A Hawk and an Orchid.

June, so far, has followed a trend. Grey days and rain along with sharp winds that stripped away any warmth from the air. Fleece and tee shirt days have been few and far between, for now we’re back to coats and body warmers. An upside of the rain is that it brings a lushness to the garden, on dull wet days green foliage almost glows.

Thursday was the exception. A day of sunshine, clear blue skies and cotton wool clouds, marred slightly by a late afternoon curveball gale that tested plant support hoops and tore bright new leaves from the tops of garden Sycamores. A time exposure caught the gales passing. Blurred foliage and streaking clouds.

Despite the poor weather, garden birds have had a good breeding season, dozens of fledglings of various species are being both seen and heard. When we moved here, species that should have been here were noticed by their absence. In our first year, resident House Sparrows for example, could be counted on one hand, five years on with nest boxes dotting the garden and a regime of feeding and habitat creation, we now count them in tens. At the moment the busiest parents in the garden are Starlings, each adult is permanently accompanied by two or three brown plumaged fledglings who, in flight, follow the parents so closely you’d think they were tied to each other with string.

As the numbers of smaller birds have increased, so too have the visits from raptors. Occasionally we’ll have a visit from a Kestrel, a bird passing through, taking time to hover over the meadow, before moving on to pastures new. There’s also a female Hen Harrier who often cuts through the garden on her way from moor to shore, but the true hunters here are Sparrowhawks. We see them most days, often no more than a glimpse, a dashing dart of a bird skipping over a dry-stone dyke or silently zigzagging between the trunks of shelter belt trees.

The birds are impressive flyers. Once, from my workshop window, I watched a female Sparrowhawk leave her perch in a Larch and fly under my van, emerging from the other side to perform a low level attack on a flock of birds in a Hawthorn. Despite a twinge of sadness for the individual birds that fall prey to them, their presence is a positive, a sure sign of a healthy population. A male landed on a dyke a few metres from the house, a brief pause while he checked out a front garden. In terms of size he’s around a third smaller than the female, about the size of a Mistle Thrush. A few frames were grabbed before he became aware of my presence, a split second meeting of eyes and he was gone, a ghost of a  bird, slipping away as quietly as he had arrived.

In the garden Lupins are starting to flower. Ours were a gift, given as seedlings two years ago and are just coming into their own. In past times they were grown in Orkney as both a crop and as a soil improver, like other legumes they take nitrogen from the air and fix it in their roots. Old black & white photographs of Orkney show ox carts and thatched blackhouses and fields of Lupins. Occasionally, where we’ve disturbed soil in the meadow, a seedling will pop up. The meadow is the only land here that would have been suitable for tilling and cropping, if they were grown anywhere here, that would have been the spot.

Another plant that has flowered this week is iris sibirica – silver edge, of all the irises we grow a firm favourite.

On Thursday, before the gale swung in, a few more wildflower plugs were added to the meadow. Ragged robin and Water avens, both grown from seed sown last year and both destined for wetter spots. Most of last years wildflower seed sowings were planted a few weeks ago, but these half a dozen trays were held back when it became clear that their spidery white roots weren’t well enough formed to stand transplanting.

As I put the last of them in I found an Orchid, a thumb high dot of colour tucked in amongst the grasses. Where a meadow has missing species, most can easily be added. It’s something that we’ve done over the past four years, sowing seed in trays in late summer, pricking on into cells and then planting the following year, time consuming but easy. The plants you can’t just add are orchids, they’re symbiotic and need the presence of a soil borne fungus. Upon germination they feed on sugars produced by the fungus, a relationship that continues until the orchid produces leaves and starts to feed itself through photosynthesis. You can’t have one without the other. 

Making a meadow here has been a labour of love. In the early days, lots of sweat and graft and also some doubt, would all the effort of clearing by hand be worth it, would the existing grasses and rushes be too dominant? By year three any doubts were long forgotten, the space full of flowers and alive with bees and insects, the only things missing were orchids. I probably need to get out more, but finding that single thumb high plant was such a thrill, the icing on the cake. Fingers are crossed that more will follow.