Gardening

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Co. Landscapers of

G A R D E N D E S I G N S T U D I O

Castle Gardens, New Road, Sherborne, Dorset DT9 5NR

www.thegardensgroup.co.uk thegardensgroup

Take a moment to marvel

Following many months of satisfying work in the garden, July is a wonderful time to sit back and enjoy the fruits of your labour.

Every corner of the garden is bursting with colour and with regular visits from a whole host of creatures that will be thankful for your wildlife friendly gardening efforts, there’s so much to take in. So once the watering, weeding and pruning is done, take a moment to savour the best of the summer season.

With our social distancing measures in place, you can pick up your garden furniture, parasols and bird baths any day of the week:

Opening hours Monday to Saturday: 9am – 6pm Sunday: 10am – 4:30pm

GARDEN VISITORS

Mike Burks, Managing Director, The Gardens Group

We are very lucky with our garden and the number of visitors that appear. In reality, they aren’t visitors, most of them think of the garden as their own and maybe think of us as being the outsiders. I’m talking about wildlife rather than humans, although, in normal times, we get a few of those too!

On the slithery front, there are plenty of slow worms around. We have areas of wild grass which they love and old walls which are perfect as hideaways. Grass snakes too are often seen, or more often the young rather than adults. Both of these are pleasing because they will be helping control slugs and they seem to be doing that job well.

We get spiky visitors too and a family of hedgehogs wander through most nights. These visits incur the indignation of our rescue dog Joey, who sees their intrusion as the height of rudeness. He does a lot of woofing, which alerts Myla our black Labradoodle, but she only half-heartedly supports him! Hedgy curls up for a bit and then charges off at the earliest opportunity, fitting under the gate quite easily.

Furry residents appear as well. Field mice are seen quite often and then, the other day, a sleepy mouse appeared, which we think is probably a wood mouse. It would be nice to think we had dormice too and there are gnawed pips from our myrobalan cherry, which could be a sign, but no actual sightings.

A fiercer visitor is a weasel, whose family has been around for a long while. We managed to video it popping its head out of a pile of rocks a few years ago, but the last sighting was whilst I was catching up on some

Bokeholic/Shutterstock

"These visits incur the indignation of our rescue dog Joey, who sees their intrusion as the height of rudeness."

paperwork early one morning and heard a rustling. I kept very quiet and spotted him (or her – I didn’t like to ask) wandering along in one of our polytunnels. I must have stayed still because he gently mooched out the other end of the tunnel unaware that I was watching.

Feathered visitors are many and, for a number of weeks, I have been noting how early the dawn chorus starts. At the time of writing in early June, it’s now got to before 4am. I’m convinced that it’s the same bird that gets them all going and it never seems to have a lie-in!

Robins have always been plentiful and they like to use our kitchen as a feeding station as soon as the back door is opened! Sparrows have also set up home, as well as a pair of goldfinches along with blackbirds, thrushes, wrens and dunnocks. The peace was disturbed by a sparrowhawk who came through chasing a pigeon, who was smart enough to head into the shrubbery just in time to live another day.

Over alongside the river across from the garden centre are kingfishers and we were watching a green woodpecker feeding its chicks in an alder tree last week. I’m no birder, but garden centre manager Brian is always good at identifying what I’ve spotted and even he was impressed with the tiny firecrest that was whizzing around a few weeks ago.

Insect life too is plentiful and I once was working away in the garden in the early spring when I heard a scraping sound. I finally tracked it down to a wasp who was scraping the stalk of a dried-up stinging nettle, presumably for its nest! Wasps are much maligned but are good news for the garden as they eat garden pests. They make the most extraordinary nests too. They become troublesome when food sources start to deplete in the summer and that is when they get involved in our al fresco dining.

We had a hornet looking for a nesting spot in the accounts’ office the other day. I turned off the lights to encourage it to head back outside but it decided that one of our files was perhaps the perfect spot to start a nest! The accounts team thought otherwise and I was delegated to suggest to the beast that its fortunes lay elsewhere. She went along quite happily and our suppliers whose names are between ‘H’ and ‘L’ are now able to be paid!

So, see this as an excuse to relax once in a while, sit very quietly and whilst you are enjoying your garden, you will see others enjoying it too.