A beautiful conversation in the garden

I was delighted recently to receive this wonderful email from Catherine Djimramadji, and found the story so eloquent and moving that I wanted to share it with you all.

The photos are mine, but the story is all Catherine's. Enjoy!

It was, for me, an enormous relief to stumble into wildlife gardening a few years ago. Growing up with the underlying assumption that gardening was essentially a battle against nature, the early years of my garden-custodianship were uncomfortable.

The garden we acquired contained grass, gravel, decking and an entire absence of flowering plants. Its only redeeming feature was a mature silver birch tree that I loved from the beginning. I had hopes and plans for a beautiful, productive, organic garden, where chickens would peck around alongside my thriving plants, but for a variety of reasons that didn’t happen. The chickens succeeded in destroying the little vegetation we had, and when combined with waterlogged clay soil the garden turned into a mud bath.

For years I did everything I could to avoid looking out of the window. As a little child I had once dreamed of being a gardener, but I had very definitely failed.

A few years later my toddler became interested in birdwatching. I knew absolutely nothing but we began learning together. He taught me the difference between a blue tit and a great tit, and we discovered they both seemed to visit our silver birch. We hung a bird feeder outside and now had a reason to look out of the window. We realised we had house sparrows in our hedge and that swifts hawked for insects above the garden. 

Conscious decisions followed: to leave seedheads over winter and enjoy the flock of goldfinches that feed on them; to compost our waste; to remove some of the hard landscaping and add more plants; to watch the wildlife we found without thinking they needed controlling or eliminating.

We discovered elephant hawkmoths (below) breeding in the garden and I overcame my childhood dislike of insects.

We watched frogs, bees, mice and bats, and our world became more colourful as a result. We have added a large flower border filled with nectar-rich flowers, a native hedgerow, a tiny container pond, a bog garden to make use of the waterlogged areas, a stumpery/log pile, night-scented flowers for moths, and our silver birch now has companions: apple, rowan, spindle, wayfaring tree and guelder rose.

It is wonderfully full of life.

In your latest Nature's Home article, Adrian, you include a quote about gardening being a conversation. I find that a wonderful image. A conversation with land, soil and place, and with all the other species that inhabit and pass through the place. For a while after beginning this conversation, I felt uncomfortable calling it “my” garden. My paper ownership of the land meant nothing to the winter gnats who saw it as their lekking ground, nor to nesting blue tits, out-of-sight worms or the silver birch that has lived here way longer than me.

But I am now happy to call it our garden, by including myself in that community of life that cohabit this little patch.