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Many years ago, on a bright April day with cotton wool
clouds whisked across a clear blue sky by a strong breeze, I first saw Ivy
Cottage. I stood at the entrance of the driveway leading into the garden, where
daffodils danced at the feet of a row of cordoned apple trees covered in
blossoms. The lady of the house sat on the lawn in the sunshine, engrossed with
her spinning wheel, and I felt as though I had wandered through a time-travel
portal.
The term 'cottage' was quite misleading, as this
three-hundred-year-old Cotswold stone and brick property was actually a
five-bedroom house. We made an offer, which the vendor accepted, and in August
of that year, we moved in. The garden had to take care of itself that autumn
and winter, but as it began to thrive the following spring, I discovered many
intriguing things growing spontaneously.
Aside from the fruit trees, there was a large vegetable patch, a raspberry patch, and my favourite—a sprawling wild garden I never touched. Rabbits hid there, foxes used a regular trail through it, and a hedgehog raised her babies there for several years in a row. Bees loved the foxgloves and honeysuckle, while butterflies were drawn to the lilacs and buddleia. Each year, appearing unannounced in a different part of the garden, were poppies, ox-eye daisies, and the delicate and shy fritillaries.
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| rhsplants.co.uk |
Another annual visitor was the teasel, which appeared in various parts of the garden each year. Known since before Tudor times for its woollen production, the mills in our area purchased locally grown teasels.
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| thompsonmorgan.com |
The teasels were dried, and their spiky heads were then used to raise the nap on the fabric. This process was known as ‘teasing.’ In the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, locally grown commercially harvested teasel crops became a thing of the past due to cheap imported teasels from Spain. My teasels attracted not only pollinators when they came into flower, but once they went to seed, they provided a feast for various birds, particularly
goldfinches.
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| a-z-animals.com |
The goldfinches weren’t the only birds inhabiting the garden. We had a noisy wren nesting in an old wall and a robin in the potting shed. Chaffinches and bullfinches, lovely as it was to see them, became spring pests once the fruit blossoms appeared. House and hedge sparrows, blackbirds, and thrushes all came and went, alongside an infrequent woodpecker and an occasional blue jay.
Being a single working mum meant I often didn’t tend
to the garden as much as I would have liked. When the grass grew too long, I
borrowed a neighbour’s goats to trim it. The only issue with this was that
they had to be tethered to a ground peg, resulting in various odd-looking
crop circles. It was either that or have the garden completely stripped.
During the ten years we lived in that house, the vegetable and raspberry patches were expanded, and I cultivated various herbs in reclaimed clay chimney pots acquired from a local demolition yard.
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| pinterest.co.uk |
However,
none of this brought me the same satisfaction as my wild garden and all its
inhabitants, both flora and fauna.
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