It has to be our worst garden weeding challenge. Ever. A consequence of very poor forward thinking on my part.

We knew that last autumn was a mast year for most of our oaks – something which happens every few years. The evidence was clear – acorns littered the croquet lawn and required bucketfuls of them and their shells to be raked and removed last autumn. All part of the annual leaf fall clearance, which any gardener is faced with if their garden has many mature trees within it. Acorns which fell from the big old oak behind our barn also littered our gravel yard – this was more of a challenge – gloved finger raking into small piles, and scraping these into buckets seemed the only easy solution. Our small leaf blower didn’t work, since it shifted the gravel as well, but after many hours, eventually I managed to remove the bulk of them.

We’d even lost our favourite ewe lamb, Lalique, as a result of (presumed) acorn gorging from the 2 oaks at the bottom of cae efail (the smithy field). We’d never before seen our small flock race towards the grass beneath these oaks when they were turned into this field. We could have fared worse – some Welsh farmers lost multiple ewes. In a landscape with many oak trees in hedgerows, keeping livestock away from fallen acorns in long grass is an immense practical challenge, and some young animals evidently develop a penchant for the acorns, in an autumn like 2025. .

However, what about the 2 inches deep layer of them which carpeted the ground, beneath the carefully managed ground-cover plants beneath this wide canopied tree?

In a very wet autumn and winter, this thick carpet of acorns was simply ignored and left. What was I thinking? Or not. That they would all form a benign mulch? That many would fail to germinate, or that jays and rodents would consume or disperse the vast majority? No chance.

Spring has presented us with a veritable forest of countless oak seedlings beginning to appear in the last 10 days – just when I thought I was well on the way to managing the annual spring weed rush. And my guess is that this will be just the first wave, for this year. I fear they’ll keep emerging for weeks and probably some will have delayed germination into 2027. I’ve known for years that removing tree seedlings from every bit of the garden has to be tackled in the spring a.s.a.p, since many have deep roots. One can’t just hoik them out with a bit of a gentle fertle with an old kebab skewer and a wiggle, which is how our (previously) most feared and numerous weeds like hairy bittercress, grasses, goosegrass and willow herbs are tackled. And of the most common tree seedlings we always find popping up – ash, sycamore, maple, holly and oak, oak is undoubtedly the most tenaciously rooted.

It’s going to be a very long, tedious and garden disruptive process to try to eliminate them all. I prefer our DeWit 2 pronged weeding tool, used with a stab and twist action, using just my right arm to plunge the tool, (not the foot rest) and loosen the deep tap root. On another level we’re also beginning to worry that such an enormous effort on the tree’s part to ensure successful procreation, may both accelerate, or even herald its demise. Although it’s often referenced that oaks can take 300 years to grow, 300 to live, and 300 to die, we suspect that such longevity in our harsh climate and poor soils is unlikely to be achieved.

“The monarch oak, the patriarch of the trees,

Shoots rising up, and spreads by slow degrees;

Three centuries he grows, and three he stays,

Supreme in state and in three more decays”.

John Dryden 1688

(Click here for a post in which, by chance, after reading a bedside copy of Thomas Pakenham’s ‘Meetings with remarkable Trees’, we visited and viewed the oldest, dying oak in the United Kingdom, at Croft Castle. Is that history-soaked, 1,000 year old leviathan, still alive?)

So we’ll keep unplugging away at oak seedlings over the weeks ahead, and try to factor this into a daily routine, rather than thinking we’ll manage the task in a few days – we can’t, it’s simply too backbreaking or knee stressing for our aged frames. And we’ll monitor and gaze into the wonderful crown of this ancient tree a little more closely in the seasons ahead. For signs of life, decay or death. With hundreds of Kg of acorns and seedlings already removed to our compost heaps, we also hope that they decompose without any negative impacts on the compost!

