On the Right Place for Garden Tools
... and knowing our patch ... and a bird ... AND a spider too
Our town provides us with a large, brown waste bin for compostable materials that are collected weekly and, we trust, actually composted. It’s plastic so we want it to live a long and useful life before going to landfill but a combination of two things are bringing that day inevitably closer. Firstly, the bins are picked up and emptied into the truck by a mechanical grab and predictably that has cracked and split the sides. Not quite fatally yet but it is getting worse. The second factor is driven by our squirrel population. They can’t yet get into the bins via the cracks and so have gnawed their own access portals at ground level … very handy if you are a squirrel. Yesterday, a batch of walnuts that were being toasted in the oven sadly turned into blackened and burned offerings and were put out for composting - the squirrels had other ideas and not a crumb is left in the bin just a very few hours later. Not an atom of walnut remains, black and horrid as they were. Never let it be said that in our house and garden we do not practise efficient and effective recycling 😉 🐿
Time now to turn from wildlife and return to an important gardening topic this Sunday as we roll towards autumn. The storage of garden tools for the winter. Although there are still flowers and leaves aplenty, it won’t be long before “something has to be done” about this seasonal matter. My mind has been turned to this subject by another chapter in Anna Pavord’s excellent “Garden Companion” which I had cause to mention a few weeks ago. Published and purchased in 1992 in England, and only now being properly digested by me, it contains some practical and relatable gems.
In this short extract, Anna had been compelled to give over her tool shed to the installation of a heating oil tank and had to find alternative quarters for her collection. Quote.
What I liked most about the old shed was that it grew into its role without any fussy interference on my part. Rakes were balanced easily on the small lip of wall under the eaves. Billhooks could safely be jammed in the space between the rafters and the tiles. There were enough large nails already poking out from the woodwork to accommodate the forks, spades, and clippers that I used regularly. Plant pots and seed trays were stacked against the back wall of the shed. When I eventually light on a new headquarters for the tools, I fear that I will not get off so easily. Decisions will have to be made. Hoes in rows? Or bunched together in a corner, as they have always been? Tools hung in graduated order of height? Altogether too much like the parade ground. And the more organised the toolshed is, the more incumbent it will be upon me to retain that order. Shock, horror – perhaps the cold utilitarianism of a new toolshed will force me to throw things away, to evaluate seriously the little hanks of string, pieces of wire, binder twine and skipping rope looped over the nails that do not hold tools. They are none of them essential, but together provide a comfortably familiar landscape, like the postcards you stick behind pots on the mantelpiece, and which imperceptibly become part of the wallpaper background.
I should, of course, take a firm grip on myself and throw away anything that I have not touched for the last five years. Housing the remaining skeleton collection would be no problem at all. I have, however, just got rid of a gardening jacket that has been my friend for eighteen years, and, recklessly, a clock that had lost some vital part of its innards. Surely, no more sacrifices can be expected.
A good assortment of tools, used or not, is like protective clothing for the gardener. Golfers always have far more clubs about their person than they can possibly use. Rock musicians barricade themselves behind a phalanx of guitars. Why should I not have my daisy grubber and long-handled pruner, my brass hand syringe and selection of roses from the spouts of vanished watering cans? Meanwhile, I must find a home for this heterogeneous troupe. I have an awful feeling the hoes have designs on my study. 
Any gardener can only sympathize with this dilemma.
Our Patch
We enjoy wildlifing on our “patch”, which is to say we like to go out regularly to meet the furry and feathered neighbours in the garden and down the road within walking or cycling distance perhaps more than we do travelling the world searching for rarities … though that’s fun too, maybe once a year. Depth rather than breadth.
Seems we are not alone. I happened across this piece in a book I was reading about wildlife in Somerset, where I spent many happy childhood years visiting aged relatives on Exmoor. It was written by a Donald S Murray, originally from Lewis but living in Shetland, who views these matters much as I do.
“There are two ways of acquiring wisdom. One – they say – is travelling far and wide. The other is to stay in a location, focusing ears and thought and eyes on all that surrounds you in the one place in which you choose (or are forced) to bide, noting how the seasons slide into each other, the rise, and fall of wind or cloud or tide, taking account of changes and allowing them to guide the path on which you step and stride.
– From The Man Who Talks to Birds (Saraband, 2020)
… and then, and somewhat coincidentally. As we emerged from the travel restrictions imposed by covid-19 it was apparent that others had been compelled, by choice or otherwise, to limit their wildlife adventuring to a local patch. Stephen Moss, a writer who is also a professional leader of worldwide birding trips for deeply committed birders with deep pockets recently wrote in a very enjoyable book (“Skylarks with Rosie: A Somerset Spring”) the following:
“All these (birds on a marshland I used to visit but can no longer) made my garden sightings feel somehow less significant in comparison. Yet as it dawned on me that my garden and the moor behind my home were now the boundaries of my life for the foreseeable future, I again realised what I have always known: that birding isn’t about the rare and unusual – exciting though they are – but the reassuringly regular and commonplace. In any case, this was what I would be seeing and hearing during this particular spring, and so, I decided, I had better start to enjoy it.”
Ruby throated Hummingbird in the garden. Most of the summer these are sleek little birds but this week they are furiously fattening up in readiness for the southwards migration. There was one on Friday morning that was already so fat he looked like a small feathered golfball but, of course, he didn’t stay while I got the camera. This chap, still “stouter” than usual, posed nicely after lunch.
At which point I was going to finish this edition … and then J (who does not do ‘squeamish’ thank goodness) called me out into the garden to admire a spider. I think you will admire it too - it’s an Araneus sp. for sure. At first I thought possibly Shamrock Orbweaver (Araneus trifolium) but I am coming round to a rather chubby specimen of Cross Orbweaver (Araneus diademata). Not rare but new in the garden. About the size of your thumbnail. Usually I casually tell people “oh, she won’t hurt you” and then I read that the bite of a shamrock spider can be painful but it is not dangerous for humans with effects comparable to a bee sting. So my advice henceforth ought to be “she won’t hurt you if you leave her alone” which we all should anyway. They have their lives to live, on their own terms.
In the next instalment of 1001 Species, we will go for a well directed stroll and see what can be encountered in late September.
