Winter Wildlife Hedge - Northern Style

A blessings of our new home is that many of the features we loved on the allotment are present in a new form.  For example, readers may remember our allotment 'wildlife hedge', a mass of brambles and russian vine...

Up here we have a mature 'wildlife hedge' in our back yard.  Previous owners have inter-planted golden privet, holly, ivy, hawthorn and some variety of leyland cyprus all of which has been trimmed at regular intervals, but is well above head height.  It screens us from the dog walkers in the park and is a refuge for the birds.

First of all we put out a large metal holder (gift of a former customer) close to the french windows.  But the only taker was the robin who investigates whenever we garden.  So with a bit of lugging and the sound of suction - our lawn can get quite waterlogged - we moved it closer to the rear paving and the hedge with immediate success.

Now the robin flies in to attack the fat balls.  Crumbs drop on to the lawn and are picked up by the blackbird.  When he goes, coal tits come a little nervously from the foliage and have a quick peck.  Two wood pigeons sit on the shed roof observing the scene; having worked out that the feeder will not take their weight they also glean on the grass, as do the magpies, at whose arrival all other birds flee and are silent.  This pair do not stay for long, and once more the robin takes up his perch. 

I sit watching this interplay as the sun comes round to the south.  Frost slowly melts from the car and once more we get ready for a trip to the tip to recycle our garden stuff.

Sundial

A little while before we exchanged Essex for Lancashire a friend in Harlow gave us the top part of a sundial.  It remained on our coffee table, like an oversized circular paperweight until we moved and unpacked.

By now we had established from both from observation and the use of my mother's old hiking compass that our back garden here on the avenue, faces almost due north.  We began a process of filling the terracotta and other pots we had been kindly left by the previous owner with sturdy bedding - winter pansies, clyclamen and hellebores - and arranged these in semi-circular fashion under our bay windows to make the most of the front southerly aspect. 

But what to do with the sundial?  Not for nothing have we spent nine years allotmenteering and improvising.  Take one ornamental chimney pot originally from the back lawn, a bag of gravel discovered in the garage, a circular plant holder.  Now our sundial sits atop its pot on our front patio embedded in gravel awaiting the morning rays.  This being the north, its improvised holder has filled with rain, sleet and latterly hail.   We empty out the water and wait for the spring.