We’ve had the perfect growing weather here recently – lots of rain and warm temperatures and everything in the garden and surrounding countryside is green and growing. In my little patch I’ve been planting some new fruit and herb plants. I’ve given up on growing veggies for now as they were lots of work for a rather meagre harvest – mostly thanks to cabbage white butterflies, aphids and a host of other chompers who set about nibbling my homegrown produce. Not that I really mind, planting herbs keeps things simple for me and I like to see creatures in my garden – chives, borage, thyme and lavender are perfect plants for attracting bees and other wildlife.
I would much rather have a little corner of this Earth that is busy and brimming with life, unlike some of my neighbours it seems – two of them have recently had their ‘gardens’ worked on and carpeted with plastic fake grass – they are now sterile, dead squares surrounded by stark fences. And our immediate next door neighbour has just chopped down every tree and bush in their garden in favour of grass, including a really big and beautiful lilac that was a springtime magnet to so many butterflies and bees emerging from annual hibernation.
So, in an attempt to compensate the local wildlife, I’m happily letting things go a bit more wild in our garden and it lifts my spirits to see some of these tiny creatures that I’m sharing my garden with – lots of different bee species are happily buzzing from one chive head to another; many ladybird larvae are starting to cocoon up and transform into their adult form, and tiny yellow orb-weaver spiderlings that hatched on a hellebore are flinging out their silken strands, leaving their 300 or so siblings and heading out on their own.
Of course I’m very lucky to have larger visitors to my garden too. The fox is still calling in regularly and I’ve got some lovely pictures of her which I’ll share soon.
Hope you find some tiny delights in your own corner of our beautiful Earth – if you have time to, please share what plants or creatures you are co-inhabiting with. ‘Til next time x
little cotton rabbits 
Beautiful pics and that crochet granny square is out of this world. What pattern did you use?? Thanks.
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I had the same sort of spider-siblings on my gate latch here in Chicago… fortunately I looked before I opened it! They’re amazing!!
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Thanks so much Anne Marie. I forgot to mention the blanket, it was the first crochet blanket I made and the pattern is not only a lovely one, it’s generously free too, it’s called Flowers in the Snow by Solveig Grimstad: https://www.ravelry.com/patterns/library/flowers-in-the-snow
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They really are amazing aren’t they. When I first spotted them I though it was a seedpod of something, because it was a tight yellow ball but when I leaned closer I brushed a leaf and the vibrations made the little yellow ball ‘explode’ into hundreds of fleeing spiders – it made me jump!
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I love all your tiny neighbors! I stopped using chemicals on my lawn last year and now only use organic/natural fertilizers and my yard has never looked better! We have so many birds, butterflies, spiders, squirrels, bunnies, voles, worms, lizards and I love them all, except the mosquitoes, they aren’t my friends.
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I love the idea of finding “tiny delights”. Thank you for that this morning. It’s lovely.
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What stunning photographs, Julie. You have such a talented eye. How disappointing that your neighbours have laid fake grass; I saw some at Tesco and joked with my husband that it wouldn’t sell well! We’re letting our tiny patch of lawn go to the buttercups and daisies and I’ve seen lots of bumble bees when it’s stopped raining. I love your photograph of the spiderlettes and I’m going to be keeping my eyes open for the small things more! Thank you for sharing these moments with us.
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Beautiful images Julie and yes its lovely to share your garden with some wildlife! We have some whoppers of spiders in our garage and greenhouse but I think our top creature has to be our little hedgehog friend, who is very partial to some cat biscuits of an evening. 🙂
Happy weekend,
V x
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What a shame about the neighbouring gardens. I’ve been planting herbs as well, the pollinators love the flowers. Saw a stag beetle on the grass earlier which was lovely – I’ve got some dead wood in a pile which it probably likes. There are frogs in the pond, despite the crows and magpies eating the odd one – eek. And I’m growing more things for pollinators and not as many veggies as well. Fake grass is a horror. No idea why people are still putting it down. Shame on them. Hope you have a lovely weekend with a little time for relaxing in the garden. CJ xx
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We do the same – we let things grow wild. We put out water for the wildlife. We grow plants that birds (hummingbirds!) will love. We don’t mind weeds. All the wildlife are welcome here, including spiders, snakes, and even the occasional Gila Monster!!
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I’ve never understood why people cut down all the beautiful growing things. If you’ve ever seen a Sun City community in the U.S., you’ve had a glimpse of he**. Right now in my yard in Oregon USA, I have blue jays, towhees, hummingbirds, doves, sparrows, robins, and a couple of bunnies munching on my grass and roses. Recently, we had 2 deer come to snack at our rose bush buffet. And a couple of nights ago, a bear came and broke down our thick post to get at the bird seed. Oh well, bears gotta eat too. I wish I had a fox though and am looking forward to pictures of yours. Have you seen her babies yet?
