The toad beneath the harrow knows
Exactly where each tooth-point goes.
The butterfly upon the road
Preaches contentment to that toad.
– Rudyard Kipling
SPRING has arrived in the Pumphouse Garden and with it signs of life and the emergence of wildlife.
Yesterday we saw evidence of activity from the badger set with grubbing up present on the pathway and the badger desire lines meandering through the rapidly growing grass and brambles. Hopefully as they become more active we will be able to capture them on the trail cam!
A small Common Toad (Bufo bufo) was found in a weed pile and relocated to a safer spot by the small wildlife pond on my plot. The toad looks too small to be of breeding age but it’s excellent that we have a population in the garden and where there’s one there shall be more…
Despite being much maligned in folklore, used as a squatting melancholic metaphor by Larkin and even used as evidence of occult happenings in witch trials, toads are a beneficial familiar to the gardener. They eat invertebrates, the dreaded scourge of all tender greenery, molluscs, and particularly favour ants so their presence in the garden is as much a benefit to us cultivating the land as it is to them as we provide safe and undisturbed habitat.
Perhaps these warty lurkers of the soil may well be doing the occult bidding of witches, or appearing as the morphed form of the demon Bael while we are all tucked up in bed but they are likely far more fearsome to the quarry at the end of the silver trail of the slug than to us.
Some excellent examples of Toad Lore are here, for those who wish to know more!
It is the season for the annual toad migration at present and on warm, damp nights from February to early April they can be found on the towpath on their way to their reed bed breeding ground in the canal. If you see them in the road or path they can be vulnerable as they freeze for defence, so help them across if you can. Gently scoop them by the body and cup them gently in your hands taking care not to lift them by their limbs.
Below is a small gallery of towpath toads helped to their breeding ground this year.
Photos (c) S. Makin and A. Austin
It is a simple, small joy in spring to sit on a quiet, warm evening and hear their chirruping calls from the reeds, the song of the gardener’s friend.
And with that I’ll leave you with a little ode to the humble toad:
Toad
Stop looking like a purse. How could a purse
Squeeze under the rickety door and sit,
Full of satisfaction in a man’s house?
You clamber towards me on your four corners –
Right hand, left foot, left hand, right foot.
I love you for being a toad,
For crawling like a Japanese wrestler,
And for not being frightened
I put you in my purse hand not shutting it,
And set you down outside directly under
Every star.
A jewel in your head? Toad,
You’ve put one in mine,
A tiny radiance in a dark place.
Norman MacCaig
A.
Welcome to The Pumphouse Garden 