The Bumblebee Flies Anyway Read online

  It is, of course, a miserable grey day. Not even the sun could shine for me. The sparrows have been gone for a week and the void is huge. They’d only just started coming in. This was theirs only for a few weeks. Five weeks? But before that they were next door, in the holly to the left and the buddleia to the right, and now they are nowhere. The silence is everything.

  Trellis. I need trellis. If everyone else is cutting and destroying then I need to create, to block them out. I need to walk out here without interrupting people smoking on their steps, without being talked to, without witnessing the destruction of a habitat. Trellis would give height to the garden, make space for the roses and clematis to grow into, keep neighbours out but bring more wildlife in. Maybe, in time, the house sparrows will come back. I price it up on my phone. I can have it for less than £200 if I do it myself. Can I do it myself? I’ve not put trellis up before but it can’t be that hard, can it? If I can take decking down . . .

  I get up, buoyed slightly at the prospect of privacy. Or some of it. I weed a bit, bindweed and avens, leaving ivy-leaved toadflax in the walls, willowherb in a small clump. I tie in and prune and plant. I move foxgloves. I divide and replant lamb’s ears and common bistort. I figure if I grow more plants around the greenhouse then it might look nicer, less out of place, less huge and awkward. But, really, it has never looked good. It needs to go.

  I stand and survey my land, defeated. The back border looks terrible, suddenly. The plants have grown together too much and there are big muddy gaps where I’d sown seeds that haven’t done anything. And I didn’t stake my poppies, which are white but should be red. The pond hasn’t filled up, despite two more days of rain. Willowherb has popped up in all the wrong places and I can’t move it because I want elephant hawkmoths to lay eggs. And they haven’t. Slugs and snails have been on the rampage. The last of the sunflowers I planted stands ravaged and alone. I feel like a failure. I want to dig up the whole thing and start again but I can’t.

  I tear the pathetic excuse for a sunflower out of the ground. Its stem is thick, strong and spiky, it would probably have survived. But who wants one sunflower in the middle of a border? I planted nine. It’s better to just not grow these things.

  I glance at the pond. Two pond snails writhe together at the water’s surface. I sit for a minute and watch them. The water reflects the sky and I see starlings and herring gulls on the rooftops. A calmness washes over me. At the pond edge is a bit of valerian I’d pulled out of a wall somewhere and have been rooting in the water. I lean over and pull it out to see if it’s ready for planting. Yes, but there’s a clear sausage of pond snail eggs attached. So many steps forward and so many back. Then forward again. Will it always be like this? What will be destroyed next? I pray for years of rain and sunshine so this garden can grow. Sustain itself, sustain its wildlife. There’s no buddleia but there are baby pond snails. There are no sparrows but there are baby pond snails. Baby steps. Baby snails. Baby love and baby hope. The two things that keep us all going on this crazy world that, for some incomprehensible reason, keeps bloody turning.

  My garden was grey but now it’s green. When the sky is blue I can convince myself I’ve done something important. I can sit on the lawn looking at bees or top up the bird feeders or watch dragonflies lay eggs in my pond. It’s easy when the sky is blue, when the garden is green. But it’s not enough. It’s not enough for me and it’s not enough for anything. I can rip up decking, grow plants, put up nest boxes. But there’s nothing I can do about next door. I can never stop someone destroying a habitat, taking down a home, chopping something up or paving over it. This garden I’ve created might be insurance against further loss but it won’t reverse it. It can’t. And look at it: a little green piece in a jigsaw of grey. The sparrows won’t survive here alone.

  I run along Brighton’s streets looking between gaps in houses and over roofs at what lies beyond them. Sometimes I catch glimpses of trees and life; mostly I see sky – evidence of more gardens lost beneath tarmac. Space enough between large houses to build an access road to a car park or a mews; homeowners and developers made for life; gardens lost for ever.

  A school extended. Shrubs and trees cut down, walls put up. A church, which long since lost its congregation, converted into luxury flats. Mature trees cut down and replaced with low-maintenance shrubs with little or no use for insects, seemingly green but not even close. Plastic trees, plastic grass or the next worst thing. A razed front garden; its contents, still lush and green, lie in a skip on the road, roots angrily facing the sky. A child sits on steps before a paved front garden playing with a toy car.