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loved !!! S2
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It breaks my heart when trees are cut down. My neighbours recently cut down a beautiful old liac tree too. I am growing three new lilacs to compensate!
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Julie – Thanks for the pattern link – can’t wait to make this beautiful pattern!
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Hi – I’ve visited your blog occasionally over the years and I love the creative, cosy things you make. I also wanted to say how much I admire your patience and dedication to your son. I am a parent of two young kids that do not have autism, though they can be challenging in their own ways. I know how hard it is to remain calm and not show your frustration day in and day out. Please know that this stranger on the internet thinks you’re doing an amazing job.
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Lovely! What a lucky catch to find all the spiderlings heading out!
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You always lift my spirits with your photos and observations, and of course your knitted friends. I winced when I read of neighbors’ deeds. I know that feeling, but there’s not much to be done about it. The plastic grass is cringe-worthy. Our tiny yard is home to chipmunks, gray squirrels and the occasional vole. Plenty of birds, most of which I can’t name, but the most delightful are the cardinals. We have a small patch of woods adjacent to our property and last winter I looked intently to find the source of an odd bird call. I spotted, way up high, a large hawk nest. A couple of times it has chosen to dine in our yard. Gruesome and fascinating at once. When I bus the table at the end of the meal, there is naught but feathers and bones. I marvel at how perfectly they they pluck the feathers and strip every last shred of meat from the bones. They put humans to same for wasting so much food. Between fencing and dogs, the larger animals are less likely to visit the yard, but I occasionally have seen foxes, once a fat skunk (I often smell them as they waddle through at night), deer, possums, rabbits (which my son and I refer to as “Vegetation Management Crew Members” mimicking the appellation of certain workers for the utility company.) Once as I sat on the back porch at night, I found myself staring at four young raccoons. They froze and gave me an impudent look, as one sometimes catches from teenaged boys who don’t care that you’ve caught them smoking or drinking. When I refused to retreat, they slunk off into the night never to be seen again. All this in a densely populated suburb close to a big city.
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I am so sad about your neighbor’s yards, but you are helping to balance things out a bit and at least appreciate the many beautiful aspects. I love your fox. I spent the last two days worrying about two barn swallow fledglings. I was able to get some good pictures today :-). https://myfavoritesheep.blogspot.com/2019/06/gone-to-birds.html
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And I think to myself… What a wonderful world 🎼🎶🎵🎶🎶🎶 I love the smell of green! You corner of the world looks delightful. What a complex world we live in. It calms me to focus on the simple things ❤️🇨🇦
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I do love a bit of tiny wildlife spotting, a couple of years ago we had 3 or 4 ladybird larvae on our bronze fennel each going through different stages of their metamorphosis – I had never seen this before and then along came a few, like buses! 🙂 Sadly, some rather lovely trees in the established garden next door to us were stripped out (along with everything else) in the name of ‘development’ leaving just grass, so we’re hoping our new neighbours when they arrive love the wildlife like we do. Enjoy your weekend and stay cool x
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I do so love your garden and envy all the rain you are having. In my part of the world which it a coastal town in South Africa we mainly get out rain in Summer. It’s Winter here now.
We are visited daily by a troop of monkeys looking for food as food is now very limited. We cannot grow anything as they will eat the lot. They even dig up the carrots!!!Clever little animals.
Love your blog and all your creations xxx
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What a great lesson in looking carefully and sharing our world with little creatures who have as much right to be here as we do! Thank you.
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Beautiful pictures as always!! We’ve had a bunny lately snoozing in our garden bed among the bee balm. I didn’t mind until I saw that some volunteer black-eyed Susan’s had been munched on!! Chipmunks and squirrels are the regulars along with the songbirds I feed. Hummingbirds too. Julie, I see my Red Sox are in London playing those dreaded Yankees!! How interesting.
P.S. My little Lacey says hello!!!
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Thank you for the lovely photos. The raindrops photos are beautiful.
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Julie, I always love reading your blog and seeing your fantastic photos. Like you, I’ve been SO distressed that many people in our neighborhood have installed fake lawns and/or cut down every tree and bush on their property. We have laws here in the SF Bay Area about cutting down trees, but somehow it’s almost always allowed as long as you can come up with money to pay the authorities. So sad. I’ve let my garden become a jungle due to lack of time. Here’s a link to my yard photos taken last month. As you can see, I’m partial to roses, many of which are the English or antique rose varieties. I don’t have many hybrid teas, but I love them all.
