The Bumblebee Flies Anyway Read online

  You can grow so much more in a greenhouse. You can start plants off, give them a few weeks. You can move the pots and flies and chaos from the table beneath your living-room window and keep them somewhere more appropriate. You can store things that don’t fit in the shed. You can take up space that would otherwise be a big muddy mess because you can’t afford to buy plants. You can potter in the rain, drink tea or beer and listen to the radio while sowing seeds and transplanting. You can hide here when you want to be invisible. You can be happy.

  A bloody great greenhouse, though.

  I cycle to Helen’s, armed with spanners, a drill and WD40. It’s a perfect spring day. The sun is shining and the sky is blue. Everywhere are blackbirds and robins, the hairy-footed flower bee, things flying into this tree or that shrub, startled birds, the low buzz of a bumblebee. Finally, after weeks of cold. It’s nice being in a proper garden, nice being among the wildness away from mud and stones.

  Helen makes me tea, a laugh in her eyes. She has to take the kids out. She leaves me with my screwdriver and drill, WD40 and the birds. I kiss the children. I’d not taken down, or erected, a greenhouse before. I’ve no idea what I’m doing. But it’s sunny and there’s tea.

  I start with the window panes. These I release from ancient clips using a screwdriver, prising them from thick cushions of moss. I work steadily, piling them together. The frame is difficult to unscrew, welded together by years of rust. I search online how to shift stubborn screws and watch videos of people drilling holes in them to release the pressure. I follow suit, metal screeching against metal into the clear spring sky. I work around the hairy-footed flower bee, who calmly leaves and returns to her nest as if the house wasn’t coming down around her.

  It comes down in two days and I drive or carry it in several journeys the half-mile back to mine. It’s back up again in a few hours, wonkier than before and with bubble wrap fixed in place of broken panes. An old dog but with plenty of life left yet. I dig the soil and empty old bags of manure into it. I plant tomatoes and aubergines, arrange leggy seedlings on the shelves, pot up others while drinking beer. It’s huge and ugly and looks ridiculous. But it’s mine. I will grow things in it.

  Sheba pants in the heat. She’s got her choke-chain on again. Mum says it’s cruel but Granny insists on it, says Sheba’s a handful. She pulls on the chain, exploring this smell and that. Finds interesting things to wee on. I skip along to one side of them, trying to keep up. We’ll let her off when we get to the fields, says Granny.

  We’re walking along a quiet country lane bordered by recently laid dead hedges made from the pruning or clearing of something or other – branches and saplings. The smell of sawn wood lingers as birds hop through new territory. Sheba explores as far as her reins will go. Her feet paddle in the undergrowth until she’s pulled back onto the road. The heat is tempered by dappled shade from trees knitted together at the canopy, each one reaching across to touch the other, like Michelangelo’s Creation of Adam. I feel I’m walking through a tunnel of trees, that I’ve been swallowed by trees, their shadows ripple on the tarmac beneath us like water. The gentle rustling of leaves brings a calmness that, aged eight, I’ve only just started to appreciate.

  The road is narrow as roads often are in the country. Two cars couldn’t pass here comfortably and there’s no pavement for grannies and grandchildren and panting dogs to walk along. We take centre stage where the road rises a little, not along the edge where it crumbles into the ditch. The cars can see us better this way, says Granny. We can move to the side if we need to let them pass. I find the ditch more interesting, though. Sheba does too, I can tell.

  There are no cars. And few sounds on this May day except the rustling of leaves and the panting of dog. Birds are dotted about. I go to climb my favourite tree while Granny and Sheba slow down but don’t stop. Granny, Granny! Look! She waves and Sheba wags. I love this tree. It’s an oak, Mum says. Rooted deep in the ditch, it appears shorter than it is and it has the perfect arrangement of branches to climb up to a sort of platform you can sit in. Must have been coppiced or pollarded at some point, says Granny. I stare blankly from my vantage point. I can’t see much from here, just fields beyond the dead hedge on either side, a bit of a farm building but no tractors. I could sit here all day, bring a picnic here, read a book. But it’s in a ditch off a narrow country lane. Suddenly I feel silly and climb down. I wish this tree were in your garden, Granny.

