Winter and hedgehogs

As winter approaches, Mother Nature retreats, with wonderful order and efficiency, into her shell. In the flower garden the annuals have set their seed for the next generation to be able to emerge and take over from this year's dying crop. The great majority of insects have laid their eggs or crept under cover for the winter to ensure the survival of their species for another year. As you give your garden its end-of-year tidy, look out for ways of boosting their choice of over-wintering sites. Don't compost all your sweet-corn husks; leave a few secured in a wall, hedge or tree where their cells will provide great shelter for bees, ladybirds and the like. Sun flower stalks cut into 15 inch lengths and bound together for strength, will be five star accommodation for a myriad of tiny creatures. Be creative and see what you can design – get the children involved!

Frogs and toads bury themselves down into the vegetation to avoid the worst pf the winter's blast. With the increasing chilliness of October evenings, bats will have found a roosting site where they can huddle together for warmth; they might hang in hollow trees, or in the dim recesses of a barn or loft space, or even in your nest box if you have been far-sighted enough to provide one. At Cabragh Wetlands our pipistrelle bats are snoozing happily, but will still be tempted out on unseasonably mild evenings, especially as the moths they feed on may also be on the wing. Squirrels have been busy collecting and storing caches of nuts as winter food, and as it gets colder they will spend more and more time in their nest, or 'drey', popping out every now and then to locate one of their many larders and top up on their favourite nourishment.

But at this time of year do make an effort to remember the hedgehogs. They are one your garden's best friends, an avid consumer of excess slugs and snails, and you could construct a great shelter for them in a few seconds, with a few blocks or timber for walls and some planking for a roof, weighed down with a few stones. Tuck it under a hedge in a quiet corner, preferably away from the road and pop in a few handfuls of warm straw or hay. Last winter was unseasonably warm and many hedgehogs mistimed their breeding season, producing helpless, hairless young too early in the year, and many were killed by returning frosts and icy winds.

Halloween is another great danger for the hedgehogs, who love to overwinter in the depths of a heap of logs. They can retire at a moment's notice to the safety and warmth of a cosy woodpile. Are you planning a Halloween bonfire? Then please take the time to dismantle the wood before you set it alight, and give that most delightful of creatures a fair chance to get out and find himself alternative winter quarters.

October

October is upon us, a time of mists, cobwebs, fruits and berries – "mellow fruitfulness" as Keats put it. The hedgerows and trees are laden with berries, and many species will be competing to grab the fruit and either eat it now or store it for the tough winter months ahead. At Cabragh Wetlands we have a fine mature hedge, perhaps 200 or more years old, which is an invaluable habitat for exploration with visiting school groups. There within a few yards of each other you will find blackberry, spindle berries, elderberries, rosehips, haws, sloes, holly, ivy and others, all currently dripping with beautiful fruit in various stages of maturity.

There is of course a warning to be given out – many of the berries you see on trees and hedgerows are poisonous, and it is a basic rule that you do not pick and eat anything until you are absolutely sure what it is. But do not be afraid of nature's larder; our ancestors have used the fruits around them for many millennia, and it is one of the many paradoxes of our civilization that as we 'progress' and develop our food technology and convenience shopping facilities, so we are shedding the knowledge and experience of countless generations of our ancestors. With the alarming rise in food prices this year and the dire news from Wall Street and London, there seems to be a lot to be said for returning to a more simple and natural way of life, using the food around us and relying less on carbon-emitting, expensive imports from around the world.

So have a look in your garden and at the trees and hedges around you to see what might be used. Brambles are past their peak now, but there are still plenty of elderberries. They start life as softly fragrant white flowers in spring, long used to make refreshing elderflower cordial and tea, which was a partial remedy for colds and diseases of the throat. Leaves and unripe berries are poisonous, but the ripe berries are free of poison and excellent additions to blackberry pies and jam, not to mention elderberry juice and wine. Elder may be a rather unsightly tree, almost a weed given the rapidity of its growth and its ability to re-sprout from a stump, but it is home to a very large number of insects, perhaps second only to the oak as a habitat.

