Sun, Sun, Sun.

I’m sure I’ve used Rain, Rain, Rain in a blog post title before, but possibly not Sun, Sun, Sun. It’s been a fabulous 3 weeks here in West Wales, with wonderful sunny days without getting too hot – rarely above 20 degrees C, and managing to avoid any late frosts. By the end of the month, I was thinking that it was the best spell of weather I can recall here.

However, my memory clearly is failing – May 2020 was even sunnier, and even drier, coming after a very dry April, though I notice after reviewing my “Garden Views” page for that month, that we did have minus 3 degrees C  frosts, which played havoc with some early vegetables. I guess that the fact that other things were going on in the world then, and we were in even more of an isolated bubble than usual, has influenced my memory.

No matter, I’ll begin with a selection of images from around the garden and meadows in recent weeks. There’s not much to add – the garden has looked wonderful, with many areas looking as good as they’ve ever looked. perhaps only some of the Clematis montana, and the deciduous Azaleas haven’t flowered quite as well as they often do.

This year, the upper hay meadow has transformed itself again, jumping up a gear or two with more widespread floral diversity. After years of manually saving and hand scattering seeds of “special” flowers across the field, the effort has evidently paid off. Pignut now seems to be established across much of the meadow, clusters of orchids are popping up in many new places, and we seem to be past peak yellow rattle over much of the meadow – about 11 years after we began this floral re-introduction project. As I write I’m pondering when to cut our first hay, the dilemma being the weather is perfect for manual haymaking, but we really can’t bear to cut any of the floriferous bits. I’ll probably start with some peripheral sections in the lower meadow since we can’t afford to risk trying to remove it all later in the year in a rush – we’re just too limited in stamina these days.

Sometime soon, I’ll try to complete a short YouTube to illustrate how the upper meadow looked in late May/early June since it changes daily. We’re pleased we’ve already had a few visitors who’ve been able to share special moments in the garden during the last week, including a first visit by A&J who arrived at 11.30 a.m, for a birthday treat visit, bringing a picnic lunch and didn’t leave until about 4.30 pm – so we seem to be exceeding the National Garden Scheme (NGS) requirement for a garden with sufficient interest to keep visitors engaged for about 45 minutes!

This seems an appropriate point to include a link to the NGS’s digital Little Yellow Book. We only discovered this for the first time about a month ago, after a round-robin reminder sent to us by Jackie, our wonderful county organiser. It’s a mine of interesting information about what the funds raised by private gardens like ours opening for the public are used for. It also includes some wonderful personal stories about life-changing experiences by people benefiting from NGS-funded facilities or help, as well as personal tips about gardening and the increasingly recognised value of gardening, and time spent in open air/green spaces, for physical and mental well-being. It’s encouraged us to keep going in our own limited, small-scale intimate garden opening.

Part of the delight of having continuous wonderful weather is the ability to have most of our meals and drinks outside. There’s always something of interest to observe, mainly bees working the flowers on the terrace, but a week ago as we were finishing lunch, I drew Fiona’s attention to a cloud of flies milling beside a tree on the edge of the garden – except that they weren’t flies, but a fairly small swarm of honey bees which moved over our heads and onwards to the North. I’m not sure if they had left one of our colonies, since they didn’t settle as a cluster, moving more purposefully onward to the North, so seemed to know where they were heading.

Even more dramatic yesterday, was the sight and sound of the sparrowhawk skimming through the terrace right in front of us, barely 10 yards away at head height, pursued at pace by a cluster of 5 swallows. The hawk turned sharp right through a gap in the oak/hazel foliage, just above head height, hoping to throw off its annoyed and noisy chasers. The swallows simply flew up and over the oak and the group continued their chase in the sky above cae efail, with the hawk spiralling higher, whilst being constantly harried by swallows which visibly nipped at the raptor’s wings causing it to flinch and switch direction. By the time I’d thought of rushing for a camera, the hawk had left the scene and the swallows could return to more benign insect catching. Sadly, our visitors were focused on the greenhouse at the time so missed the drama.

We’re still unsure whether the swallows have any chicks, but at least they’re enjoying skimming the meadow for food, with the annual brief hatch of chafers exciting a lot of interest from other birds this week. The house sparrows seemed quickest off the mark, diving in amongst the lengthening flowering stems of sweet vernal grass to grab a feast, but like most natural events no doubt enough have survived and mated to provide grubs for the badgers to discover later in the year – the subsequent turf ripping being one of the biggest issues for us with our meadow restoration.