  My feet slap on tarmac as I run to catch up but Granny turns, suddenly, and stops. Ssssh! She puts a finger to her lips as I creep towards her. What is it, I whisper. Listen, she says. Can you hear it? We stand as silently as we can, Sheba panting and pulling on her lead, leaves rustling in the trees. There, she says, do you hear that? I listen hard. There’s something in the distance, like someone blowing on a siren whistle but not quite. Whoo-hoo. Whoo-hoo. Whoo-hoo. We stand together in the road as a smile beams across Granny’s face. The first of the year, she says, realising it’s my first one ever. Come along, dear, she says, let me tell you about the cuckoo.

  We turn left into the field and Granny lets Sheba off her lead, who bounces immediately in the direction of the large pond in the distance. Granny tuts. She makes a half-hearted attempt at calling the dog back but gives up, she knows it’s futile. Where were we? Oh yes.

  The cuckoo is a shady character who flies here from Africa and lays eggs in the nests of other birds, such as the dunnock and reed warbler. It’s quite big and grey, with a barred chest. Granny will show me a picture later. Only the male makes the Whoo-hoo sound, she says, the female makes a sort of cackle, and I’m not surprised. If I believed any of this, which I don’t. It’s perfectly natural, she keeps saying, it’s just nature. But I’m cross on behalf of reed wobblers and the other one, and I don’t think it’s very nice. I take it all in, albeit suspiciously, until Granny tells me that the baby cuckoo then pushes the other birds out of the nest so it gets all the food for itself. This is just mean! I ask lots of questions but one I keep returning to is: Why? Because it’s nature, says Granny, and we shouldn’t impose human values onto wildlife. The cuckoo is not bad, it’s just a cuckoo. She tries to tell me about the fox that steals the chicken, the hedgehog that eats the slug. Is that any different? she asks. But there’s something about the laying of eggs in another’s nest and then flying back to Africa without even seeing your offspring, who then go on to murder their adopted siblings, which is a bit too much to bear on this late- spring jolly with Granny and Sheba and my favourite tree. I don’t think I’m being unreasonable here, Granny.

  I sulk for a while as we walk along the field edge, me collecting bits of sheep’s wool caught on the barbed-wire fence. It feels oily and leaves a film on my hands. Sheba bounds up to us, covered in pondweed, and we laugh. Stupid dog, says Granny, I’ll have to bath you later. We come to a stile and then turn back, the pond to our left now and the road ahead of us leading back to the tree and Driftwood and maybe that cuckoo. I hope I don’t hear it again. I don’t understand why it made Granny so happy. Something about summer being on its way, she said, the end of winter. I can’t stop thinking about those chicks being pushed out of the nest. Do they die, Granny? I should think so, she replies, but they won’t go to waste, something else will come along and eat them. By the time we come out of the field back onto the road my whole world has shifted. Sometimes it’s better to not know things.

  I spend my days planting, raking stones and soil. I’m behind schedule (there is no schedule) and I need to get on. The books tell me to raze the whole thing, rake it over, add compost and/or manure and start from scratch on a blank, perfectly prepared canvas. Draw a design, they say, work out what should go where. And then plant. I don’t have time for that. To have a garden – any semblance of a garden – I need to act quickly. I can’t be waiting for the removal of a million stones and bindweed roots, the levelling and enrichment of soil, the ‘plan’. I’ll miss summer. I have to work, one scrap of soil at a time. Forget the books, it’s May.

/>   I carry the last of the decking planks through the flat and leave them outside to be collected, marking seven months since I unscrewed the first piece. The pond is slowly filling up. Bits and pieces of the back border have long been planted – the apple, teasels and odds such as the common bistort and Japanese anemone. There’s white clover and comfrey from Dad’s allotment, the rooted honeysuckle cuttings, growing lady’s mantle and globe thistle from Mum’s garden. A thousand foxgloves that haven’t flowered – next year they’ll be busy. Everything is tiny, fragile, susceptible to the attentions of slugs and snails, a lack or excess of water, sun, shade or wind, or of being forgotten by me; I’m their guardian and keeper yet also the main benefactor of their success. I have to keep on my toes.

  I rake soil, sow seeds, forget about them, sow more or plant things impatiently where germination hasn’t been quick enough. Greenhouse shelves burst with maturing plants not yet ready to be planted out, cuttings of box, perennial wallflower, climbing rose, honeysuckle – anything I had or could get hold of is cut and plunged into gritty compost to increase stock and fill space, gifted by Mum, Helen, snatched from the park, the street. My secateurs forever in my bag, stolen seeds and rogue stems spilling from my pocket.

