Happy New Year 2017 from the Serendipity Garden!

The weather is important for a gardener, too much of this that and the other and the whole balance gets skewed - and things get out of order. Last spring we had a lot of rain, much more than usual, but it ended in June and here in London we have not really had any substantial rain at all since June and only a few days with any rain at all. It might be winter on the calendar, and it has been rather cold the last couple of days (just below freezing – which is cold in London!) – but gardening never stops for a bit of night frost, not in my garden. In fact, winter is the busiest time of year in terms of planning, planting and getting new ideas into action. That is – if we could just get some rain! The ground is still too hard to manage any planting so I am planting bulbs in pots and containers for now and hoping for some rain. Soon please!

The temperature has varied widely in December, just see what we got on Christmas Day. A balmy 14.7 degrees (58.5 F)!

The garden looks so nice in the winter sunshine, the beds are so empty and the trees so bare – everything has paused for spring. Only 3 months to wait and I got LOADS to do in the garden before we get to 1st March so I won’t run out of things to do!

The fox is still here most days, I am still not sure if it is a male or a female but I can’t say it looks particularly pregnant so I don’t know. Maybe it is just a young male that likes to hang out in my garden? I can understand that :-)

The fox usually sits on the roof of the shed where it has a good view over the area and can jump quickly down behind the shed in that little safe space between the shed and the wall. If it is a female it is likely she will have her cubs in that space and the cubs won’t come out until they are around 4 weeks old. The cubs are usually born in February or March after a 52 days gestation period so this fits well with a female fox not even pregnant yet. But she would have looked around and found her perfect home and I suppose I should feel honoured she chose mine. If I am right I will probably have some cute photos of fox cubs running around in my garden to show you by May or June. I do have a bit mixed feelings about the prospects of having a fox family in my garden until the autumn, I had this twice in the past in my previous garden and although the cute-factor is sky high, the mess and destruction is equally high.

But I might be wrong, it might not be a female at all, but rather a young, male just looking for a place to crash. I am pretty sure it is the same fox I am seeing every time – which also begs the question in case of a pregnant female; where is the father? Fox parents stay together and the father brings food to the mother the first few weeks when she is cooped up in the den. I guess time will tell :-) 

In terms of wildlife, there’s a lot going on in my garden. My bird feeders are well visited all year round and the blue tits and green tits are very active right now.

So are the collared doves, I seem to have a flock of 5-6 birds that stay close to my garden, usually in the tall avian cherry tree and they help themselves to bird food many times a day.

And then there are parakeets.

What? Parakeets?!!

Yes, the other day I was treated to this sight when I got up in the morning and looked out the kitchen window. Two ring-tailed parakeets were literary emptying my birdfeeder between them and scared off any other birds attempting to have a snack. The parakeets stayed for a few hours and then left. They haven’t been back so far and to be honest I hope they won’t come back. This was the first time I have seen parakeets in my garden and it was a treat to be able to take some photos, but they are very noisy, messy birds that do a LOT of damage and they often come in a large flock and can completely wreck a garden in matter of hours, eating all new shoots on shrubs and trees. There are estimated to be 6-10.000 feral parakeets in London alone and possibly as many as 30-50.000 in Britain.

Parrot colonies have only resided in London in significant numbers since the 1990’s, and various theories have been put forward to explain their presence. It is generally accepted that just one single breeding pair of rose-ringed parakeets being released into the wild could have formed the basis of the existing London parakeet colonies. It has also been suggested that a flock of the birds escaped from London’s Ealing studios during filming, that a container of the birds fell open at Heathrow airport, and that a large aviary collapsed during the storms of 1987, releasing a significant number of the birds into the surrounding area. Whatever way they came here they are now considered a problem as there are way too many of them, and there are steps taken to cull their numbers. I hope these two birds had just taken a slightly longer trip than usual, as West London is the usual area for them. I hope they won’t be back with all their friends soon - two at the time is more than enough!

And most of the time the main ‘bird feeder raider’ in my garden are the squirrels. I have three visiting squirrels at the moment and sometimes they are here all three at the same time. I haven’t managed to film or photograph all three together, I am still trying! The squirrels eat anything but seem to especially favour the sunflower seeds I use in this feeder.

And afterwards it is off to the birdbath to have a drink of water!

OK, that was the wildlife presented, let me show you some plants and flowers. These are my 3 witch hazels that I bought in March on sale, after flowering was finished so this is the first time I see them in flower. They were advertised as ‘Highly Fragrant’. I wonder how many plants I have in my garden that has turned out to have little or no fragrance after all despite being advertised as fragrant?

These witch hazels are all Hamamelis × intermedia, which I have later found out have very little fragrance and the faint fragrance you might possibly detect would only appear in sunny, warm weather. We have had rather cold weather since flowering started so perhaps there might be some scent to detect later on but I am not expecting it. The varieties I have are ‘Arnold Promise’, ‘Ruby Glow’ and 'Orange Beauty'.

This yellow one is ‘Arnold Promise’ and so far is the only one in full flower, but the other two are not far behind. Witch hazel grow quite slowly and I intend to grow these permanently in containers, perfect to plop into beds that need a bit filling out when other plants have passed their best or died down.

It might be winter, cold and 3 months till we officially start spring, but the snowdrops wait for no one. The first ones are here, just one sunny day or so from flowering.

But before I get too much into spring-mode I would like to finish with 2016 and here is a movie from my garden – I know some of you have waited a long time for a new garden movie. Sorry I didn’t manage to produce any in October and November, but I hope this movie will make up for that. I filmed the footage Thursday the 29th December, apart from a small section of the fox in my garden, which is from beginning of November. I have added a small selection of the ‘Best Bits’ of garden photos as a sort of photo cavalcade at the end, I hope you enjoy the tour! Best viewed in full screen in HD if you have connection for it, please adjust your settings in the bottom right corner.

Today I have been blogging for exactly 6 years – if you had asked me 6 years ago if I would still be doing it 6 years down the line I would probably have said of course not! – but here I am, still writing! I find it more challenging though to sit down and prepare photos and write the posts and as a result I haven’t posted as much this year as previous years, and the last couple of months I have been rather absent. I use my blog as a kind of garden diary and it is amazing to see how the garden changes from year to year. I am especially grateful for having a record going as far back as it does since I moved house in May last year, so my previous garden still lives on through my blog :-)

I will definitely continue blogging, but I am not sure how frequent it will be - I tried to do it twice a month in 2016 and struggled with that. I have started posting photos from my garden on Instagram and I use Facebook as well to post short updates. I find this easier and I will probably continue with it more often. But nothing can replace one of my really, really long blog posts absolutely loaded with photos and I am sure there will be plenty of them in the future, maybe perhaps not just as often :-)

May I wish you all a Happy New Year and all the best for 2017 – and I hope we all get a great gardening year with just the right mix of sunshine and showers! I am off to delve into some of the plant and seed catalogues that seems to be coming my way in droves at this time of year. So many exciting plants! Not that I need anything at all until I have planted my 530 plants already waiting to go in the ground, but I could always have a look....:-)

See you next time!