Trees

We get a great many birds of various varieties in the garden. In part I think this is because we hang a good selection of bird feeders out, but also there are a lot of trees surrounding the garden. They provide habitat, food, roosts, nesting places, and staging posts that allow the birds to flit from cover to cover. This is unusual because we are pretty suburban really, but the house was built in the mid to late 1800s and for a long time there was nothing but fields to the back, the bottom of the garden creating a new boundary. You can see here the way they carved out a section of the field, perhaps to build cottages for workers at the farm across the lane

The trees at the very bottom were, I guess, once a hedge, but have now grown up and screen us from the bungalows beyond. There is hazel, ash, silver birch, laurel, spruce, laburnum, and a walnut

this is where good things to eat get grown, tender seedlings are nursed along and, down in the Dell, the badgers live and wild flowers drop their seeds

there is wild bullace

and a grotto of ferns, lovingly planted by the Man

As you go back to the top part of the garden you find spiders webs catching the light

crocosmia glowing by the shed

and more trees; this time willow, hawthorne and ash behind the shed

yew which paid host to a little cloud of long tailed tits and blue tits as I was wandering about - a sudden flurry of high, excited peeps and twitters, far too fast to capture with the camera

maple, rhododendron, more laurel and, in the background, across three other gardens, two stately oaks which shield the two blocks of flats tucked in behind and are, I'm glad to say, protected. I often hear the woodpecker drumming and in the evenings, jackdaws gather, chattering away to each other. Such a precious resource.

Beneath these green guardians you'll find oxalis and violets nestled under the maple

Look up and you might find the woodpecker in the top of the spruce, tick ticking to himself

or goldfinches pausing to pour their rippling song into the air

Turn round and Wol is peeping from behind the hydrangeas

the Japanese lady communes with her dragonfly

cyclamen nestle in pots

and the little Waterboy has a new companion, waiting for a pond to appear