Small, sour crab apples are abundant this year; it is a great orchard tree for pollinating normal cooking and eating apples, and crab apples make excellent jellies for use with gamey meats, like venison, pheasant and rabbit. Go out and collect rowan berries (mountain ash), which used to be given to chickens, pigs and cows. Wild birds love them, and they are a feast for the eyes as they dangle in large bright red clusters. As rich in Vitamin C as the orange, rowans also can be turned into a gourmet jelly to accompany game dishes. Rose hips are even richer in Vitamin C than the orange, and also make excellent jams, jellies and teas.

A favourite autumn berry is on the spindle tree, which is a modest summer plant, but comes into its own at this time of year when the seed capsules redden. The birds wait until the berry splits open to reveal up to four orange seeds hanging on individual strings. Do not try cooking with spindle berries – they are poisonous. The tree gets its name from our ancestors who used the wood to make spindles for spinning yarn on their spinning-wheels. Perhaps we need to make more use of the wonders that nature provides.

Wild Gardens

It is never nice to have your garden criticised by a visitor or neighbour. Just as we tend to overrate our driving skills and take criticism very personally, so our gardens are our own territory, organized to our own taste, needs and convenience. But just reflect on the fact that your garden, whatever its size, is also home to countless living creatures, each of which has taken precisely the same length of time to evolve as you and me. Each creature, be it bird, mouse, earwig, earthworm, dragonfly, wasp, bee, moth, beetle or whatever, has its own needs and instincts, each requires sources of food and places of shelter, just like you and me, and each has its own crucial place in the food chain and the greater web of life. As wild places are gradually reduced, so our gardens become ever more important habitats for survival.

So my garden may be too untidy for somebody's taste, but it does contain a rich variety of plants, and a range of places that our fellow creatures can use to good effect. There is a great danger that an over-tidy garden will become sterile and relatively lifeless. Concrete patios, tarmac driveways, decking, cemented walls, sprayed flowerbeds and immaculately cut lawns may well be the fashion of the moment, but they are anathema to most wildlife. Remember as well that too much concrete and tarmac will reduce the ability of the ground to absorb the extraordinary rain we have had recently. If we in Thurles all pave over our gardens, the flooding downstream in Clonmel will worsen.

So as autumn sets in, leaves drop on your lawn, plants die back and the migrant birds begin their travels to avoid a Tipperary winter, don't be in too much of a rush to tidy everything up. Do you really want your neighbour to stand back and pretend to admire your immaculately scrubbed but sterile environment? Leave some grass a few inches long; this will draw in a range of insects that are essential rungs in the food chain and provide regular meals for any mammals that may live nearby. Rake up your leaves by all means, but leave some in heaps (perhaps held together in a ring of wire mesh) to provide shelter and hibernation space for insects and mammals like hedgehogs. Similarly a rough and ready pile of old logs will give wonderful protection and sustenance, especially for beetles, frogs and toads. Nest boxes are easily erected, and a good hedges give both nesting sites for your birds and 'roadways' for mammals and insects too travel along in relative safety. Leave seed heads on

A recent newspaper article bemoaned the decline of traditional bird species like the lapwing and corn bunting, with comments that the decline was probably irreversible because governments are not doing enough to halt the decline. If true, that is a terrible indictment of modern society. But why on earth do we need governments to organise everything? Are we so helpless and so controlled by the tsars of fashion that we cannot take responsibility for our own pieces of the earth and manage them in a nature-friendly way? Many of you will have children who have studied ecology, perhaps at the Cabragh Wetlands. Why not give them a little project by sending them out to do an audit of your garden's nature-friendliness. How many good features can they find in your garden that will boost the chances of some insect, plant, bird or mammal surviving the winter to breed again next spring? Any feedback will be welcomed, and we would welcome the chance to share ideas.