  I scatter seeds of love-in-a-mist into gaps in the borders. I weed selectively: mostly avens, herb robert and ivy-leaved toadflax, leaving a bit for the wildlife. Everything in moderation.

  The couple four doors down are gardeners. Good gardeners, get-to-work-in-a-cold-spring gardeners. She leaves plants on the pavement for passers-by. One day a Geranium phaem and some Welsh poppies, another day a hosta so ravaged by snails that I have to cut it back to its rootball and hope it will start again. I wonder if it’s a game, if she can see my garden from an upstairs window, if she’s leaving things out for me. I walk past, hoping to bump into her, say hello, see if she’s left me any more presents. I leave the house to meet friends and then have to run back with an armful of treats. Sorry, there were some plants. A bag of plants.

  The greenhouse has left me little room for anything else. But it’s good, in a way. A whole room of tomatoes and seedlings taking up space in a tricky part of the garden I might not have got around to planting this year. I can concentrate on the rest of the garden now, the back border and the side bit around the pond. The space in between? For lawn perhaps.

  I like a lawn. I like to sit on it, stretch out in summer, delve into the thatch, looking at ants. It sets off the borders nicely. I can grow clover and daisies and dandelions in it, the starlings can forage for leatherjackets in it, foxes can eat peanuts off it. I’m sick of people saying lawns are sterile and bad for wildlife, that they’re a monoculture, high maintenance. Better to plant flowers for bees, they say. You can lay turf and in its first year it will be a monoculture. Some Italian species of rye grass that’s hard-wearing and suitable for anything from being turned into a football pitch or used as a landing pad beneath a climbing frame. But it’s not a monoculture after the dandelions have found it. After the daisies and the plantain have seeded in. After the other grasses, the native species, the fescues and the meadow grasses have reclaimed their space. Mow it weekly into stripes and dress with a weed and feed every autumn and you’ll kill all of that, of course. But leave it to write its own rules and it’s one of the most diverse habitats in your garden. Really. Some species of ground-nesting bee need closely cropped lawns. Green woodpeckers use short lawns to find ants, hedgehogs seem to prefer foraging on short grass. Let it grow a bit longer and insects will hide among the blades, house sparrows will pick them out and feed them to their young. Let the ‘weeds’ flower and seed, let caterpillars hunker down in the thatch. Watch the wildlife come in. A mixture of heights and weeds makes the perfect lawn, in my book. Stripes are overrated.

  And yet all I have for this is a pathetic shady strip between pond and greenhouse and my hidey hole at the back, my little space between the pond and the climbing rose, that gets the most sun, where I can squeeze in my deckchair for the rare occasions when I sit down. This, reluctantly, is to be my lawn, my ‘seating area’, where I will lie and read books, delve down and look for ants. I dig the earth over, remove stones, rake it level. Water and sow seed. This garden will yet be a garden.

  Summer

  My garden was grey and now it’s green. Sort of. I feel like a failure, though, a charlatan. Nothing looks done. Nothing is beautiful. But there’s been a change, a shift I can’t put my finger on.

  When I work now I can feel the house sparrows watching me from the holly and buddleia on either side of the garden. I think they’ve started to come in but I can’t tell. The only window looking out is from the back door into the gully, and it’s frosted. And they’re so shy when I’m out here with them. Sometimes I hear a thuuuuur as one lands on the wall above the pond, cranes its head, spots me, thuuuuurs off. Are they bathing in the pond, I wonder. Eating, what? They ignore the hanging feeders of sunflower seeds. I empty them into the ground feeder and replace them with mixed seed. Just a little, in case they don’t like it. One outside my bedroom window and the other at the back, with ‘Shropshire Lass’. Maybe that will bring them in.

  There are other birds too. Heavy birds, I think. Stones shifted around the pond, white tail feathers, big green shits. I look up at cackling herring gulls on the roofs.

  I have a greenhouse and soil that will be a lawn. Plants that will grow to fill the space. Eventually. Maybe. The plants, still small, sit politely where I planted them, not yet sprawling as they should do in a few weeks. June and still so much mud.

