stored in the roof of the garage. It is a four manner (or womanner or man an womanner - best to be politically correct). It's got an engine and has seen a few interesting adventures:

      My wife and I ran a youth club in our younger days and on one occasion took a group of them to Norfolk for a boating holiday on a houseboat. I wanted to take the inflatable as it was useful for exploring some of the smaller streams and I'd fixed it to a roof-rack borrowed from a mate at work. Anyway, we were heading along Chester Road towards the M6 when there was a funny sort of rending noise and we became aware that something was going on in the road behind.

      "Good God - what's that?" my wife shouted as someone behind beeped urgently on their horn and I slowed down, allowing an extremely low vehicle to pass us in a shower of sparks. There was something about it that looked familiar and it only took a moment to realise it was my boat. This must have been the first time in history that an inflatable boat sledged along the A556 at 60mph on a roof rack. By the time it stopped, the roof rack no longer justified that description but, amazingly, the boat was still intact, so I stuffed it in the back seat on top of three teenagers. The roof rack was consigned to the hedgerow and we continued to Norfolk. I think the teenagers complained, but they were very muffled.

      On another occasion we'd taken it to the Scottish Isle of Arran and I was going out fishing on Lamlash Bay. My wife and I had had a row about something, I can't remember what, and I was furious. She'd dropped me and the boat on the shore and had driven the van off in a huff. I inflated it, fixed the engine and pushed it out into the sea before jumping on with the intention of roaring impressively out into the bay.

      I was in my James Bond era. James had done something to do with boats in one of his early films. I can't remember which one it was but know it was one of the first two hundred because James was still Sean Connery. Anyway, I stood at the stern with John Barry's theme tune occupying my mind,and gave the starter cord a vicious tug. Nothing happened. I tried again and still nothing. Not the slightest splutter. I looked around and realised I was drifting fairly quickly away from my sandy launch site towards some fairly vicious looking rocks and didn't fancy the chances of the boats rubberised hull should it make contact. The theme tune had died away. I tried again with that hint of desperation which doesn't usually disturb James's calm surface. By this time a knot of small boys had assembled to watch and were standing impassively, no doubt hoping for a sinking. Resisting the temptation to tell them to sod off, I tried again. I was sweating profusely and suspect the mist over the sea emanated directly from me.

      One of the boys shouted something and I was about to let them have a mouthful when something about his attitude made me stop.

"What?", I called.

"Turn the fuel on", came sage advice of a ten year old, and that was how I came to be roaring off into the waters of the bay, trying unsuccessfuly to remember a time when that had happened to James.

      This unimpressive start set the scene for the rest of my fishing trip: I don't know whether the boat had made contact with the rocks without me realising but, whatever the cause, it was leaking. I was determined to get my money's worth of fishing and ended up holding the rod with one hand while bailing out with the other. I actually caught a couple of mackerel and whiting but there was so much water in the bottom of the boat that I had to catch them again when I got back to shore; I'd bought an expensive anchor which I couldn't really afford and it got stuck on the bottom. I suppose that's the function of an anchor, but not to the point where, when you decide to pull it in, the boat goes down rather than the anchor comes up. The problem was such that I had to eventually cut the rope and consign the anchor permanently to the deep; when I finally got the boat folded up and ready for the return to our hired cottage, there was no sign of my wife. When she finally got there to pick me up, it was in a van which was changed in appearance - she'd driven it into a ditch and had been towed out by a friendly farmer.This, you might think, put the cap on an unsuccessful day. You'd be wrong. I was so mad about the damage to the van that I loaded the boat and forgot the engine. I only realised it wasn't with us a couple of days later and, of course, when I went to look for it, it wasn't leaning on the harbour wall where I'd left it.

      Arran is (or was - we haven't been there for some time) a pretty quiet place and there was only one policeman and about five police stations. We had to go right round the island until we found the one where he was at (back at the first place we'd tried by the time we caught up), to report the loss of the engine. He then directed us to the marine supplier on the sea front.

      "It'll have been given in to George", he said, and that was the one positive aspect to this episode because, on seeing us, George said "ah, ye'll have come for the engine", disappointingly omitting a "hoots, mon".

Wildlife winter shelter

      And, echoing this disastrous trip, my garden presents a disaster in its own right. This time though, it is intentional. I'm not one of these gardeners obsessed with neatness, and I allow dead growth of the previous summer to last into the following spring before the secateurs are put to work. The thinking behind this lies in the shelter that rotting foliage offers to numerous forms of wildlife. Not only do insects find some cover but there is a knock-on effect when there is a daily forage by the flock of tits and other small birds which see my herbaceous border as their larder, gluttoning on seeds and overwintering insects when many people's gardens are barren wastelands. This, to me, is what the garden is really about - not just a place for my choice of plants and my need for control, but a way to bring a suggestion of our dwindling countryside closer to home.

      Encouraging wildlife isn't just about buying a hedgehog home from the garden centre which comes close to needing a mortgage and lacks only a television aerial, it is about recreating countryside. Very few of these man-made hostelries actually attract the intended targets, it is the pile of bricks or old logs which usually induces residents to move in.

