Photographer Ray Roberts celebrates the wildlife that can be seen just from his dining room window....
I have made mention before several times in this column, of the joy that we get from watching visitors to our garden. Although our plot is not in the same class as Monty Don’s Jewel Garden, on Gardeners World, we always find time each day to have a good look around. Starting in the morning at breakfast time we watch from our dining table all the different species of birds that come to dine at the feeding stations on our lawn.
Nearly a dozen jackdaws that live down near St Hugh’s Church, visit us especially when some out-of-date bread is thrown out. These members of the crow family seem to have some means of communication as when one of two of them turn up and see the dry bread, it is only a matter of minutes before the crowd arrives. Last week we threw out some grapes after they refused to sweeten up and the jackdaws were soon eating them. Sour grapes, if you ask me.
A couple of our garden shrubs are now covered in ripe berries that the blackbirds love. As usual blackbirds are a bit weighty and have difficulty perching on the thin branches within reach of the berries and the female that I photographed seemed to be very nervous as our neighbour’s cat was on the prowl.
One morning, quite early, breakfast was nearly ready when I noticed a hedgehog strolling around the lawn. It is very unusual to see a hog in daylight but the sun was only just on the rise. Gardeners will know that slugs and snails travel around their plots during the hours of darkness and sometimes they don’t manage to get back to their safe house before daybreak, so this hedgehog was on the lookout for those slugs that were still out in the open. These very prickly creatures will a small plate of cat food occasionally.
We were out tidying up the back garden and trimming the clematis back when a very bright green caterpillar, about 35mm in length, dropped from the climbing leaves and landed on my wife’s shirt. This was a poplar hawkmoth caterpillar with a fearsome looking sharp, pointed tail.
Most of the nasturtiums in the garden have now lost their leaves to the caterpillars of large white butterflies but the flowers remain on leafless runners. There are lots of these yellow caterpillars covered in black marks and they certainly seem to be very content with these smelly plants as we have no cabbages on our plot.
A plant that has sprung up down by the greenhouse and now has several round sprays of tiny yellow flowers is a fennel, one of the Umbelliferae or Carrot family and I have no idea how its seeds came into the garden. This is a very fragrant plant and it reminds me of aniseed if I brush up against it and has been widely used in cooking since Roman times.