Tag Archives: Abbie’s column

Abbie’s newspaper columns

Monarch caterpillars and butterflies – a mid-life obsession that is safer than a Harley Davidson

The green swan seed pods and the fat monarch caterpillar in high summer

Mark has always loved butterflies. Alas it was his misfortune to be born in a country with remarkably few butterflies so he has had to focus all his efforts on the only obliging candidate, the monarch. When we travel overseas, he likes to be armed with guides to both local birds and butterflies but at home the yellow admiral and the coppers are largely unknown in our area and the cabbage white does not qualify. The red admiral, which is here, is not as much fun because its main host is stinging nettle. New Zealand has an abundance of different moths, many of which are extremely beautifully marked, but you have to be of a nocturnal disposition for these. This brings us back to the monarch which is large, spectacular and can claim indigenous status because it was self introduced (like the wax-eye), arriving here under its own steam, apparently around 1840.

I admit that I fear his dedication to supporting an exponential increase in numbers of monarch butterflies wintering over may be nearing obsessive levels. Even I was a little surprised at the extent of his swan plant plantations. As magnolia crops have been harvested from our open ground area, he has gone in to the cultivated ground with his little seed sower and trundled up and down the rows dispensing swan plant seed. Strung end to end, we are talking several kilometres of swan plants – probably closer to five kilometres than two. What is more, he is successional sowing in the same way he does with the sweet corn and beans. All this is aimed at ensuring that we have plenty of food to take the monarch caterpillars through to late autumn. That way, they are far more likely to winter over here and there are few close up sights of natural beauty as magical as looking up into a tree on a fine winter’s morning and seeing the monarchs waking and stretching in the sunshine.

The drive to have successional crops may strike a chord with many readers who will be struggling now with a surfeit of caterpillars and a dearth of food. There is something both brave and poignant about watching an exodus of monarch caterpillars heading down from a completely stripped swan plant and wriggling off into the wide unknown in search of another. I suspect Mark suffered some emotional traumas in years past, coping with food shortages. One autumn he raised many caterpillars on slices of pumpkin and he finds it hard to cull babies to preserve dwindling food supplies for the more advanced specimens who are likely to reach maturity and chrysalis in time to metamorphose.

Merely sowing swan plant seed is not enough, however. Definitely not. Crops require management. For starters, you want to try and get at least one plant through to its second season so you can gather your own seed. It germinates readily if sown fresh. We have always known the swan plant as an asclepias, Asclepias fruticosa in fact but it has apparently been renamed Gomphocarpus fruticosus which is altogether too difficult for us to remember even with our experience in horticulture. Sometimes it is referred to as milkweed (it exudes a milky sap) but the term swan plant is commonly understood. The seed pod is like a green bubble swan and when it bursts, the fine seeds come out attached to silky white filaments – maybe they resemble white swan feathers? The filaments help the seed to be dispersed by the wind.

The problem with juvenile swan plants is that the monarchs don’t understand about food conservation so you have to protect your swan plants or they will be stripped long before they become established. If you only have a few plants, you can cover them and restrict access to the egg laying butterflies. These days we have so many plants that the supply finally outstripped demand but in the awkward mid stages, Mark did have to resort to a little infanticide to protect the plants for autumn. And we have to be honest and say that our swan plants are not organic. Without intervention in the form of insecticide, the yellow aphids would have destroyed the entire crop before the monarchs even got going. When he first decided that spraying was necessary a couple of years ago, he went through and carefully picked off all the larger grade caterpillars and relocated them to a clean area. These days we just have too many plants so he tries to get his timing right because insecticide is indiscriminate and will kill eggs and caterpillars as well as the nasty aphids. He tries to do it as early in the season as he can before the explosion of monarch caterpillars.

If you only have a few plants or a single plant under siege from caterpillars, it helps to put in a twiggy branch alongside. Too often the caterpillars will chrysalis on the swan plant where they can be very vulnerable to subsequent generations eating off the stem to which they are attached, so it is better that they be encouraged to neutral territory. Our observations are that cocoons must hang in order to allow the butterfly to emerge undamaged. If you have a stray cocoon, you can try tying a piece of fine cotton to its top so you can suspend it. We have resorted to a bit of sticky tape just across the stem at the top of the cocoon which seems to hold them long enough as long as it doesn’t get too wet.

