I used to live in Brittany, where I worked for a while on a plant nursery. One day while weeding the pots of Azaleas, my boss pointed at the hedge, saying ‘regardes, troglodyte!’ , which I translated as ‘look, a cave dweller!’. Puzzling: life in rural Brittany could sometimes feel like going back in time, but not to that extent.
In fact what he was pointing at was a wren, Troglodytes troglodytes. ‘Wrens get their scientific name from the tendency of some species to forage in dark crevices’ (thank you Wikipedia). The other day I was pleased to see one foraging in my garden, outside the office. On one side of a seating area, and next to the pond, I’ve filled some wire gabions with logs, and allowed these to mature gracefully, so the ends are becoming frilled with small bracket fungi, while Honeysuckle, Clematis and native Bryony gradually colonise the structures. A Fargesia bamboo planted nearby has filled out nicely, and to the back I’ve planted a Sea Buckthorn hedge. The base of this hedge is a good place to empty trugs of autumn leaves where they can rot down gently out of site, suppressing the weeds and feeding the hedge.
The guiding principle for the area (& in fact, most of the garden), is increasing the habitat for wildlife. The pond has lots of frogs and newts, and I hope that the base of the gabions makes a nice cool shady retreat for them while they are on land. Deep decaying leaf litter will favour lots of mini-beasts, food for the amphibians. Birds pick the berries off the climbers over winter. The different sized gaps between the logs seem to be great for spiders, and maybe it was this that was attracting the wren’s attention. He was a delight to watch, disappearing into the crevices and the vegetation, then popping up again, picking his way around. Complexity generally seems to be a good thing for wildlife: richness, diversity. It’s a pity that so many gardens are tidied to within an inch of their lives (and that often that is the style that clients want), when a bit more messiness and a few more shrubby thickets is what will make our gardens more hospitable to all kinds of animals. I doubt the wren will nest here, not while there are two moggies who like to sun themselves on the bench, but at least the garden can serve as an occasional wren feeding station.
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