LONG NOSED LUMBERJACKS AT WORK…

Rain, lovely rain. Lots of it… and you can almost hear stuff growing all around. Suddenly, everything is blossoming – the gloriosa lilies add a particularly exotic touch: gorgeous yellow, with dark red veins. And armadas of butterflies, like flitting flowers themselves. Biodiversity at work.

And it’s not just the little things either.

I was out in the garden feeding the dogs late the other evening, when Tamu suddenly started barking, hackles up and glaring out into the night. Cupping my hands behind my ears, I could make out the distinctive cracks and rustles of a party of elephant feeding.

They partied here for several hours, and early next morning we headed out to see how much damage had been done. You see, elephant are wasteful feeders: they will quite happily push over a tree and only take a few mouthfuls before heading over to find a new victim.

We were lucky on this particular occasion: we could only find three trees that had really taken a hit. One gets thoroughly worked over every year without fail. It won’t recover from this episode, which is actually a bit of a relief - now I won’t have to agonise about it any more. A nice fig was unceremoniously uprooted – but was replanted next day and will probably do just fine; while a third victim was pretty well trashed. No problem there, as it is a common species, with plenty of wildings coming up each year.

The vandals had been through the thickets, leaving a chaos of broken branches, trampled grass and great piles of dung in their wake – lots of free new nutrients, and we could see the dung beetles at work, busily putting it all underground for maximum benefit.

Phew.

In theory, we have adopted the approach that you can have a garden full of trees anywhere, but there are very few places in the world where you get elephants too – so we are resigned to the loss of a few trees each year. In practice though, we get attached to the trees we plant so carefully (over a thousand so far, so Jules tells me) and it is heartbreaking to see a healthy young tree reduced to splinters by an over-enthusiastic pachyderm.

What I find fascinating is how smart they are. They are fairly regular visitors: at certain times of year, they come into the garden every few days. And yet we almost never see them. They know a) that they are not generally welcome outside the park; and b) precisely where the park boundary is. So they will only come at night, munch happily on our trees, and drift back into the park and relative safely just before dawn.

And anyway, who really needs a herbaceous border?