I have a small patch of grass that I look after outside my house that doesn’t belong to me but I have cut it for the last 22 years. Three years ago I heard about no-mow May and decided that would be what I would do with it. I do cut around the outside of the patch so that it looks ‘gardened’ and not just abandoned as we have had people park their cars on it before.
This year I have looked at the range of plants/weeds growing in it just to try and get some idea of the variety, so here it is.
Broad-leaved plantain
Buttercups and ragwort
Celandines
Cow parsley
Dandelions
I think this might be soggy orchard grass
Soggy Cock’s Foot grass
Possibly a sedge
I planted this so not really wild but it has self-sown in the grass.
Not sure at the moment what this is.
Cat’s ear
The white petals in the pictures are from a cherry tree. It’s quite hard to identify grasses when they are so wet!
In the section of grass that has only been left for one year we have a much smaller range of plants: only two types of grass and Cat’s ear so length of time does increase diversity.
If you know what any of these are – especially the ones I have not named – do let me know.
April is a time of showers and sunshine, sometimes quite windy and sometimes warmer, others colder. I think we had it all this April and the wildlife responded to it by being visible sometimes and not others. Probably as it should be at this time of year. We did have some sightings of insects I have not really been aware of before and some old friends back again such as this buff tailed bumble bee on the grape hyacinth. I love how furry they look.
This month they have also been on the Skimmia, Lithodora and the early geraniums when it has been sunny. They are always the first bumble bees that I see and the most prolific on the plot.
The newcomer, to me, was the Hawthorn fly. There were swarms of them on the plot and down the path between the wildlife plot and my plot and are quite distinctive. They are all black and hover, settling occasionally on flowers and then darting away (very difficult to photograph) and have long legs that drag behind them as they fly and hover. These give them quite a distinctive shape in the air.
The first photo is a little bit blurry but I have included it so that you can see the long back legs. Here they are settled on one of Dave’s brassicas that he has left to flower. Leaving your veg to flower is a really easy way to invite wildlife onto your plot. Hawthorn flies are particularly keen on hawthorn (!) which is in the hedge at the back of the allotment plot, but are also very good pollinators of fruit trees, apples, cherries and some pears which are in full blossom now. With the planting of the native hedging around the plots a couple of years ago, we should be seeing more of these over the next few years if it is allowed to flower.
I think the one in the photo must be a male because it has a large head and large eyes. Apparently the female has a small head and tiny eyes.
All the blogs that I have read about these flies suggests that they are normally seen around the 25th of April – I think we started to see them about the 20th – and they live for about a week. They are certainly not around as I write this. Strong winds can blow them over rivers and streams and this causes fish that feed on floating insects to rise and this is why fish hooks are made to look like them. No trout or grayling in the pond though.
The next thing I found on the plot was a moth sheltering in a patch where I had left weeds to grow – a good enough reason to leave small patches of weeds in out of the way places on our plots. I have no idea what it is and I can’t identify it online so will ask in the moth facebook group. (Update: Someone on the allotment Facebook group identified the moth as a Silver Y – yes it has little white Ys on its wings.) I do, however, know ladybirds and the sunshine brings them out from the cracks and crevices of the manure spread on my veg plot.
And finally, the holly blue which do not just like holly but also like dogwoods, Spindle and Bramble all of which we have on the plot.
May is possibly the best month for the plants in the wildlife garden. They are all types of green, there is enough moisture to plump them out and start them of growing and it can be quite warm and sunny. Below are some of my favourite photos of the plot this month.
First up is the mint moth. I found it sitting on a Nepeta (catmint) leaf in the sunshine. It is tiny and flies in sunshine and at night and can apparently often be found sitting on mint leaves – I planted a lot more catmints last year so they have done their job.
Mint moth on catmint.
One of the best places at this time of the year is the path behind the shed. It is like a glade with some sunshine but deep shade later on in the day. In the afternoon, the plants seem to glow and if you sit and listen you can hear the birds pecking through the undergrowth. You can see the difference in growth from the 2nd and 3rd photos taken at the start of the month to the 4th which was taken at the end of the month.