The final piece of the jigsaw for us is having enough food throughout the year to sustain the butterflies. So it is swan plants as host for the eggs and caterpillars and nectar rich flowers for the butterflies. They will just fly away if you live in a green desert with no food for them. I have written before about butterflies feeding in winter on our Prunus Awanui and Edgeworthia papyrifera. There are many flowers with good nectar but I am slightly amused to see zinnias and marigolds making a reappearance here. We haven’t grown these since back in the competitive school garden days of our children but I notice Mark will row them out in the vegetable garden for the prime purpose of feeding the butterflies. In fact the monarchs have caused him to revisit his approach to the vegetable and kitchen gardens and to give space to many flowering plants in order to feed his butterflies. There is nothing as twee as a potager. We are talking more meadow garden style but it is very pretty. The monarchs are a good argument in support of a gardening style which favours flowers twelve months of the year.

Mark is by no means alone in his monarch butterfly fetish. There is a strong organisation in New Zealand to foster the monarch and readers who wish to know more can visit their website on www.monarch.org.nz . This site will also give further suggestions for nectar rich flowers. One of our friendly neighbours has derived much delight from our monarch butterflies visiting his garden in winter, despite Mark threatening to bar code them and charge accordingly. Send our butterflies home, I heard him say. As far is Mark is concerned, his monarch butterflies give him a great deal more pleasure than a mid-life Harley Davidson and are a lot safer and cheaper.

The green breathing space

A restful green on a summer's day - a garden border in dry shade

It is a reflection of our benign climate that I can write a mid-summer column about the soothing role of green in the garden. Overseas visitors are often amazed when they are told that we never irrigate our garden here. Three weeks without rain is nearing a drought in our area of North Taranaki but I hasten to add that we also enjoy high sunshine hours. Much of the world is brown in summer and areas with winter drought or very low temperatures can be brown (or white) in winter, too. We are green fifty two weeks of the year.

As I brought in the washing yesterday, I contemplated the view from the line which includes the modest back border of the house. I say modest because it is the typical New Zealand house border which runs between the path and the house and so it measures about 50cm wide and several meters long. It is not always easy to know what to grow in a narrow border which is cool dry shade in summer and downright cold dry shade in winter but I did think it was looking rather lush, green and attractive yesterday. There are no flowers out at the moment so it was toned green on green and all about leaf texture and shape. The lapagerias clamber up to to reach the guttering and give height. These are commonly known as Chilean bell flowers and we have a towering pale pink one, a teetering huge white one and a red one all in a row with a daphne bush marking one end. There is good textural variation in the fine foliage of a maiden hair fern, the strappy leaves of a cymbidium orchid, a rather understated green hosta and the large, lush leaves of scadoxus, all underplanted with the mouse plant (arisarum). This last plant can be somewhat invasive but it has nowhere to invade in such a confined border and children are enchanted by the curious flowers. At other times of the year, the lapagerias flower and we have seasonal bulbs that come through but for the heat of summer, it made rather a nice restful picture of green.

Restful, simple green gives a breathing space in a busy garden. Most of us achieve this with lawns where the expanse of green is a little like letting out a sigh of relief. Paved patios and decking just do not give this sense of spacious rest even if they don’t need mowing. Mind you, I was raised by a keen gardener who decided that lawns had no merit. She would rather weed and maintain additional garden than mow a lawn. Widowed early, she never got to grips with mowing. I can remember when I was about nine we moved in to a house where the lawns were rather too extensive to manage with the old push mower. She bought a motor mower. After three days and a couple of site visits from the salesman, the shop took the mower back and refunded her money. They were probably deeply relieved to be shot of her. My mother’s aura did not mix with a motor mower. It would not start for her and she decided it was jinxed. She never tried to make the acquaintance of a mower again. She simply dispensed with grass. Now I think she was wrong and it did not suit her to see the role played in garden design by the restful green space.

The green circle carried off with style and panache at Sissinghurst

The green circle carried off with style and panache at Sissinghurst

No doubt many readers have been to Sissinghurst in England. Vita Sackville West and Harold Nicholson employed a radical device in that garden to create a space – a simple circle of grass surrounded by a high clipped green hedge (probably yew). In the wrong hands, this could look overly contrived, or even naff in a suburban New Zealand quarter acre garden. But in all the busy-ness that characterises the arts and crafts garden rooms of Sissinghurst, filled with colour and texture, this simple green circle gave a place to pause. There was nothing to assault the senses. The circular lawn, viewed from above, as one can because of the splendid tower (not to be confused with a viewing platform – the tower is a relic of the former castle) is neatly and obediently striped. They may not wish to unleash a creative or careless lawn mowing person on that lawn – a spiral, bulls-eye or even an untidy mishmash would not look as perfect as the wide and precise stripes.