Hydrangea enriched with frost

      The recommended pruning technique for Hydrangea macrophylla is to leave the dead flowers on over winter and remove them to the nearest healthy buds in spring. It's claimed the dead growth protects the buds from severe frosts but whether or not this is true there is certainly protection for insects like ladybirds, so it fits in well with the philosophy of the wild winter border. Having said that, the slowly dying flowers metamorphose from colourful to brown in a pleasing way which prolongs its period of attraction and further justifies being an untidy gardener.

Barriers in the garden

Reaping the Whirlwind

Parthenocissus enriching wall in Dunham Park, Cheshire

      And so ends a period of non-stop rain and hurricanes. I now know what 'defenceless' means. It means I no longer have de fence. This is thanks to what the far right bury-your-head-in-the-sand philosophers describe as 'perfectly normal cyclical weather patterns, so you can carry on raping the planet, as long as you're making money and buying more material things'. To my mind, the fact that every new weather event seems to be 'the most extreme since records began' curtails this line of thinking with a question mark. But hey, who am I to question these clever people? It's just that a bit of my fence is now in the pond and the rest of it has become excellent firewood.

      It's quite interesting to think about how the fish see this event. Think about it - one minute you're looking up at an admittedly dull sky, the next - it's as black as hell and you're bumping into each other, wondering how you're going to find the next worm. This must be similar to the situation faced by cavemen when an eclipse occurred, although they'd have the additional hazard of being trampled by disorientated dinosaurs trying to find their way home. Anyway, in the case of the fish, God (me) turned up and took the fence away to join the rest of the firewood. In the same way He (not me that time) moved the moon from in front of the sun so that the cavemen could look up wondrously before going away and inventing religion.

      Religion was wonderful, because it provided the answer to everything: if there was a tragedy, for example, God was angry about the way we'd been going about something or other, and was therefore making us pay (for more information, apply to Ukip). And this leads you to think about what southerners had done that was wrong enough to bring the floods down on them. Apart from supporting Chelsea and seeing the north (anywhere beyond Watford Gap) as a wasteland occupied by savages, that is. Maybe there are a lot of bankers living down there?

      Hearing about the floods in the south of England, where the rivers burst their banks and caused toilets to back up reminds me of childhood trips to Blackpool with my mum on a coach ('sharrers' we called them, which was short for 'charabanc'- something I didn't know at the time because we weren't posh).  Swimming in the sea not far from a damn big sewage pipe inevitably led to the odd occasion when you'd reach out to cling on a floating log before realising it wasn't a log. It was then that you concluded there must be some very big people in Blackpool. This was before the days of the M6 motorway and the journey there would take getting on for half a day. Harold McMillan (remember Harry?) opened it in 1958, to huge excitement as the curtains drew back to reveal the brave new era of sweating it out in 10 mile jams while the kids murdered each other in the back seat. We all thought this was great but, as usual, the Southerners had to go one better by creating the biggest carpark in the world and calling it The M25. Maybe that's why they've got floods. It reminds me of the time Crocodile Dundee flourishes a massive hunting knife under a mugger's nose and says 'now this is a knife, son'. That's what southerners say about traffic jams on the M25.

      Coming back to fences, it's worth looking at how wind works: a solid barrier offers a lot more resistance than does one which allows it to filter through (the Beagle would never have reached the Galapagos and we may still have been waiting for the theory of evolution if the sails had been full of holes). This is why professional nurseries use fencing materials which effectively diffuse the wind. If a solid barrier strong enough to withstand powerful gusts is used, the wind simply whips over the top and creates damaging turbulence on the other side. Brick walls have this disadvantage but balance it by absorbing heat from the sun and creating a warm microclimate by then releasing it slowly. Some of the old walled gardens had fireplaces built into thewalls and added to the natural heat of the sun by using a system of warming chimneys meandering through the structure. An example of this can be seen at Tatton Park, in Cheshire.

      A hedge is often resorted to, as it has the advantage of allowing wind to permeate through, while still offering protection to plants on the other side. Even hedges have their down side though, because their roots can often out-compete plants growing at their base. This can be dealt with by regularly adding well rotted compost to the area at the same time as liberally sprinkling blood, fish and bone. However it is an ongoing task and you have to remain aware of the problem. For a more in-depth look at hedges, go to this link.

Boring fence showing hard outlines

      A fence isn't usually a strongly aesthetic feature in the garden but it is often necessary and its harsh outlines can be disguised in various ways. The typical waney lap has a relatively short lifespan (manufacturers suggest ten years if dipped in preservative and fifteen if pressure treated), so to have valuable plants firmly established on the wood is to lose or at least damage them when this support falls apart.

Fence with outlines softened by training Clematis tangutica on plastic netting

      By hanging netting or trellis and training climbers onto this, the plant can be carefully lowered while fence panels are being replaced. In any case, plants which climb by twining stems, tendrils or modified leaf stems (honeysuckle (Lonicera), Wisteria, Clematis, nasturtium (Tropaeolum), passion flower (Passiflora) and various others) would be unable to find purchase on the flat surface of a fence. Other climbers, like ivy (Hedera spp)or Virginia creeper (Parthenocissus quinquefolia), are able to cling onto hard surfaces and would be difficult to disengage from a fence which needs replacing. A close inspection of Virginia creeper discloses little suckers on the ends of tendrils, which enable it to stick. Maybe that's where Spiderman got the idea.