We finally have foxgloves.
Behind the shed on 1st May
Also on the 1st May
Behind the shed at the end of May. There is another foxglove in there.
It has also been the month of butterflies. There have been the whites and painted ladies but also Speckled Woods.
Painted Lady
Speckled Wood
The Tree Mallow has been in flower all month. It has taken two years to get to this size and the bees and other insects have loved it, including Asian Ladybirds. These pictures are of one of the flowers and a bee covered in pollen and trying to sort itself out.
You can see the bee’s leg on its head, trying to clear some of the pollen.
Mallow flower with all the pollen.
Finally, we have the chairs in the beds. They are not for sitting on because they have broken. They are here to rot away decoratively and provide some of that man made environment that wildlife has become so adapted to. There is also an old wheelbarrow leaning on the apple tree as if the gardener has forgotten it.
You can just see the whellbarrow against the tree.
Leaving these elements in the beds is all part of the Permaculture principle of creating no waste. Things aren’t waste if they can be used aesthetically in a flower bed. No trips to the recycling centre and no fires to burn the wood.
I absolutely love grassroofco’s garden and completely agree with him. This is why there is a bit more ‘stuff’ on the wildlife plot. I don’t have a car yet!
I am at the stage with the wildlife plot where I can stand back and consider what we have and what is missing. Last year I realised that we didn’t have any floxgloves and so we have spent this spring planting a whole range both wild and cultivated. They’ll all end up as one pinky-mauve colour in the end but at least we should have some. The other thing I noticed that we are missing is umbellifers. We have Verbena bonariensis (I think this plant counts as one) but we need more.
Anthriscus sylvestris – Cow parsley in my garden.
I’ve looked through a range of books and come up with a list that will provide some of these flowers for as long as possible across the year.
Ammi majus
white
June – August
Verbena bonariensis
purple
July – October
Giant fennel
yellow
July – October
Dill
yellow
June to August
Daucas carrota ‘Dora’
purple
June – August
Angelica sylvestris
white
May – June
Seseli gummiferum
white
May – July
Valerian
white
July – August (Thanks for the suggestion Belinda.)
This means umbellifer flowers from May to October, six months, with many pollinators enjoying these flowers. I have started sowing seeds and have Ammi majus that are large enough to go out and Daucus carrota on their way but still a bit small.
This is such a fantastic book if you like the look of the High Line Gardens. These are gardens in new York created on the old railway line that is elevated above the city and was descending into disrepair since its closure. Some far-sighted person envisaged a garden and together the landscape architects James Corner Field Oprtsyiond, Diller Scofodia + Renfro and gardener Piet Oudolf created a vision and plan that became reality.
The book is a picture book of the gardens on the High Line throughout the seasons and it shows the hard landscaping and the planting working so well together. I think it is possibly my most favourite garden that I haven’t visited of all time (at the moment) because I love the hard edges of the landscaping and the wild planting.
There were two things I took from the book for my garden. Firstly, always be able to articulate the vision and principles for the garden. I am well aware of doing this in my work but hadn’t thought about it from a gardening point of view and it is true. The beds in my garden or on the wildlife plot that are the least successful are the ones where I am not sure what I am doing in them. On the wildlife plot the names of the beds are sometimes a shortcut to what I am doing with them – The Grasses Bed – but I have one unnamed bed that I just stick all the leftover plants in and it looks a mess. At home in the garden I am slowly moving to be a bit wilder and this needs articulating about what I mean for each border and bed and the garden as a whole.
I love the way the tracks have been relaid and the planting appears through them in parts of the garden. Some of the tracks have also been used as sculptural items and I like that too. Context is everything here – the context being industrial but wild land.
An example of articulating the vision of the garden is of the Chelsea Thicket. Here a sense of enclosure was required with fragrance playing a key part of the experience. The ground is to be covered in a carpet of herbaceous plants that act as a mulch and prevent weeds from becoming too prolific. This has been achieved through the planting of trees that enclose area and then shrubs such as viburnum, winter hazel, fothergilla and witch hazels to name a few that provide the fragrance. Underneath these are planted sedges, hakonchloa, spring vetch and fumewort. This is a classic layered woodland.