 

__

With such a prolonged dry spell, the stream rapidly slowing down to barely more than a trickle, and no signs of an imminent change in the weather for at least another two weeks, we’ve been in both water conservation mode and watering mode. It’s a dilemma as to when to start to resort to using our IBC storage tanks, acquired after last year’s hot summer in areas of the main garden where plants are beginning to show signs of severe water stress. The usual suspects get hit first – Chrysosplenium, Saxifrage fortunei, and even yesterday the Lysimachia clethroides. Thank goodness much of the garden has moved towards at least part shade, and nearly all of the garden has a complete ground cover, with little bare soil, limiting water loss to transpiration rather than too much straight evaporation.

Time and task allocation are always demanding when conditions are like this. There’s not the usual pressure of getting on with dry weather jobs on those rare dry days. Just juggling priorities – external property maintenance; track management; watering (which has to be done by hand with hoses and watering cans to use it efficiently – we bought a sprinkler years ago, and then realised it was far too wasteful for our limited supplies); routine garden tasks; weeding; and meadow/sheep management. At least we timed shearing to perfection, with Richard coming just before the temperatures began to rise on May 21st, possibly the earliest we’ve ever managed it.

As well as all this, after a very benign February and April, with masses of bees around the garden, it’s been a bumper year for seed collection. This is time-consuming but benign work and I’ve had such good germination from last year’s efforts, that I’m encouraged to repeat the process. The highlight this year, after focusing on snowdrops, wood anemones, Crocus, and Dicentra, has been hunting down the few ripening berries on our several Daphne bholua thickets.

Since acquiring the 3 seedling forms from Pan Global plants a few years back there’s a greater chance of diversity. We had a few berries last year, but I missed the boat. There’s little information online, but what seems to happen is the green fruit which should all contain a single seed, ripen suddenly over a couple of days, turning soft and black. They need to be sown quickly, apparently, since like oaks the seed needs to germinate and put out its root soon after falling. So I need to get going on this quickly! As I was collecting the berries today, I noticed that for reasons that aren’t obvious, most of the berries seem to be hidden on the stems of the shrubs which are on the East facing side – perhaps because these are more sheltered from the prevailing winds. Given how much blossom is produced over more than 3 months this year, and given how the honey bees adore it, in a way it’s surprising that more fruit don’t form. But still more than enough to have a go at propagation, once I’ve scrubbed the flesh off the seed.

As well as my occasional blog posts, much time this year has gone into my Garden Views pages, YouTube compilations, and an attempt to record what we’ve actually been doing around the property, on a Gardening Year page, as a prompt for us in future years, and as a possible aide-memoire for whoever takes over stewardship of this special place in the years ahead.

Any readers interested in visiting to see the meadows in their current glory, or indeed interested in a bag of green hay for seeds from the upper meadow – the next 5 weeks is probably prime time for viewing them, or perhaps 9 weeks for green hay collection, from mid-June.

__

Here’s another brief What3Plants moment compilation from the magic terrace garden – a plant combination that always delights us, but has this year proved even more successful, in part because of the weather, in part because of the decision to switch to Allium ‘Purple Sensation’ from Allium ‘Purple Rain’. The former flowers are taller, slightly earlier, and set masses of seed, and hence have the potential to fill in, with time, with Gelli-adapted forms. Although the ‘Purple Rain’ has returned quite well this year, it seems sterile  – or at least its seed set is minimal, though Fiona found one flower with bulblets forming amongst the flowers, as sometimes happens with leeks. Add in massed Aquilegia vulgaris and Camassia esculanta, and the effect is created.

__

18 years ago, if my memory serves me correctly, we made our first visit to Monet’s garden at Giverny in early May and were inspired. Not by the waterlilies and wisteria, but by the more formal garden which was a riot of intermingling flowers of all colours, and was teeming with insects of all sorts.

It set in motion the simple concept that by choosing what I call “insect friendly flowers” (as opposed to the many flowers and cultivars that seem to have little appeal to our native insects) for a major part of the plantings in a garden, one might over time attract a greater diversity of insects into a garden space.

Back then, around 2005, I would get so excited to see a single bumble bee in the garden, I’d spend ages following it around, trying to take photos of it. The first honey bee sightings came much later, at first just in late summer with visits to our Sedum spectabile. In time this led to the idea that honey bees might manage to survive in our upland wet climate if not exactly thrive. My 12-year journey of discovery to our now current maximum complement of 6 minimally managed but active colonies located around the garden’s periphery is recorded here.

I’d noticed that May 20th has recently been designated as World Bee Day, and I thought given I needed a break from constant outside work in the fabulous run of sunny dry weather, I’d pick up the camera and wander around the garden and meadows and see what bees I could film, and which flowers they might be visiting. It’s an astonishing transformation from our largely bee-free environment all those years ago.