  She sticks her bum in the air to tell the boys she has mated. Bright orange, it is, orange for Leave Me Alone. It’s not a bum, really, but a scopa on the underside of her abdomen, a patch of hairs or a ‘brush’, used to collect pollen. And with it held high, like Mary Poppins in full bustle, she flies, unmolested, from one flower to another, gathering food to feed her young.

  She visits drumstick alliums and sweet peas, ornamental thistles and perennial wallflower, she’s not fussy. She dives down into a thistle head and all you see is wiggling orange bum as she swims across its anthers. She takes deep drinks of nectar. She doesn’t rest, launches herself into the air again, now back to her nest where she regurgitates the nectar and brushes the pollen off her scopa. Mixes them together. She backs out of the nest and then backs into it, lays an egg. Then she returns to the garden. She’s looking for something else now. She flies around a bit, lands on a rose leaf. She clasps the leaf between her legs and chews into it, working her way around it as a pair of scissors. She takes seconds to do this, cutting and rolling as she goes, the perfect elliptical disc. Heavy now, her wings have to work harder. She lifts off like a helicopter, brrrrrrrr, the disc of leaf rolled up between her legs, the weight of it pulling her down before she gains enough momentum to lift herself skyward again. She carries it to her nest and fumbles with it, unrolls it and pushes it in. She makes it wet with something like spit, wallpapers it to the sides. She pastes it into the corners. She’s locking her baby in. Locking her egg with its parcel of pollen mixed with nectar, into its little leafy hollow. She works in a circle, sealing the leaf to the wall so nothing can get in. She inspects her work thoroughly. And then she backs out again, chews a piece of leaf again, flies back again and begins building again. In front of the egg with its pollen and nectar, in front of the leafy hollow, she starts making another cell, another little nest for another little babe. The first section of cylinder is made from four leaves pasted together, like a closed daisy capped off two-thirds of the way along its petals, in which the first egg lies. Now she pastes four more leaves to the existing ones, lengthening the daisy. Sometimes she ignores ‘Frances’ and takes a disc from an evening primrose leaf or even its bloom. The new nest cell is prettier than the last, yellow and green. She returns now to the drumstick alliums and the ornamental thistles, wiggles her abdomen to gather pollen, fills her belly with nectar. She flies back to the nest, deposits her load, flies again to the flowers for more. A few tr
ips now. Then, when the nest is ready, she backs in and lays her second egg. Flies out to get a leaf, seals her second baby in, pastes the second leaf cell down. She gathers more leaves and pretty pink petals, extends the cylinder further, makes the third section and lays the third egg. Cut leaves, gather pollen, lay egg, repeat. It takes all day and she’s barely started. It takes all day to lay three eggs.

  I wait until dusk before I sneak a peek in the bee hotel. It’s not nice to disturb them during the day and they can abandon the nest if they feel unsafe. I peel back the viewing panel and see her cylinder of leaves, beautifully arranged in a variety of colours. She’s resting in the newest one, pops her head out to see what’s going on. It’s just me, little leafcutter bee. I’m just seeing how you’re doing. She shrinks back into her cylinder and I gently close the door on her, return her to darkness.

  There’s no way of knowing where she came from. A bee hotel in someone else’s garden or an undisturbed cavity in a wall or tree. Only red and blue mason bees nested with me until now, this leafcutter is a pioneer. I’m so happy. The rose, ‘Frances E. Lester’, is barely six months in the soil, the thistles and alliums their flowering first. Yet here she is, oblivious to the bareness and the smallness, the ungerminated grass seed, the expanse of stones. There’s pollen and nectar, the right type of rose leaf, a bee hotel to nest in. She’s here, only a few months after the garden was released from its prison of decking. My first leafcutter bee in this half-made mess. My heart swells with pride.

  A queen white-tailed bumblebee founded her nest in a hole a mouse had tunnelled into the border, beneath the ice plant, and long since abandoned. The ice plant is ancient, fifty years perhaps, planted by the old lady who lived in the house her mother bought off-plan in the 1930s. The bees were safe here, deep below the surface among gnarled roots and well-formed walls, the roots holding the tunnel in place. Smelling sufficiently of mouse to ward off predators, the queen conducted her business unseen and unmolested. Only her workers braved the outside world, foraging from flowers above ground to bring nectar and pollen to her babies. The nest grew and grew: more babies that became workers that foraged food to feed the next lot of babies. All beneath the ice plant, the ground, all hidden from view. Bumblebees nesting in the border. Who knew?