Gardens
A tale of Tiggyvvinkles
Ursula Buchan
This is the time of year when the dead hand of tidiness weighs most heavily on our gardens. Anarchic weed growth is losing its vigour, while the days for uprooting it are long and balmy. Everywhere, bare chocolate-sponge soil, punctuated at regu- lar intervals by spindly bedding plants, is encroaching. Shrubs are trimmed, paths are swept, alles ist in Ordnung.
Not so here. Untrained climbing rose stems obscure the flowers while shrubs close over narrow paths, their overlaying leafage the legacy of close planting and light pruning over many years. Even sub- stantial weeds blush unseen. The garden suffers less from lack of care than from lack of restraint. Infuriating as it must be to orderly people (even I sometimes find the effect self-defeating), it does have the merit of acting as backdrop, cover and larder for wild creatures.
This year I have had several occasions to bless the generous untidiness of my garden. In spring, groundsel left for a week to seed in a rock bed (this, the most successful annual in Creation, will seed at any time of year in open weather) allowed me the plea- sure of watching a troupe of five or six goldfinches, beating their black and yellow wings within feet of the kitchen door. Con- versely, a short-lived rush of tidyminded- ness in April resulted in me scaring away two sitting blackbirds. That kind of thing can spoil my morning as effectively as a tax return.
But the real virtue of a laissez-faire atti- tude was borne in on me when, one fine evening in late June, I came upon four young hedgehogs close to the fire-heap, almost invisible amongst the dry rubbish waiting to be burned. Every so often one would shamble off into a large and rather shaming pile of old weeds and garden detritus, left in limbo until I managed to get round to emptying the two compost bins of their rotted material. This heap may be a reproach to the gardener in me, but it made the ideal nest and feeding ground for hedgehogs.
They could not have been much more than a month old, their spines were soft and their eyesight appalling. They were not the slightest bit afraid of us: we could come within a few feet before they visibly stiff- ened. They lumbered round each other, spines touching, like old buffers stripping the willow, emitting high-pitched cheeps as they recognised their fellows. One day I found them dozing, snout to snout, in the sun.
I am not keen to promote a welfare dependency culture amongst hedgehogs. There are far too many slugs on my let- tuces for me to want to divert them to cat- food. In any event, I am loth to change their natural habits for my own ends. If I want to see them feeding in the evening, I will go looking for them, not force them to come to me. Their appeal for me is their independence, not their malleability.
I feel this especially about hedgehogs because, thanks to Beatrix Potter and the fact that they exhibit characteristics which we like to think are almost human (rolling gait, snuffling nose, bleary eyes), they are prime candidates for anthropomorphism. Why else call the hospital for sick and injured hedgehogs St Tiggywinkle's? Real- ly! Anthropomorphism is landing our gen- eration in all kinds of difficulties: we are treating animals as surrogate, indeed some- times superior, humans and, though it sometimes helps their cause, it certainly diminishes us.
It is precisely because I do not consider hedgehogs as spiky but amiable human- substitutes that I could not regret their leaving, even though the evening trip to the greenhouse had lost its savour. One day last week they took off for fresh woods and pastures new, in this case the village allot- ments, which they could reach by climbing a low wall at the end of the garden and where the slug and insect pickings were probably richer still.
By a mixture of active intervention and benign neglect, it is possible to increase the bird, insect and mammal populations so substantially in the garden as to be notice- able even to the human eye. We can all do it, whether we live in country or town (hedgehogs, for example, are well known in suburbs and, I strongly suspect, also inhabit neglected ground and allotments in cities) provided that we do not subject our garden to the same level of orderliness which seems appropriate in the house. That is our undisputed domain, but we are only one of many tenants in the garden.
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