At Hidcote Manor, Major Lawrence Johnston from a similar era and also with a busy arts and crafts garden full of small garden rooms, achieved a similar purpose with his Long Walk and his circular area – simply referred to as The Circle. The Long Walk is appropriately long, running on an axis spanning over half the garden and it is simply a generously wide mown strip of grass (no manicured lawn here – this was indubitably grass) bounded on both sides by tall hornbeam hedges. The Circle was tidy lawn bounded by clipped hedges and some rather large and splendid topiary birds.

Think of it all as the gardening equivalent of the sorbet to cleanse the palate between courses at an elaborate dinner party. A sorbet would be OTT at an informal barbecue but it is entirely appropriate at a banquet.

A good garden designer (the operative word is good) will understand the juxtaposition of uncluttered space and detail – that is one of their techniques. The reality is that most home gardeners in this country either can’t afford a good garden designer or they prefer not to. The DIY green space is the lawn. While technically green is a colour, in gardening practice it is perceived as colour neutral like the off white walls of the interiors of many houses. Defining the boundaries of that green space, maybe with clipped hedging, gives it more oomph as long as it is immaculately maintained. However, the imposed formality of the perfect circle needs to be managed carefully – you really need your proportions and context right. There is a fine line between circles with panache and being contrived, or worse – pretentious. The sweep of lawn is safer.

It was a revelation to us to see how effective the deliberate green breathing space was in both Sissinghurst and Hidcote. But most gardens will benefit from the framing that a green lawn provides and in the heat of summer, it makes even more sense.

A Major Mission in the Rockery

The refurbished rockery looks a little barren in places but below the mulch are many bulbs waiting to spring into fresh growth

The refurbished rockery looks a little barren in places but below the mulch are many bulbs waiting to spring into fresh growth

My current activity started in a very minor way. I must thin out the Cyclamen hederafolium and nerines in the rockery, I thought yet again but this time I had my timing more or less right. The nerines look fantastic in flower in autumn but the clumps had become so large that they had forced themselves up out of the soil and the foliage hangs on right into late spring, swamping treasures around them.

What I did not realise when I started was that the task was going to be so major that I would spend eight hours a day for several weeks, taking apart the contents of the rockery pocket by pocket. It has become a Major Mission.

Cyclamen hederafolium is the autumn flowering species, formerly known as neapolitana. It is a gem which flowers over a period of months in white and, more commonly, cyclamen pink. After many years, decades even, they sure were overdue for thinning out. They grow from flattish, round corms and a large one is about 10cm across. Some of ours were closer to 25cm across and as I gently excavated, I found them up to three deep. In fact, my thinning exercise yielded up around 60 litres of surplus corms with which Mark plans to carpet woodland margins and add to his naturalised bulb hillside in the park. That is six 10 litre pots, in case you are wondering how I arrived at the 60 litre figure.

Having started, I found that the English snowdrops and black mondo grass which share some of the same rockery pockets were also in desperate need of thinning. And while I was about it, I figured the heavily compacted soil could do with aeration and a light dressing of compost. Then the rocks needed some of the lichen and moss scraped off them and some of the pockets had soil levels which overflowed. In fact a complete spruce-up seemed in order. And of course the areas which I did looked so fresh and clean that I felt I had to continue. I am still not finished but I am a driven woman and will not desist until I have done the lot. I have uncovered rocks and divisions in the pocket beds that we did not even know existed.

Rockeries are not in fashion these days, not at all. Ours is a 1950s style rockery using raised beds in island formation. There are a lot of rocks, brick and concrete in it and it must have been a major exercise to build. I had not noticed before that the largest rocks are in the beds closest to the drive. The further you go from the vehicle access, the smaller the rocks get and the more freeform concrete construction there is. I can understand why. Some of the largest rocks must have been very difficult to move.

The basic rockery concept is to emulate the conditions of an alpine meadow. We can’t do alpine, though we have tried. We lack the winter chill and are a great deal too humid with rainfall evenly spread all year. Alpine meadows are cold deserts kept dry in winter by a coat of snow and ice. So our rockery plants are by no means traditional. No gentians or edelweiss here. But what it gives us is a section of garden which is highly detailed, where the pictures are small and individual and baby gems can be admired in close up view. It is entirely different to the big picture style of garden where form, colour and flow are what dominate. Bulbs rule in our rockery, especially those of a miniature or dwarf persuasion. We use cycads, venerable dwarf conifers and some smaller growing perennials so the area is not totally bereft of woody and herbaceous plantings but they are merely the backdrop.

