Love for your natural garden in August

Even up here in the North-East UK the heat has been a bit much this week! Show yourself some love (ice-cream, definitely) as well as your little bit of outside, whatever you have. Here are three ideas to try on your ancestral acres or little city balcony!

Bees really appreciate a wet mossy stone in hot weather

Provide - for the bees

Bees can struggle to find safe and accessible water sources, which quickly evaporate in the heat, and they frequently drown when desperation to drink drives them to water too deep for them, such as water butts. My beekeeping neighbour suggested this: find a nice flat mossy stone and lay it in a water-filled dish. If you keep the water level up to the moss it acts as a wick, quickly wetting the moss over the whole stone. The bees find a new staging post within minutes and it’s great watching them drinking and refreshing themselves in the heat, and mossy green stones are really pretty too.

Plan for future Augusts

Now’s the time to give a thought to the hot summers to come, and explore what you can take away for your own garden from what nature provides at this time of the year. Take a look, for example, at the wild sunflower: elecampane!

My frankly terrible photo of butterflies and bees on my elecampane

You really can’t get sunnier, more cheerful, or more generous; its scent warm and comforting like new hay. It fully deserves a place in any garden, but in a natural garden it’s a jewel! It can grow up to 6’ tall when it loves its spot, with joyous flowers that just keep coming for several weeks in July/August, prolifically welcoming insects, particularly butterflies. Mine is in dampish semi-shade against a stone wall and for the last couple of weeks has been absolutely covered with red admirals and peacock butterflies that ascend in fluttering clouds every time I try to take a photo for you. A few days ago a peacock butterfly found its way into my house, where I found it looking very dead on the floor. Looking so dead, in fact, that - lazy person as I am - I didn’t do anything about it for some time. Several hours later, I was shocked to find it just about up on its feet and struggling to try to reach the window. Without much hope, I took it outside, put it on an elecampane flower, and its long proboscis immediately uncurled and found the nectar in a tiny central disc flower. Some little while later, still there, it opened its wings towards the sun. Then, not long after, amazingly, it flew away.

Elecampane doesn’t just raise minibeast life from the dead, though! It has earned the nickname ‘horse heal’ for its curative properties with our equine fellows, and the less elevated name of scabwort for its use with human skin conditions. However, it’s more commonly used in lung and digestive disorders.

If you’d like to give it a go, it’s fairly unfussy, doesn’t mind too much what light aspect you give it, and it loves to be in the company of other natural planting (although it’ll definitely earn its place in a regular border). You could try growing it with common knapweed whose jewel-like magenta flowers contrast gloriously with elecampane’s vivid yellow and are equally adored by butterflies; and I love it surrounded by fragrant pink native clover or, for the hardcore sunshine yellow fans, an absolute carpet of birdsfoot trefoil.

Enjoy the drama

We’re not all spider enthusiasts, but I would urge you to send them some love! We would be lost without them and their lives are full of drama. At this time of the year the little orb garden spiders begin to be more obvious, and watching one make its web is always a real wonder. Witnessing the magic of connecting the anchor points - which can be several feet apart - fixing up the radius, finely and systematically constructing the spirals, deftly attaching the spirals to the radius with deft little flicks of the hips (yeah, spiders definitely have hips), you can’t help being in awe. It takes so much work that you can understand how miffed a spider must be if a rival - even a apparent child spider - freeloads on its hard work.

One afternoon, I’d watched this process all the way through to its creator settling into the middle to wait for dinner. But within moments, along came a smaller one, and in a fit of cheeky opportunism, it freeloaded on the original spider’s web’s long bridge thread and on it fixed its own.

Original spider (OS) was a bit put out by this and left its station in order to run over and twang the bridge thread with a front leg, at which the second spider (SS) wisely retreated to a nearby leaf. The first resumed its place in the middle and settled down once again to wait for the menu to fly in.

After a decent pause, however, SS judged it safe to have another go. The episode was repeated, and for a second time everyone returned to their original positions.

SS wasn’t giving up, though, and immediately on OS’s return to centre, SS was back displaying the persistence for which all spiders have been renowned since one found fame for it with Robert the Bruce. This time, however, OS was distinctly losing patience. It charged at SS, and following several furious, deep twangs, SS disappeared for some long moments. This time, it seemed that OS had firmly established its territorial claim.

Nevertheless, after a reasonable pause SS reappeared, none the worse for its extremely firm ticking off. Clearly undaunted, and with admirable doggedness, it made short work of reattaching its threads. Presumably it thought it only had to hang on in there. But this time OS resorted to a shot in one of its own feet and actually snipped the thread, the beautiful web deflated, and SS tumbled down onto the leaves below.

I had to go at that point but unbelievably when I returned it was SS who was patching up the ragged remnant of the web, and OS had gone to find peace elsewhere.

I know we’re not supposed to anthropomorphise, but not to do so is such a denial of the unmistakeable dramas like this that play out every day in an outside space allowed to run its own show, our shared evolution and thus our innate recognition of what’s happening. When we let the web of life reconstruct in the smallest of spaces, and pay attention to it as it does, we mindfully reattach to our own health and humanity and improve our shared future, whatever else is happening in the world. And you don’t get more positive than that!

If you’d like talk to me about connecting with nature through your own outside space, please in touch with me:

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