One of the things that put me off the more conventional route into managed honey beekeeping was the extraordinary focus on intrusive management and housing of bees, with a relative dearth of discussion about food supply, and indeed the likely important benefits from diversity of food supply – that’s to say different pollen and nectar sources. I remember very clearly the question posed by our young Irish horse medicine lecturer, Kieran O’Brien, at the beginning of one of his sessions –

“What’s the most common cause of weight loss in an animal?”

Answer – “Food Deficiency”.

Wonderful Irish logic.

This could be debated perhaps, but it’s a valuable reminder that simple, common problems are always worth considering first. As an aging, COPD-afflicted, non-vaccinated male, decisions about my diet and metabolic health were significant ones for me to take during those Covid years. Introducing higher dose Vitamin D and K2 supplementation have surely helped (my many years of COPD symptoms have completely dissipated since I’ve used these to the extent that my dust-protecting masks are no longer necessary for several tasks). But I’ve also been impressed by the research and simple message of Professor Tim Spector of Zoe, and his advocacy for at least 30 different plants to be included in one’s diet per week – not just fruits and veg, but herbs, spices, nuts, etc. The reason is that different plants contain many different beneficial chemicals, particularly polyphenols, which have impacts on the myriad of healthy, and unhealthy organisms in one’s gut.

I’m convinced that any insects will equally benefit from a diversity of food choices, which given how flowering plants work, will anyway tend to change through the seasons. In many of the clips incorporated into this YouTube offering, you’ll see how faithful an individual bee is to a particular flower type, so having MASSES of the same flower, in flower, in the same location really does aid foraging efficiency. (There’s the side issue that honey produced by bees with a diverse foraging menu will likely have much greater nutritional benefits than colonies with a more limited selection of flowers to visit).

I’ve made no effort to name the bee species, though I have highlighted honey, bumble, and solitary bees. By my reckoning on this single day – perhaps 3 hours in total of looking/filming time, there were more than Spector’s 30 different popular, visited flowers in the garden and meadows, though many were preferred by one group of bees, and not others – in part due to bee size and tongue length. Compare that with the food options available when commercial, beekeepers move their colonies around to provide “pollination” services and focus on a single crop species for several weeks whilst it’s in flower.

I hope this compilation also goes some way towards illustrating that small honey bee colonies, not pushed by man to work really hard, still leave plenty of forage options for many other native bees if there are lots of suitable flowers in the first place!

__

Finally, as a musical accompaniment this week, here’s a stunning piece of music, the second of Brahms’ 6 piano pieces, opus 118, which we heard again last week at a piano recital by Llyr Williams at the wonderful Rhosygilwen oak hall near Cardigan. I can’t find a recording of this by him and trawled through various performances of it online. For a modestly short piece the duration of recordings, and hence the pace at which it’s played, varied tremendously from just over 5 minutes, to well over 7. In the end, since it’s known as both an intermezzo and a romance, I found this slower recording with more emotional subtlety than many male pianists seem to portray, the most enjoyable. If you’re unfamiliar with it, give it a go, it’s full of delightful harmonies and contrasts. It was composed by Johannes Brahms in 1893 as one of his last pieces of piano music and was dedicated by him to Clara Schumann.

Not a bad way to start the day. Certainly beats the “Today” programme.

(PS – Lest you ponder whether Ms. Buniatishvili overdoes the emotional nuances and pauses in her playing, read this wonderful piece by Maria Popova on her equally wonderful website “The Marginalian”- “Love Beyond Label: The Tender Letters of Clara Schumann and Johannes Brahms” which I only discovered today as background reading for this piece. It explains that Brahms and Clara Schumann had a relationship spanning 43 years, which after their deaths, yielded 2 volumes of letters between the two of them. This correspondence developed after the older Robert and Clara Schumann had befriended the young Brahms, only for Schumann to attempt suicide shortly afterwards by throwing himself into the Rhine. He was rescued but spent the next two, and final, years of his life in a psychiatric institution, leaving Clara, as a single mother and tireless performing artist, to bring up her 7 children alone. A Pulitzer prize-winning poet, Lisel Mueller, even wrote a poem, “Romantics” about their relationship.)

Over emotional nuances? I don’t think so – this piece was clearly written with very deep emotions at its heart, and in this performance, the pianist weaves the two hands, like two lives, through a range of subtle dramas and interplays, sometimes tender, sometimes fiery or passionate. It was also recorded in the intensity of the height of the pandemic – a classical piece of emotional, interpretative art.