My Patch

1958: The ancient oaks of the Common beckoned me from the end of our street. My brother would be up there sitting unnervingly high in their branches with his chum Rowena (aged five). I made for my own lookout on the top branch of a Scots pine that stood umbrella-like above of a thicket of elder and birch. My hands and shorts would soon be covered in sticky resin that smelled pleasantly of pine for the rest of the day.

Chestnut Avenue.

This outlier of the New Forest was our local patch where we had adventures as cowboys, commandos and super heroes. We built dens, caught lizards and explored endlessly all year round. Our school was housed in Nissen huts from the war and our playground was an open part of the common, dotted with birch, gorse and broom where yellowhammers, long tailed tits and red-backed shrikes nested.

Between the Common and the University lay the brickfields with the their old piles of rubble where toads would hibernate. Treacherous boot-sucking clay pits were where we would catch newts and come home looking like New Guinea mud-men. We were always made to drop our clothes at the back door.

All of the primary school children in our street played on the common, which seemed boundless to us. We were all of born around 1950. Adults and older brothers and sisters were almost invisible, bound up in homework and the cares of adulthood. Some were on National Service in Kenya or Cyprus.

First singing chiffchaff.

Why am I telling you all this? Well, it all came back to me when I was thinking what to do with myself during the lock-down. Trips to the Norfolk Coast are off, most local nature reserves, stately homes, garden centres and pubs are shut. Even the local reservoir is closed. What could I do for exercise and stimulation? In my view there’s only one option and that is to get to know my patch. I won’t be building any dens or climbing many trees but I'm trying not to miss a single day on my patch and I’m going to try and approach it with same wide eyed wonder that I had back in the day.

In order to put some shape on my explorations I have started cataloguing the wayside weeds and posting the results daily on the village Facebook page. I remember trawling the Common for groundsel for Sammy our pet budgie, and for our bad-tempered buck-rabbit, Thumper. That's the inspiration for tomorrow's posting on groundsel. I'm finding a lot of other interesting plants in cracks in the pavements and roadside verges and quite a few in my garden. I thought I knew all their names but a little research proves that I don't. I'm finding it a great way to get to know my plants a bit better. At the same time I’ll be looking out for the year’s markers; frog spawn, toad spawn, newts, grass snakes, butterflies and the migrant birds that are already arriving.

The first cowslips. Not a soul around.

I have always had a patch. Before the common it was Swaledale (grouse, dippers, common sandpipers) and later, in my 6th form it was the Brecon Beacons (buzzards and crossbills). At teacher-training college it was Frenchay Common on the outskirts of Bristol (water voles and tree sparrows) and my first teaching post sent me to Salisbury Plain to see all the chalkland orchids and butterflies, plus breeding stone curlews and wintering harriers. My next patch was Arundel in West Sussex (for orchids, nightjars and nightingales), then Loch Leven in Scotland, (with pinkfeet and peregrines) and  Cousin Island in the Seychelles (for a tropical paradise stuffed with endemics). Finally I landed here on the Reserve at Little Paxton and around my home in Brampton in Cambridgeshire. After so many exotic and scenic locations I’m afraid I have taken my local patch too much for granted but now it’s my salvation. It feels like being a youth again with every day bringing a new discovery.

Moth trap, just unwrapped.

For my 70th birthday my wife bought me a light trap for catching moths. I haven’t run one since Salisbury Plain in the 1970s so I have a lot to learn. I bought a battery-powered kit so that I could take it away camping, but that’s all cancelled now, so I’m going over to a mains supply kit with a plan to run the trap every night in my garden and record what I find there. It was the garden that sold this house to us and it is always a work in progress. I think it will get more attention this summer than ever before.