The most essential skill to possess, whether designing or conserving layered landscapes, is the ability to observe and articulate the patterns
p227
The second thing I took from the book are plants to try out – I garden on sand and therefore some of the limitations they have on soil depth and dryness make the plants quite suitable for me. Once I have worked out and articulated the vision for my gardens and beds, then I will go back through the book and identify some plants to try. Easy to try plants would be spring vetch (Lathyrus vernus), Frosted Violet coral bells (Heuchara ‘Frosted Violet’) and sedges (Carex bromoides) as an understory.
This is a book I will return to time and time again, to lose myself in the pictures and to try and recreate a small part of it in the soil I tend.
I have written about the various log piles that are dotted around the wildlife plot and found a great graphic that shows who and what lives on dead wood so in this post I would like to look at the stages of decay in the log piles and what they look like.
There are several stages of decomposition in trees which this diagram clearly shows
Stage 1 and 2 are living trees but stage 2 has a tree that is slowly declining with patches that are dead or severely damaged. Branches and twigs may break off but the tree is left intact and standing.
Stage 3 is a dead tree which is still standing but starting to sag and its texture is starting to soften. This is represented on the plot by the dead trees I have planted in the Thugs Bed.
Stage 4 is where the tree starts to lose its bark, sags to the ground and breaks into large pieces. Plant roots invade the sapwood. An example of this is the standing dead tree on the wildlife plot which is losing its bark through peeling and creating a heap on the floor which plants (weeds!) are starting to colonise.
This is not a planted dead tree but a dead tree that remained where it stood when alive, by far and away the best place for them to stay.
In stage 5 most of the tree is on the ground, in contact with the soil and decomposing by breaking into smaller, softer pieces. Roots of plants invade the heartwood. There isn’t any of this at present on the plot.
Stage 6 is the final stage where the tree is soft, powdery and basically a decomposed mound. We don’t have any of this either.
My understanding is that for a healthy forest you need trees at each stage of the decomposition process and whilst the plot is not a forest, each stage of decomposition has different fungi, lichens, invertebrates etc living on it and so it provides for the greatest diversity.
Fungi are the main agents of decay in wood, breaking it down with secretions of enzymes.
After the wood is softened, saproxylic beetles – those that feed on dead wood – and their grubs feed on the tree and on the fungal bodies on the tree. There are around 650 beetle species that are thought to need dead wood at some point in their life cycle. The tunnels and holes they make allow water to get into the wood and this softens it more and this is an invitation to the invertebrates such as woodlice and millipedes to feed on the wood. Predators and parasites such as robber flies and ichneumon wasps arrive to feed on the beetles and other invertebrates.
There are three main types of decay in dead trees; white rot, brown rot and soft rot. White rot breaks down the chemical components of wood into carbon and water, releasing nutrients such as nitrogen and phosphorus that were locked in the material. As the rot proceeds the wood takes on a bleached appearance, becoming fibrous and springy. The silver birch branches at edging the beds have rotted down like this and there is some at the top of the standing dead tree.
Brown rot only breaks down the simple sugars such as cellulose and the wood becomes brown, cracked into cubes and crumbly. Soft rot happens in environments where moisture content fluctuates such as wood lying on the ground. Lignin is broken down and the wood is white in colour.
The first picture shows cracking in the wood where the different fungi are working. The middle is holes in dead wood caused by beetles and their grubs and the third is an example of white rot in the standing dead tree.
Following on from my post about log piles on the wildlife plot, I came across this brilliant graphic about dead wood and who feeds on it.
You can download a copy here – I used google translate to help me through the process as it was in Dutch. I don’t think I have the lynx and wolves but probably have many of the smaller species. I shall be keeping an eye out and trying to identify them across this year and then create my own version of this in December/January.