  Piece by piece, our cities are being turned into luxury flats and car parks. Developers take the money and walk away, the people none the wiser. Councils are allocated less and less money to maintain parks and green space. Will they be sold off too? Where will the children play? And when these children are in government, what will they know and what will they save when budgets are further cut? Luxury flats? Car parks?

  I sit alone in my flat, the garden, still silent, beyond the back door. Fuck it. I dig out my bag of haws, which has been in the freezer since Mum visited last autumn. I had planned to make ‘hawsin sauce’, a sort of ketchup that goes nicely with chips. But I never got around to it. I empty the bag into a washing-up bowl of water. In a few days I’ll sieve the contents, separating floating flesh from heavy, hard, brown seed. I’ll put the seeds into the pockets of my running jacket and gradually, over the course of the next few weeks while running at dusk in autumn rains, I’ll push those seeds into Brighton and Hove’s forgotten soils. I’ll choose retirement and nursing homes, hospitals, schools and communal flats; places where landscapers trim back and mow for tidiness but rarely bother to dig out errant seedlings. It could take two years for my haws to germinate – twenty for anyone to notice what I’ve done, but their legacy could last a hundred. How many moths will lay eggs on a hundred hawthorns in a hundred years? How many birds will gather their caterpillars for their young, the haws in autumn? How many developers will rip the plants out and pave over them, the people none the wiser, tramping in their wake? Who knows who knows who knows.

  Autumn

  The boy who cut the buddleia and razed next door’s garden was mistaken; it would not be paved after all. The removal of all plant material revealed that it was mostly paving stones anyway; just three deep, empty beds remain. I jump the wall and throw wildflower seed onto the beds: teasel and willowherb plus some cornfield annuals for bees. Try to stop me.

  I can’t stay, not here. This isn’t working. I look at property online, scour websites and maps and find the biggest gardens in Brighton and Hove, not too far from the sea. The largest are on the train tracks. I take trains to Portslade and Preston Park, glimpse large gardens through the window. Old apple trees, climbing roses, long-forgotten swings. Sometimes I view a house. Mostly the gardens are disappointing: paved, neglected, deathly quiet. But I find my dream home on Wilbury Crescent. It has a huge south-facing garden with two apple trees, a pear and a cherry, a long lawn and a crumbling shed, and masses and masses of potential. All mine for a million quid.

  I take the greenhouse down; it was never right. In its wake is bare soil, brown against the lush green of the rest of the garden. I clear away tomato haulms and plastic pots, bottles of plant food and bamboo canes. I dig the soil. Now what? I call Helen. The remains of the turf she laid in summer is still piled up in her driveway: Do you want it? It’s dead. Yeah, I want it. I load rolls of mud into the car, take it home, through the flat. It’s brown and thin. I rake the earth where the greenhouse stood, make everything level, lay this last bit of lawn. It will grow, everything always grows. Early September, it will be green by May.

  I buy trellis and paint it on misty afternoons, starlings shimmering above me like schools of mackerel in the sea. The paint is a sort of blue-green. On the tin it’s called Gentle Sage, other brands call it Willow. It’s the colour of globe artichoke and lamb’s ear leaves. I put the trellis
up on my own, a bit wonky but serviceable. I plant Clematis ‘Bill Mackenzie’ and watch it weave into the space.

  I spread compost on the soil, release plants from pots, move things around, divide and replant, take semi-ripe (nearly ripe) cuttings, bury the first of the autumn bulbs. Why am I doing this if I don’t want to stay? Habit, I suppose. For the house sparrows, I suppose. Feed the soil and everything will follow, I suppose. Feed the earth, the detritivores, the centipedes and beetles, the roots of plants that will flower and seed and fill trellis and protect birds.

  The garden is transformed again, better and bigger than before: a small, irregular-shaped, half-dead lawn surrounded by borders and a beautiful little pond. Climbing roses, clematis and honeysuckle slowly colonising the fences and trellis behind. Scraps of this and that, useless now but that will grow into the space. Elephant ears, white deadnettle, cranesbills and foxgloves, plants gathered from tree pits and cracks in the pavement and road, rooted in water and planted out. Serbian bellflower, which seeds all over the city, now grows with red valerian seized from a wall. Linaria taken from the Sackville Road, honesty from a supermarket car park. It will be spring again. It will be spring again.