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There’s rarely a better time of the year for a very early, slow dawn stroll around the garden, than an early May day dawn. When the air is cool, the wind is stilled, the birdsong is continuous, and angled golden sunlight highlights features, flowers and planting vignettes which are changing on a daily basis. In one part of the garden, fabulous scents are extra elements of this sensory symphony. In particular, one of the most evocative and fleeting in the garden, is the perfume of Rhododendron luteum, and some of its fragrant relatives, like ‘Soir de Paris’, which I still refer to as deciduous Azaleas. And which still take us both back to a trip to the Rosemoor garden of Lady Anne Palmer, and the banks of specimens lining the drive to her elegant house, decades ago, just after the RHS acquired the property and massively expanded its garden and public space experiences.

How one describes a flower scent like this is beyond me.

And it seems many others. Including AI.

‘Honeysuckle-like’, ‘strong, sweet, fragrance’, ‘fabulous and delicious perfume’ are all well and good but miss its complexity and impact. Its ability to lift the spirits from a distance and demand that one seeks its source, and breathes deeply to inhale its richness as though it has some life enhancing properties.

Maybe it does.

Trying to understand a little more about this powerful effect that scents have, at least for me, to instantly dredge up memories in great detail from a long time ago, led me to more discoveries.

The complex and numerous chemical molecules that make up all scents and smells are detected by our roughly 400 nerve-linked receptors which are positioned in the lining of our upper nose. These send impulses to the olfactory bulb in our brains, responsible for processing this ‘smell’ information. The output from this olfactory bulb has direct connections with parts of the brain’s limbic system like the amygdala and hippocampus. These regions of the brain are important in creating emotional responses for us, and also in memory learning.

However, our other vital sensory inputs like our more highly valued senses of vision, hearing and touch, don’t have such direct links to the amygdala and hippocampus: their output is processed first by the thalamus, which then passes the information onto other ‘higher’ regions in the brain. Click here for a simple discussion about the neuroscience of scent, or watch this short, quick-fire video.

None of this helps me with words to describe the scent of these Azaleas, but I’d rank them alongside Daphne bholua and a few of our daffodil cultivars, as being my all time favourite scented plants. Scent memories I hope I shall take with me to the grave.

There’s a brilliant recent review article on the significance of the loss, or impairment of our ability to smell which you can read here. ‘The impact of olfactory loss on quality of life: a 2025 review’  Anna Oleszkiewicz  Ilona Croy  Thomas Hummel.

Look at the date of publication, read the introduction below, and you’ll see why this has become more widely appreciated in recent years:

 

“For a long time, the sense of smell was considered the neglected stepbrother of human sensory abilities, and the loss of smell has received little attention. This perception changed dramatically with the COVID-19 pandemic, which led to millions of people losing their sense of smell, and some never recovering. COVID-19 not only increased general awareness of olfactory disorders but also accelerated research into the role of smell in nonverbal communication and mental health. This review aims to summarize the literature on the impact of olfactory disorders on quality of life. Starting from the functions of olfaction in healthy individuals, we will briefly describe the most common olfactory disorders and their effect on an individual’s life, including nutrition and eating behaviors, social and psychological well-being, and exposure to environmental hazards. Consequences of olfactory loss permeate many spheres of daily life. On average, dysosmia (a disrupted sense of smell-sic) has a moderate impact on quality of life, though for some patients the effects can be severe.”

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As well as the scent sensations, one of my early May dawn walks saw me stepping back behind Rhododendron yakushimanum ‘Koichiro Wada’ to take this view back up the copse (above), where a number of R. flower cultivars and emerging Acer foliage create marvellous and largely unplanned visual treats for a couple of weeks in early May. I wouldn’t normally stand in this place, since it’s quite close to the flight path from one of the free-living honey bee colonies. I glanced across at it to discover that there was some external bee activity even at around 5.50am. But what was the huge blurred dark blob I could see at the hive entrance, in poor light?

Zooming in with the camera showed not one, but 2 enormous dark slugs – one gliding along the top of the hive entrance, the other gliding out, and onto the narrow landing board.

