THE RUIN OF VERGE

Well Blogger is working at last.  Huzzah!

Good day, happy Monday, and - well, you know.  Lah-di-bloody-dah!  I'm deeply depressed.  On Saturday, I dug a new bed, along my neighbour's fence and planted sixty (yes, 60) beautifully reared and nurtured sweet pea plants.  My plan? To grow exquisite blooms by cordoning the plants.  Long stems, heavenly scent, delicious colours.

On Sunday morning, some animal - badger? squirrel? rat? - had dug up and eaten every single one.  All that remains are a few wilted, severed leaves.  

The one thing you need, in gardening, is a robust sense of humour and a belief in the certainty of failure for much of the time.   If you can live with that, you'll be a gardener. Otherwise, forget it and play computer games.

Ferns, weeds and Corydalis elata (blue flowers)  in my mini-mini woodland bed, by the back door.

CLICK ON PIX TO MAKE BIGGER

But that's by the way.  THIS is what I wanted to say. . .

 Artificial bumble been nests are a waste of time and money.  

Of the zillions that have been bought and lovingly installed by wildlifely gardeners, only a tine percentage have actually been used by bees.  Here's a typical press report.

And yet several British bumble species are still in dangerous decline. Why?  Because of habitat loss, and because of a lack of decent flowers.  

Given a choice between an old mouse hole, on a sunny bank, and a prettified edifice tied to a tree, it’s obvious that any self-respecting bee is going to take possession of the former and probably wouldn’t even notice the latter.

And do any of the gardeners who lovingly fix up bee nests also over-tidy?  Do they have galleried old banks, where soil may tumble, exposing tree roots?  Are there comfy holes in their masonry or under old stumps which might suit the bees?  And might also suit hibernating toads?  Or do conscientious and house-proud gardeners clear away such things in a frenzy of tidiness? 

And what about those immaculately designed gardens, with paving, decking and hard surfaces?  No doubt, these are pressure washed regularly to prevent moss and lichens – and decked about with trendy but useless plants such as tree ferns, bamboos, olives and, God forbid, hideous bloody cordylines?  (The greatest favour our past winter did was to kill millions of cordylines.)

Wildlife needs and loves mess.  And for true peace of mind, anyone with any feeling for nature will be happy and relaxed in a messy garden, and will enjoy the visitors which begin to arrive and share the ramshackle facilities.  (Though perhaps less pleased whey they eat one's sweet pea plants!)

Besides ruined habitats, bees suffer from a lack of decent flowers.  Year after year, in my area and in most places where I drive, verge-cutting is excessive.  Legally, I believe, a metre-wide strip must be cropped regularly for road safety. 

But if you mow entire verges, you kill flowering plants.  Within a couple of seasons, cowslips, ox eye daises, meadow cranesbills, knapweeds, mayweed, poppies, speedwell – all the typical grassland species will be smothered by a sward of boring, green grass.  To allow that to happen is vandalous.  To encourage it is downright evil.

To maintain a flower-rich verge, all that is needed is a single annual, or a biennial cut. Just one pass, with a mower whose blades are set reasonably high.  That serves to prevent woody plants from becoming established and smothering the verge, while allowing broad-leaved species to flourish.

The best way to ensure habitat protection on verges, I suggest,  would be to make them ALL nature reserves, and to forbid mowing, other than as just described.

That would easy to implement.  And as well as making Britain more beautiful and life-rich, would also save huge amounts of wasted energy.  Unmown verges are not only precious as food sources for insects; they also serve as wildlife corridors, connecting larger habitats which, hitherto, might have been isolated and at risk of deterioration.

So don’t mess about with pointless bee boxes.  Instead, campaign for neglected roadside verges.  Let's put pressure on prissy local authorities and unhealthily tidy farmers, whether in suburbia or deep in the countryside, and let's press for punishing those obsessively tidy minded bastards who mow village verges that would be better left well alone.  YOU KNOW WHO YOU ARE!  Crippling fines would be too good.

And while we’re at it, please, please, let’s outlaw the planting of disgustingly large hybrid daffodils along country verges.  They don’t help bees but they do smother valuable flowering wild plants.

 Athyrium 'Ghost' my second favourite fern this year. The silvery fronds are made even prettier by the darkness of the stems.  Piccies of my favourite next time.

I’m listening to the song Das Rosenband by Richard Strauss.  It's extremely soothing.

This day in 1991 I was struggling with my first novel which I wanted to call Slurry but which Orion insisted was to be entitled The Kirkland Acres. I was concerned about pace and structure, at that stage, and wanted to get it right.  I needn’t have bothered, though. Aside from an extremely handy £10,000 advance, it was not reviewed by anyone, on publication, and fell flat on its face.  Orion’s promotion budget and programme were laughable; the re-titling was a mistake but I learnt a little more about what fiction publishers are really like.

This week’s film was The Pumpkin Eater – Harold Pinter’s brilliant 1964 screen adaptation of Penelope Mortimer’s novel.  Anne Bancroft manages to act everyone off the screen – and with Peter Finch, a youthful Maggie Smith and James Mason, that’s a formidable cast – but seems to have less dialogue than anyone else.  Director Jack Clayton holds, time and again, lingering, painful, close-up shots of her suffering face.  These are agony to watch and by the end of the film, I had to sit in the darkness for some minutes, to pull myself together.

Oh, and I've just finished reading Anne Wareham's The Bad Tempered Gardener. More on that, soon, when the bruises have healed.

Bless you for reading this far.  Bye bye!  May your sweet peas never be ruined.