  Granny’s wedding dress hangs in the living room. Like a ghost, like Miss Haversham. What’s it doing there, I ask Mum, why do you still have it? Posterity, she says, and because I want my mum with me on my wedding day.

  It’s been there for two weeks. Every time Mum walks past it she touches it, touches its folds, its traces of skin and hair, of sweat, of Granny. It smells musty and has faded from white to a sort of cream-brown. Mum digs out a grainy black-and-white photo of Granny and Grandad’s big day, the two of them standing side by side with matching sets of parents beside them. The photo reveals the dress has since been altered. In those days, says Mum, women often adjusted their wedding dresses and wore them for other occasions. Granny didn’t wear this dress once but many times.

  It’s nice to be away from home, with Mum. She lives in a part of Solihull I don’t know well; she moved here only two years ago. Beneath Birmingham airport flight path so it’s noisy and full of planes but there’s space here: countryside, fields, hedgerows, nettle beds, life. Wasps and house martins nest in the roof of her house and she gets nuthatches and goldcrests on her feeders. At the end of her garden is a huge purple beech where mistle thrushes, woodpigeons, tits, all sorts hang out among the branches. I watch them for hours. I want to climb the beech but Mum says that, at thirty-five, I’m too old. At the end of the lane is a large fishing lake she walks around every morning. When I visit I run, lap her three times and run back. The lake is managed for fishermen but there’s plenty else for me: kestrels, great crested grebes, a black swan.

  Wedding bells ring through the village. I’m on flower duty with Trudi, who came into my life recently and unexpectedly, and who’s now being thrown in at the deep end – a huge family wedding. Every table in the village hall will be decked with home-grown blooms, all lovingly assembled by us. On top of that I have the small task of walking Mum down the aisle and making the father of the bride’s speech. I’m terrified but I can’t let on. No one must know.

  I get up early to run around the lake, the pebbled path crunching beneath me. I feel calm here, safe ahead of the Biggest Thing I’ve Ever Done. The trees are holding on to their leaves still but there’s been a shift, a shrinking back, a collective breath held, a belt tightened. That which I love is disappearing for winter. I try not to think about it. I try to think of the flowers, the celebration, the happiness of Mum and her new husband, of seeing her brother, my godfather. I stop to watch herons fishing for breakfast, the first of the autumn’s redwings gathered in the field beyond the hedge. Sloes are nearly ready for gin.

  I always run clockwise around the lake; Mum walks anti-clockwise. For no reason other than that’s the way we go. I’m on my third lap when I find her, a smiling thing all caught up in her own emotion, her own trepidation about the enormity of the day. Mummy! She hugs me and tells me I’m the first to see her today; I feel proud and privileged. I’ve never seen her so full of joy. We chat about the herons, the flowers, her soon-to-be-husband, Pete, the order of the day. We part again as I run and she walks, lapping the lake in our own way.

  Later Trudi and I arrange flowers: Verbena bonariensis, dahlias, fennel, erysimum. I spend three hours in the hairdressers, come back, put a dress on, walk Mum down the aisle, make a speech, eat, drink, dance, celebrate. The day ends drunkenly, as these things do, and in the morning I wake, fuzzyheaded, in the wrong bed, to church bells and nuthatches, flowers strewn about the village like confetti. I wish, more than anything, that I didn’t have to go home.

  Most mornings I stand on the kitchen doorstep drinking tea. I look at the sky for interesting birds, keep an ear out for house sparrows that might yet return; other times I venture out and am lost for hours.

  Today the garden takes me. It’s cold suddenly and everything is frosted. I crouch down before the far, newest, border, where the greenhouse stood, and conduct a sort of audit. White deadnettle has germinated from seed I took from a car park earlier in the year; its fresh green leaves poke out of the ground. The honeysuckle cutting from Mum’s is still tiny but has buds ready to unfurl when temperatures increase again. The bracken is dying down for winter. There’s green alkanet, which has self-seeded in from next door and which I’m too polite to weed out; cuttings of box which I’ve planted in the soil to grow on for a bit before I decide what to do with them; elephant ears ready to expand into the new space – only one of its paddle-like leaves has turned red for autumn. The perennial wallflower and foxgloves are doing marvellously – we will have a huge display next year; there are bits, scraps, of hardy geranium at the front, the remains of a euphorbia, a half-dead clematis, some kale I’d forgotten about, bits and pieces of this and that. Between the plants are masses of love-in-a-mist seedlings which I gathered from this summer’s plants and scattered everywhere I could. It should look nice when the time comes.

