Too hot to do the outside work I had planned. I stay indoors with windows open to invite a cooling breeze while I tweak at words for next year’s Pond Cottage entry in Scotland’s Gardens Scheme 2026 Yellow Book. Is it right?
I was a little uncomfortable with the claim that Ray and I are learning from resilient plants and wildlife while our woodland and wetland adapts to climate change. Does it sound made up?
Maybe not. Living among so many wild creatures encourages a sense of community. Family, even, if that is not too sentimental. Birds increasingly depend on the food we put out for them, red squirrels and swans too. But they also benefit from the flowering plants we have put in the ground around the cottage, and the trees we planted when we first arrived 30 years ago.
It’s a constantly growing, changing environment, and we can’t avoid being part of it.
Feeding the hungry family
Since the cottage was renovated two years ago we have new windows that look on to a world of wildlife activity. From the kitchen window this year I have watched blue tits (coal, long-tailed and great tits too), siskins, nuthatches, robins, woodpeckers, jays, tree creepers, finches of all kinds… and chaffinch parents feeding their newly fledged young in the birch tree. Mother chaffinch returns from the feeder to put food carefully into the open beaks of her chicks lined up on a branch. It is hard for me not to feel an attachment, a kind of mother hen emotion.
During what passed for a heatwave (though the Met Office didn’t call it that), when temperatures rose to 29C in parts of the garden, I felt kinship with the birds and bees lying low in the heat. In the early morning when it was just pleasantly balmy, a blue tit drank its fill from the bird bath, song birds sang, red squirrels rummaged under the bird feeder, swans paraded their cygnets in a neat line across the lawn; mother first, then four young ones, followed protectively by father.
And how are we all adapting to climate change?
These new swans are not easy-going. Their breeding season doesn’t fit snuggly into eratic new weather patterns. They are anxious first-time parents. It’s harder for them to find natural food to eat so they depend more on the grain we put out. And make regular excursions to graze on seeding grasses in the uncut lawn. Judging from piles of guano they are finding enough.
A snowfall trail of feathers also shows where they have been. According to the SwanLovers website swans shed 25,000 feathers in the moulting season and there seem to be a few thousand around the cottage already, on the pond, the grass and the borders.
Birds and insects, however, have fared much better than last year. Flowers and seed heads are wriggling with winged creatures. Now we have to learn what to plant to ensure they stay well fed for much longer. Sheltering from the heat I enjoyed Robin Lane Fox’s Financial Times column: What really counts as butterfly-friendly planting. He makes a distinction between migrants and natives (no this is not a populist political point, please read on in comfort…)
Planning a beautiful mess
Who knew red admirals feasting on buddleias are migrants? Not me. Painted ladies too. Come autumn they fly away south. “They do not breed or overwinter in Britain,” says Robin Lane Fox with the authority of an Oxford professor. That’s not to stop us growing buddleias (I’m very pleased with beautiful new blue and purple varieties covered in visiting butterflies) but he stresses the importance of planting for natives too – “Yellow brimstones, hairstreaks or orange tips need year round food plants and shelter in which to breed and survive.”
The professor (pausing only to take an entertaining shot at the pretty-pretty photogenic meadow plantings of rival Cambridge Uni ) is planning native-grown plugs of wildflowers like ladies’ bedstraw, bird’s foot trefoil, meadow geranium, scabious, primroses, cowslips, yarrow, knapweed…Not pretty-pretty: “to be a success it has to look a mess”.
We can do the messy bit at Pond Cottage – and quite a few of the wildflowers with bags of nettles too – but now my autumn plant order includes ivy, hops, and mustard garlic for overwintering native butterflies. As well as more non-native Verbena bonariensis: “Like diners out, butterflies like foreign cuisine”.
Perhaps I should amend the SGS listing: “We learn from resilient plants and wildlife…and gardening professors.”
Pond Cottage is open to visitors from 1 February to 15 December. (See SGS page)
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