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It always makes me smile, Julie, to check your blog and see a new post. Your pictures, as ever, are beautiful. My favorite is the pretty pink flower with the raindrops (or is it dew?). However, the spider picture gave me the willies. Spiders are the one thing I am most scared of. At my house I am growing geraniums, begonias, zinnias, petunias, marigolds, and tomatoes. I’m also keeping the hummingbird feeders filled. They are my favorites to watch; so tiny and fast.
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It makes me so mad and sad when people destroy nature. They should be sent to live in high-rise apartment buildings, where they could do less harm. Our yard, like yours, is dedicated eo helping Mother Nature and her children. Solidarity from France.
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I understand, but spiders are the world’s best textile artists!
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Such lovely pictures! And a lovely garden too! This was the first year in a long time that I’ve had a proper garden. I’ve been cutting back overgrown honeysuckle and Autumn Berry trees to make room. But we still have LOTS of natural vegetation. I love your idea of planting for the pollinators. But I don’t like the idea (of the neighbor’s) plastic garden. Happy growing!
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Your garden looks wonderful, and well done for growing for wildlife. About the only thing to be said in favour of fake grass is that it is usually laid on sand or some such so the water drains away through it when it rains – rather than down the already overfull drainage system, which is what would happen if your neighbours had had their gardens paved/concreted. Shame about the tree massacre though.
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Lovely pictures! And an uplifting read. Just yesterday I was doing a bit of weeding in the garden when our neighbour called me over the fence to complain about our “weedy lawn”. Well, she didn’t say that. She asked if I was trying to be all green by not cutting it. I answered that 1. it is less work, plus we don’t have heaps of cut grass to dispose of, 2. it’s fun for the children (we cut little “roads” through the high grass) and 3. we think it’s prettier because it waves in the wind and attracts lots of wildlife. She said “Well, if you like that sort of thing.” and I concluded by “You can do what you like on your side of the fence (grass and a urinal against a large brick garden shed, really! 🙂 ), and I’ll do what I like on my side!” We once had a neighbour come, unasked, on our garden to spray the weeds with herbicides, because they “were going to get into his hedge”. So this weird love for sterility over fertility in a garden is just as much a Flemish thing as a British one. But enough complaining!
You asked what we are enjoying. Well, lots: sunflowers (not in bloom yet, but already more than 2 meters high!), marigolds, lupins, verbena, dahlias, alchemilla, lavender, millefoium, gaillardia, geraniums, echinacea, daylillies, iceland poppies, other poppies (see my blog for some pictures of bees on poppies, and next week Monday for a tour of the garden), pumpkins and courgettes (already producing a crop), raspberries and red currants and cherries and lots and lots more! Our garden is a place of wonder, rest and frustration (slugs!). I don’t see the joy just a lawn brings (artificial or otherwise).
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Just beautiful Julie! Thanks so much. Today I was blessed to go out to a friends property in tasmania. He was planting box hedging and I was presumably helping albeit maybe just slowing him down!! I saw what looked like a leaf flutter on the ground and he says – oh its a frog! Sure enough on closer inspection it was a dear little frog the colour of a dried leaf, perfect, but only maybe an inch long. i so wish I had a picture to show you!! It is the middle of winter here, so plenty of dry leaves around, maybe he was in his camoflage outfit!!! cheers, Leonie
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Sad to say tree cutters follow me around, it truly cuts into my soul seeing the barbarism. People really do seem to hate trees, wildlife anything that grows really. I find it most bizarre and all too frequent behaviour. I find it beyond upsetting. It happens in gardens, parks, main roads, quiet roads and it is never done neatly, it always results in the tree looking mutilated and half butchered.
There are usually pathetic excuses -‘too near the house’ when it is nowhere near it or ‘it was dead/dying’ when it wasn’t. Truth is people are lazy with no poetry in their hearts and can’t see beauty or councils won’t spend money. It destroys neighbourhoods and we wonder why the environment is suffering with extinction of birds, animals and plants not to mention insects. It all leaves me very dejected about humanity to be honest.
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Oh so beautiful Julie! I did the same thing as you a few years ago and gave up on veggies — our culprits were bunnies and chipmunks — they have voracious appetites. Now they enjoy my flowers LOL.
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My garden went due to Colorado’s increasingly dry climate and it’s extreme temperature swings (and maybe a bit to getting older and stiffer), so it’s a joy to see your photos. The one of the chive blossoms reminds me of introducing blue flower omelettes to a friend’s young daughter and then having her showing me her chive patch 20 odd years later. She was hoping for a daughter soon and planned to carry on with blue flower omelettes for another generation. Wishing you and your family all the best.
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PS: lovely hellebore blossoms!
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