The bees, perhaps surprisingly, seemed to pay little attention to these creatures, and over a period of about 5 minutes I watched as the lower, landing board slug seemed to turn around and head back into the hive. On occasion when I’ve opened a bee hive – including about 3 weeks ago when I added a ‘super’ box to one colony, I’ve found a large slug resting on the top board inside the hive. A hive is of course a safe, damp, dark warm location for a slug to take up residence – if the bees ignore you!. But does the slug only stay in the hive at night? And does it confer some benefit to the colony? Otherwise why do the bees tolerate its presence? Other than as part of a benign ‘live and let live’ approach which many life forms have towards other species that aren’t harming their activities in any way. Even if they are sharing their space.

During a sequence of still photos I noticed a single honey bee (to the right, above and below) carrying out something that looked to be an almost pink/orange hue, and deliberately manipulating it in its jaws and pulling it off the landing board, to drop to the ground below. Was it some sort of resented mite, beetle, or larval form of an unwanted hive guest?  I don’t know. 

Perhaps I’d timed my visit for the moment when, during a generally cool, dry period of weather, these slugs were returning to their warm, moist daylight hours shelter. Following the scent of the slime trail they would have left at dusk, to return to this favoured base.

It’s now thought that our ‘common’ slug species not only use light levels detected by their eyes and other extra-ocular photoreceptors, but also an inbuilt circadian (daily rhythm) clock located in their central nervous system, to determine when they will commence their (usually nocturnal) feeding activity. Thus experimental removal of their eyes, or placing the slugs in constant darkness for weeks, although a considerable challenge, can be circumvented by the slugs – and they’ll still tend to forage at a well defined ‘night’ time. Click on this review paper for more details: ‘Clocks at a snail pace: biological rhythms in terrestrial gastropods’ Rodrigo Brincalepe Salvador and Barbara Mizumo Tomotani 

On the same walk, I was lucky to see not one, but two Green-veined White, Pieris napi, butterflies, still resting up on dew covered white flowers.

As well as Rhododendron flowering time, May is the peak month for our Clematis montana cutivars. We now grow a few forms which extend the season slightly, although they seem to vary massively in vigour and the numbers of flowers produced. Notwithstanding that, my sense is that it’s been another great year for them. They’re beginning to clothe peripheral trees to the north east of the magic terrace garden with curtains of flower in the weeks before the rambling roses in the same area get going.

Some combine their flowering in an entirely unplanned way with shrub or perennial flowers in the foreground to produce glorious sheets of flower power, never envisaged by us when we plonked the plants in as small bought-in potted specimens or home grown rooted cuttings..

And I’m beginning to think that my annual, single event, early-in-the-spring watering of most of the plants in the garden with diluted ‘worm juice’ is of real benefit to the depth of colour and number of flowers produced. This ‘worm juice’ is simply the collected and stored liquid from the base of our two wormeries. Which gets drained off every time I need to empty our green waste bucket’s contents into them. It’s an initially foul smelling brew, consisting both of the worm’s excreta, liquid from the green waste, and indeed the rotting bodies of dead worms which have fallen into the collected layer of liquid sitting at the base of the wormeries until I get round to emptying it. Which for us is roughly every 2 to 3 weeks, and yields about 3 litres of liquid on each occasion. Most of it sits in the storage bottles for months before use, the following year, by which time most of the odour has disappeared. I dilute it at a rate of about 300 mls into a 10 litre watering can, an arbitrary figure which happens to be the volume contained in a small, plastic, ex-mini pudding basin.

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For a musical interlude for early May in Wales, a couple of pieces by Welsh artists and composers. Firstly the wonderfully calming and complex ‘Listening to the Grass Grow’, by Katrin Finch and Seckou Keita – another track from their wonderful joint album ‘Soar’

And then yet another Welsh folk song, for which I’ve failed to find a satisfactory translation into English of the Welsh lyrics. There’s a link here which gives a little background to the history of May ‘carols’ in Welsh. The performance below by Ysbyrd y Werin of Mae’r ddaear yn glasu (The Earth is getting greener) is one such carol. We visited the excellent local ‘Reading the Wild Festival’ in Llandovery to hear both Carwyn Graves and Jackie Morris talk about their latest books, which I might mention again next time. Carwyn’s book Cynefin – (subtitled) Wisdom from a 1000 years of Welsh nature poetry gave me some more insights into my perpetual struggle with the problem of finding a way into accessing Welsh language writing and music, if you have only the most rudimentary knowledge of the language.