Best guess is that there are well over 500 individual pockets in our rockery. And the skill that has my gardening ability stretched to its absolute limit is the creation of differing combinations in at least some of those pockets. So one may contain nerines for autumn colour, moreas (peacock iris) for early spring and a small perennial such as a prostrate campanula for summer interest. I can not claim that I get triple layering in them all. I wish. Alas some will be bare during parts of the year because they are too small or I Iack the material or skills to plant in layers. But the structure provides the year round interest and does not demand to be filled to capacity twelve months of the year. Some bulbs will only flower for one or two weeks but in that time, they are the daintiest and most ephemeral of delights which would be lost entirely in larger garden beds.

Mark’s parents both loved the rockery. Stepping out from the house, there is always something different to view. Day to day maintenance is relatively easy. We have always worked to keep it weed free, to restrict the occasional invasive bulb (it is why one has separate pockets to keep those with wandering ways in a confined area) and beyond the occasional light mulch and ongoing tidying, it is not generally labour intensive. With most of it being raised, it is not back breaking either. Many bulbs are happy to continue in an environment which is relatively poor. But there comes a time when the soil is so impoverished and compacted that treasures start to go back and thugs multiply so much that the competition is to survive, not necessarily to flower well.

Bulbs are not gross feeders so we like to spread a thin layer of compost on top to mulch and give a light feed only. Not every plant is precious and that realisation has been wonderfully liberating. Some plants are past their use-by date. Some are just in the wrong place. Some have multiplied too well so there are too many of them. Going though centimetre by centimetre has been like a voyage of discovery. I have worked out that I can average about four square metres a day if I stick at it. With about 100 square metres of rockery, it is a mere 25 days work.

Some people like to garden in containers to keep little treasures apart and to be able to give different conditions. Despite my current intensive effort, I think the rockery concept takes less work overall for more aesthetically pleasing results. Maybe the rockery will stage a fashion comeback. If the thought of assembling, placing and securing all those rocks defeats you, there is an alternative in what we call the carpet garden, but for more thoughts on that garden genre you will have to wait.

Crystal ball predictions for the 2010 gardening year

Ah, that wonderful Christmas – New Year hiatus. In the days before the Boxing Day sales and indeed before seven day trading, it used to be more of a coma than a hiatus but even now, in this country, we settle in to holiday mode. Why else would we tolerate the truly appalling offerings on television where there is rarely anything worth watching? Clearly we are all meant to be reading the Christmas books or chatting to family and friends instead. And the print and electronic media, yours truly included, sink into a period of reflection, summarising the year past and bravely making predictions for the year just starting. This is at least one step better than recycling earlier offerings under the headings of “ 2009 Highlights” or “Best of…”. So I shall resist the temptation to recycle a piece from earlier this year (though I will admit to being proud of the series I wrote on English summer gardens which is still on this website) and look into my crystal ball.

I believe we will diversify from vegetables. Veg gardening is not fad or fashion but the all consuming obsession is showing signs of dilution. There is a hint that some would like to read about other types of plants and gardens as well as home food production. I recall an Auckland journo wryly commenting on the $70 lettuce. That is the cost for some of producing their first and sometimes only produce after buying planter boxes, the bagged potting mix and compost, the most basic of tools and punnets of small plants from the garden centre.

Serious vegetable gardening will continue for some, but many of those who follow fashion and trends will be realising by now that to be a successful vegetable gardener requires some expertise and skill and quite a bit of time. You can not just plant the seeds or baby plants and then ignore them. Dilettantes will lose heart and move on. The declaration that one will only plant productive trees and shrubs may be a sign of naivety and not the higher moral ground. It could be argued that the doom and gloom of the recession had us all looking to survival mode. Now that the clouds are lifting, increased optimism allows space for aesthetics and beauty in life as well. And I can assure you that while the walnut tree I see outside my window fruits and we enjoy its harvest, it is but a poor aesthetic specimen compared to the magnolia nearby which is lush and opening its summer flowers. We need to nourish more than just the body and to titillate more than the taste buds. In our eyes, the complete garden goes well beyond just fruit and vegetables, although they are an important element.