  At the back Echium pinnata has filled a corner. The apple is losing its leaves. The cosmos has finally flowered and the linaria, which I took from a pavement crack, is thriving. The valerian is doing well; the crocosmia, which Helen promised me wasn’t orange, is orange. There are gaps where I’ve planted alliums, the pond is filling up.

  I feel a bit useless, out of sorts. I return indoors, re-boil the kettle and make more tea, return to my step where I’m warmer and where I can poke my head out of the door to see what arrives when my back’s turned. The tea steams into the sky. I stand on the step and sip.

  House sparrows. I hear them before I see them. In the holly at the end to the left, I think, now the buddleia is gone. It’s been ages but there’s a big hungry gang of them. One flies to the feeder just in front of me and does an about-turn with a thuuuuur as it makes its escape. Oh my heart, they’re back, they’re back. They’re cautious again now but that’s OK. As long as they’re here, as long as they’re willing to give the garden a second chance. Their cheeping fades in the distance as they go off again. It doesn’t matter, I won’t stand here all day, they’ll try again later. I fill up the feeder in anticipation.

  There are more birds, other birds, the cold will have brought them in. I hear a robin pink-pinking at something, and a blackbird, which is new. The blackbird is pink-pinking as well. At the robin? Yes: the robin then flies over the garden, quickly pursued by the blackbird – a territorial fight.

  The blackbird moves off and the robin flies to the smoke bush at the end to the right, disturbs a gang of tits. I drink tea on the step, stretch my runner’s calves. Wait. The robin flies in, lands on the sunflower feeder at the back, takes a seed and flies off again. And then another bird, a blue tit, I think, and then a goldfinch! All new. All in a dash. But it’s promising. The apple and clematis and roses and honeysuckle will provide them with shelter in time.

  I boil the kettle again, make tea again. Empty the dishwasher, wipe the worktop. The back door remains open
and I listen for song, the chatter of a goldfinch, the burp of a blue tit, the watery, staccato trickle of the robin. Instead I hear the blackbird’s gurgly song from beyond the wall. And then it stops gurgling and hops onto the wall, and I realise it was only next door. It sails down on to the ground feeder, a young gun perhaps, establishing a new territory. I strain to see it but can’t and it emerges a few minutes later from the pond. My very own blackbird, hey. Finally, the garden is a garden.

  The sunflower feeder is rarely visited and I’m pleased to see it in use at last. I draw a line where the food is with a marker pen, check the seeds haven’t become mouldy. If there are gangs of tits and charms of goldfinches and an angry little robin then the seed might yet be eaten.

  I fetch my drill and take down my bee hotels, full of cocoons now, rather than grubs; little packets of box-fresh bees, which will sit winter out in safety and emerge when the apple blossoms. I don a coat and hat to ward off the cold and sit cross-legged on my living-room floor with the back door open so I can see sparrows on the feeder. I tease cocoons from the hollow plant stems. Spiders and woodlice spill out everywhere, there are a couple of snails and some strange things I can’t identify. There are more cocoons in the fancy wooden hotel and I manage to tease a row out using a flat-headed screwdriver, but I’m scared to touch the rest of them, scared I’ll damage the bees with a clumsy slip. I leave them in there, gently brushing frass from around them with a paint brush. I count sixty-three bee cocoons, an improvement on last year’s forty-seven, and with the happy addition of leafcutters to complement the red and blue mason bees. I transfer the hollow stem cocoons into the release chamber in the fancy wooden hotel, sweep up errant spiders and woodlice that are trying to find new homes in my living room. I throw out the hollow plant stems now, these have definitely had their day. I carry my wooden hotel with its precious cargo to my shed, where it will remain cool and dry for the rest of autumn and all of winter. A box of bees and sunshine not to be unwrapped until spring.