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It’s the time of year when queen wasps have begun to build their papery nests to house this year’s colonies. Whilst up the tripod ladder helping Fiona with the annual limewashing of the property, I was aware of a wasp or two checking out the open eaves line of the house, where last year we had 2 or 3 large colonies establish their nests.

We also suffered from a rather annoying wasp buzzing around us as we sat at the wooden table for a tea break, early in the month. We didn’t think anything more about it, until 3 days later, as I took out the seat cushions, I noticed 3 small limpet-shell-like structures beneath the table. A closer look confirmed that they were the outer sections of a small wasp nest. but where had they come from?

A quick glance beneath the table showed that a wasp (the annoying one, probably) had  made good progress building a nest about 50 cm from where our knees would have been as we sat at the table. It looked as though she had got as far as the beginnings of a 4 layer structure, beyond the point of the 3 layer shell and pedicel with multiple egg cells that I’d seen Winnie construct above our bed about 3 years ago, filmed below.

Once I’d taken a few photos and enlarged them on-screen, it became clear that only 2 of the nest’s egg cells remained, and there were no eggs or larvae in them. Which begged the question, I thought, of what had caused the damage and removed the eggs and cells? Several birds will eat wasps and their eggs or larvae, including blackbirds, magpies and wrens – all of which are common around the garden. But how could a heavy bird have reached the nest, and not damaged the outer papery layers more?

Although we’d had some strong winds, I imagined they wouldn’t have caused such selective damage to the top of the nest only – and caused the loss of eggs and cells as well.

I wondered about hornets, but we haven’t seen any around the garden. Or perhaps spiders, but I couldn’t imagine them causing the damage to the nest layers. And at this point in my musings I spotted a common lizard, Zootoca vivipara, hunting amongst maidenhair ferns on the stone wall just a few feet away from the nest. Normally I spot lizards basking on warmer areas and in hotter weather. This one was actively hunting, moving with predatory concentration and stealth. Whether it would manage to walk upside down across the wooden undersurface of the table is debatable, since they lack the specialised feet micro-anatomy that lizards like geckos possess. Gecko’s can certainly attack wasp nests. Click here for a video of this.

So the mystery of who or what caused the wasp nest trauma remains unsolved.

As I wrote this piece up today, on a failing computer, I added in a zoomed in photo of the woodpecker created hole in the dead totem pole spruce trunk which features in a few photos in this post. I thought I’d noticed an increase in insect activity around the trunk in recent days. Then thought I could see a circular rim hidden deep in the hole’s cavity shadow, and changing in size slightly each day. By increasing the contrast of the image, it’s now clear that a queen wasp and her workers are busy at work creating another nest in this location. This may well be a tree wasp, Dolichovespula sylvestris, and we’re lucky that the nest is well away from the paths around the garden. How large they can make it, and whether it escapes predation before the next generation of queens develop, remains to be seen. But they do have the advantage of on site wood fibres to make the wood pulp to build the nest walls, so nest construction should progress at pace.

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Finally, and out of the blue, it was personally very pleasing to have our short book of images and poems –  ‘An Immaterial Rhapsody’ selected as a desert island book, by guest presenter Adam Price on a recent edition of Garden Masterclass’s free Thursday Chat Zoom presentation. After a recent re-organisation of their website, it’s much easier to find the huge range of interesting content that Noel and Annie have gradually built up, over the years – much of which is free to view, some of which requires membership to access. You can watch this episode here, and discover why Adam, (who has never visited our garden… yet), heard about us. And also learn about the 5 diverse gardens he chose to feature in his presentation, and why. He even read out the titular poem from the book, which was a bonus. Many thanks for this unsolicited mention, Adam.