Our Wildlife Garden

Seems that my post on Thursday about our garden has confirmed that it should stay as it is, decision made! As I've mentioned before, my camera is broken at the moment, the photos on Thursday were taken a couple of years ago but it looks the same now.

Every year it grows high like that before it dries out enough to cut and every year we have chickened out and cut it. It does look lovely cut short too, but not as environmentally friendly as it is when allowed to grow. So it's staying this year, here's hoping the neighbours don't mind too much!

It must be a real maze for Hamish, as I can't spot him in there now! He has a set way of going to the top of the garden and has beaten down his own track now.

So, now the 'lawn' fits in with the rest of our wildlife garden. Once the buddleia blooms we will have lots of butterflies too. The birds get most of the fruit, especially the cherries, (they actually drop some of the stones down our chimney!) Hamish has his fair share of apples when they drop, and we are lucky if we can get to the plums and blackberries! We've some wild strawberries growing too that are out of reach of Hamish (but maybe not the birds), so we might get to have some of those too. Every year we talk of making elderflower wine, but haven't got round to it so far. If we do it this year we'd better get a move on as they are now flowering!

Thanks to Ian and the grafting he put in to make it look so natural, and Wendy who provided a bucket load of her own wildlife pond to give it a kick start with bugs and inserts etc, we got a wildlife pond of our own, (with it's own little beach so that hedgehogs etc can climb out easily), that has been home to lots of creatures and we have replanted some lavender near the pond as our old overgrown one died on us this winter. One of the shrubs that the bees also love overhangs our pond as you can see in this photo. We took this picture a couple of years ago too, it is a lot more established now and it's great to see it all coming back to life.

Now where's that darn dog gone...

Jill

PS: Just wanted to add that we found out the name of the shrub the bees like, it's called cotoneaster.