The upside of the vegetable craze has been the return to some old fashioned values of seasonal eating, taking pride in home produce and super fresh ingredients given a new twist with some rather more sophisticated international flavours. I reviewed a rather large number of cook books last year for the food pages (Second Daughter was fearfully impressed last week with my shelf of recipe books and I only keep the ones I like) and certainly the current focus is very strongly on eating locally sourced foods in season. The delight in being able to transcend seasonal limitations by buying food which has crossed the hemispheres is a thing of the recent past for many of us. We now care whether the garlic and onions come from China, the grapes and nectarines from USA, the kiwifruit from Italy and the pork from Australia. We would rather it came from Te Kuiti or the Rangitikei, thank you, if we are to move outside our local area. So I would expect we will see farmers’ markets go from strength to strength.

The local focus of the farmers’ markets may well extend to wider gardening practices. Here, we raise our eyebrows at the widespread use of mulches, potting mixes and composts shipped across the country when there are local alternatives with much smaller carbon footprints. Pea straw is the classic. It has a great reputation as garden mulch (though it is a myth that it adds nitrogen to the soil because the nitrogen is in the roots of the pea plant and pea straw by definition, is the dried tops only) but have you ever asked yourself where the nearest commercial production of peas takes place? It is being shipped hundreds of kilometres in a large truck in order to cover your garden when there are local alternatives which will do just the same. Try locally produced granulated bark or compost, pine needles, even barley straw from South Taranaki.

The move away from poisons and sprays is a trend we expect to see escalate. Our tolerance level in this country for the use of some extremely heavy duty toxins is very high indeed, often justified as a lesser of two evils. 1080 is the classic: this mass poisoning on a grand scale with a particularly unpleasant toxin which enters the food chain is government sanctioned but we are seeing the tide of public opinion turn. At least 1080 is tightly controlled, whereas the over the counter poisons that are freely and abundantly sold here are arguably worse. Rats, mice, possums and rabbits – you too can bowl into a shop and buy some nasty poisons. The trouble is that many will enter the food chain, some have no antidotes, some are appallingly slow acting and unpleasant and in this country we are all too cavalier in our use of them. Worry whenever you see the term by-kill. It is the unintended death of other life than the target. A cute little dog named Wilfred, in our case, and the poison that killed him did not originate from our property. While we shoot all our possums here, a common possum poison used by others is very slow acting and can enter the food chain. We are having to review our long held practice of feeding the carcases to our animals. The time when we see a sharp reduction in the usage and availability of such toxins can not come soon enough for us, or indeed for the environment of our country.

Buffy the cat, potential by-kill, even even though Mark shoots all our possums. Slow acting over-the counter poisons may mean the carcase is already toxic.

Buffy the cat, potential by-kill, even even though Mark shoots all our possums. Slow acting over-the counter poisons may mean the carcase is already toxic.

Organics, we predict, will become more mainstream and increasingly widely practiced. It may not be organics as the purists know it. Indeed it is highly likely to be a heavily diluted form and possibly derided by the dedicated converts. But anything which sees gardening move away from practices and habits which rely more on the use of chemicals than on good gardening strategies has to be an improvement. If we follow the European trends, ever tighter government controls will stop home gardeners having access to a range of sprays and artificial fertilisers which have been used to prop up poor gardening practices, poor plant selection or unsustainable habits.

The wheel is turning. After a decade or more of rampant consumerism, conspicuous wealth and people who are time-poor, gardening is on the up again and for that we have the vegetable craze to thank. It all looks a great deal more wholesome and cheerful than a few years ago. Happy New Year and may 2010 be one of good gardening cheer for readers.

Tales of the Christmas Tree

Fortunately this handsome Abies procera beside our house was not cut off in its infancy fifty years ago to act as a Christmas tree for two short weeks

The need for the Christmas tree is starting to weigh upon me. The deadline is December 17, the day when our first returnees arrive home for the traditional family Christmas. We could of course join the throngs who have sacrificed authenticity for convenience and bought an artificial tree. I was listening to a panelist on National Radio last week who mentioned his tree. A man’s tree, he called it. It comes complete with all decorations glued on to the branches so all he has to do is fold it out each year. It just would not do here. I would be pilloried and derided by the returning children who would take such a purchase as a cop-out on every front. They would probably assume that it indicated their mother was entering premature old age.

