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Driving around Oxfordshire these last few weeks and looking at the countryside, I do not see a ‘ green and pleasant land ’ – it is brown. The trees are brown and so is the grass. Here we are in the second week of April and there is almost no new plant growth. The wildlife are hungry and deer have taken...
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The birds got it wrong, didn’t they. There they were, all optimistic and full of song and now winter has returned with a vengeance. It isn’t snowing here any longer, but it hasn’t melted and the ground is frozen solid. No worms for the ‘ early bird ’ to catch at the moment. A week or so ago, the soil...
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At every garden I visit just now, I am attended by one or two robins ( Erithacus rubecula ). They look and behave so much alike that, when there is just the one robin in attendance, it almost feels like the same bird is following me about from one garden to another. You read that male and female robins...
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There is a corner at the end of the garden where we’d like to grow a few vegetables – it is sunny and warm but, for a couple of reasons, the soil needed some major work on it. Firstly, I have wondered if the previous occupants here ever added any organic matter to the soil; it seems a bit thin and stony...
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Having enjoyed the series on wildlife in gardens, ‘Living Gardens’ in The Garden magazine , the monthly magazine sent out to RHS members, I thought it would be interesting to look at some of the flowering plants that attract the most bees in my garden. Working in the garden at the weekend, I was struck...
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As if it wasn’t enough to have sawfly larvae eating rose leaves, another type have been spotted eating the leaves of a hardy Geranium (possibly Geranium ‘Johnson’s Blue’ ). In June this year, it was noticed that the leaves had been eaten away so that only a skeletal structure of veins remained. The lady...
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Something is eating the leaves on the roses – if left to it, stem-like leaf veins would be all that remain. Seeing the ragged foliage and looking more closely, I see around the leaf edges tiny creatures that resemble caterpillars. They are not caterpillars, though, they are rose sawfly larvae . There...
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Despite the rain and chilliness of the last three months, ladybird larvae have appeared at almost the same time as they did in 2010. Back then, the first sighting was on the 12th of July and this year I spotted the first one on the 18th of July. But,it wasn’t a British ladybird larva, it was a harlequin...
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Arriving at a garden the other morning, I just missed treading on a chafer grub beetle, otherwise known as a May bug or Melolontha melolontha . This one was sitting very still in the middle of a lawn, which was not a good place. I wondered if had been there since the previous night as these beetles are...
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Grey squirrels ( Sciurus carolinensis ) visit the garden regularly – there is plenty of wild food for them here – nuts, fruit and seeds. The growing number of tree peony ( Paeonia lutea ) seedlings springing up in the lawn is the result of their burying the seeds, though whether they come back and eat...
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In February 2011, just over a year ago, I said that there weren’t any sparrows ( Passer domesticus ) coming to the garden, but that there were plenty of them in gardens on the other side of the green. I wondered if we didn’t have enough plants to attract them and vowed to plant more. I did plant more...
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It’s was clear that the young great spotted woodpeckers ( Dendrocopos major ) were growing fast by the increasing volume of their voices. What started as a fairly quiet squeaking, akin to a wheel catching on something as it turned, fast became a loud and incessant ‘Tchick! Tchick! Tchick!’. The parents...
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The great spotted woodpeckers ( Dendrocopos major ) have changed their behaviour. The male has stopped his territorial drumming on the wooden roof of one the hanging bird feeders and, whilst we had quite often seen them together in the Magnolia tree, they are now only seen alone. I believe what has changed...
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Wildlife is good and necessary for a healthy ecosystem, we know that, but there are some species that are less welcome than others. Top of my list of Unwelcome Visitors this week is the horsefly ( Haematopota pluvialis , which means ‘blood-drinker of the rains’), also known as the cleg or clegg fly....
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Last July a juvenile Great Spotted Woodpecker ( Dendrocopos major ) started visiting the garden and we watched as it ate peanuts from the hanging feeder and clambered about the Magnolia tree. The tree is only a few paces from the kitchen window, so we had a good opportunity to get a close look at this...
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