Alternatively, we could join the throngs who go out and buy a tree. Wash my mouth out with soap. How could I suggest such an action? No, our tree must be harvested at home.
Mind you, if you head out and buy a tree, you will generally buy a nice, dense tree of the correct, prescribed pyramidal shape. In New Zealand this tends to mean a choice of a pine tree, another pine tree, the common pine or pinus radiata. We have made the pine tree (a native of Monterey in California) our own in this country, for Christmas trees as well as timber. In the past Mark has been stung by criticism of his selection of wildling pines and has even resorted to wiring in additional branches to increase the volume in sparse areas. Last year he selected a particular tree which he then trimmed a couple of times to encourage shorter, bushy growth. Alas, in the ten days between checking it for the final time to make sure that there were no feathered friends of the ornithological persuasion resident in the tree and when he went out with the pruning saw to harvest it, a family of chaffinches had moved in. He could not cut it down and we had to make do with an emergency installation of four clipped matai trees in pots.

Over the years we have had a variety of different trees. One year I despaired of the pine needles with which my vacuum cleaner struggled to cope and I tried a tree skeleton, spray painted white. It was not a hit with the children. These days it might be seen as more environmentally friendly because when you think about it, entire forests of conifers are felled each year to furnish the homes of the western world for a few short weeks. I was in London in early December one year when the markets were full of Christmas trees which had been shipped in from Norway and Scotland. These were beautiful, dense trees, mostly Abies nordmanniana or Abies procera (the Noble Fir), and, being horticulturally inclined, I knew that such plants are initially very slow growing. The trees had to be at least eight years old and probably more. My oh my, eight or more years of growth to furnish the front rooms of Londoners for two weeks. Second Daughter was equally struck by these and I recall a blog she posted soon after her first Christmas away from home. Wandering around Maida Vale where she was staying, she took photos of the discarded trees out the front of all the residences where they were awaiting the green collection. Christmas Is Over in London, she entitled this on-line photographic essay.

An American friend is a little scathing about our New Zealand habit of using pinus radiata. The needles, she points out, are too long to allow the decorations to stay on easily. If you look at synthetic Christmas trees, they are certainly not modeled on the pine tree. Most are abies (fir trees) which have tufted growths that are much shorter and easier to work with. But the ideal tree needs a certain amount of horizontal branching from which to hang individual Christmas baubles. If the cone shape is too tight, all you can do is to wreathe it in tinsel and lights. In the US, my friend points out, you have a choice of several different varieties of tree. Internationally, abies are favoured because they don’t shed needles, picea or spruce are common but are less happy about surviving cut off in their prime and show it by shedding needles and there are many different pines to the common radiata which are used overseas. The Norfolk Island pine (Araucaria heterophylla) and its smaller cousin Araucaria columnaris make perfectly shaped trees. If you want to be indigenous, matais and miros could be suitable candidates (totara are a little too prickly, as are rimu). But the bottom line is, which trees are you willing to cut off for a mere two weeks Christmas gratification? Call me a snob, but I worry less about sacrificing the common pine whereas it is distinctly sacrilegious to sever the nobler conifers from their roots. My conscience is soothed even further when we recycle trees or branches that are for the chop anyway, even if this means some rather odd installations. This year it involves the extension ladder and cutting the top out of a mature golden chamaecyparis because its top knot has reverted to a much more open growth. The difficulty for Mark may be getting it down intact from ten metres up but my challenge is greater. See, it is a green and gold variegation and they are devilishly difficult to decorate with any aesthetics at all because they just make tinsel look even tackier than usual.

The final word on the topic has to rest with our dentist who regaled us with the charming story of heading out to buy a Christmas tree one year from the foremost supplier locally and finding that he had managed to bring home a specimen with a nest containing a fledgling thrush. The mother had presumably scarpered at the first sign of disturbance (and we won’t dwell on the mental image of bereft Mother Thrush left behind). Said dentist and wife then spent the two weeks leading up to Christmas hand rearing the thrush with worms dug fresh each morning. After all, how could you have a Christmas tree in the house knowing that you had consigned its now homeless inhabitant to an early death? As the thrush gained in size, they set about teaching it to fly with regular lessons outdoors, tossing it in the air until it caught on to the process. It would be a sentimental lie to say that it flew to freedom on Christmas Day. In fact it spent some time sitting around perched on the washing line (and no doubt pooing indiscriminately on the washing) but let that not detract from what is a charming home grown Christmas story.