The hospice garden is a haven for wildlife. This week I have been rewarded by seeing frogspawn for the first time in 2019. I shouldn’t have been surprised, as last week I saw a frog hopping along towards the pond. When I approached it to get a photo, it stopped in the middle of a clump of crocuses, as if inspecting them!

The frog and the crocuses, as well as the 20°C temperatures, were harbingers of spring. It is such an exciting time for gardeners when the garden springs back to life. First, the snowdrops, then the dafs and crocuses, soon it’ll be the tulips showing off their finery. But back to the frogspawn I had discovered. Whilst observing it, the thought crossed my mind that it was a huge volume of spawn for such a small creature. How could that possibly be and why had this not crossed my mind before? So it was off to Google to try and find out.

March is the usual month for UK frogs to mate, although it can be as early as January if there is a warm period, and much later if a cold snap kills off any earlier spawn. The males are the first to head back to the pond where they were born, where they start croaking to attract one or more females. Once he has attracted a mate he grips her from above with his forearms in an embrace called ‘amplexus’. She will then start laying the spawn which is fertilized by the male. This process lasts several hours or even a couple of days, during which she can lay several thousand eggs. The fertilized eggs sink to the bottom of the pond. The surrounding jelly, which is made up of various carbohydrates and proteins, then starts absorbing water, causing the spawn to swell significantly. These clumps, which are often the size of a grapefruit, then become bouyant and float to the surface where they merge with other clumps forming a large mat of spawn. This is what I discovered in the hospice pond.

If there is a frost, the spawn on the surface can freeze and the embryos killed. After about three weeks the remaining embryos hatch out of spawn as tadpoles, eating the nutritious jelly in the process. As a child I remember being so excited when the tadpoles hatched from the frogspawn that we had collected in a bucket. Life as a tadpole is pretty tough, with the vast majority not becoming adult frogs. Many are eaten by predators such as dragofly larvae, water boatmen or newts, with only 10% transitioning into frogs. And even then survival is difficult, coping with the hopefully hot, dry summer followed by the cold winter. Those that do survive the winter will emerge from their hideout in spring to start the cycle all over again. And this is what I have joyfully witnessed this last couple of weeks.

I also witnessed another sign of spring this week. The guys from the council came to cut the grass – three weeks earlier than last year. I just love it when the grass has been mowed, especially when I have just cut new edges into all the flowerbeds.

Spring is a busy time in the garden, trying to do all those jobs that you won’t have time to do once all the weeds start going mental. So I have been cutting back the dogwoods – a job that always makes me slightly sad because they still look like they are in their prime. I have, however, kept a lot of the stems and put them in vases. The pale green leaves are now emerging, contrasting with the bright red stems. Another job I did was to polish the silver – the silver birch. The bark was covered in a green algae, which I removed with a cloth and a bucket of soapy water. You can just about see the result in the photo above.

Sadly the warm temperatures seem to have disappeared for a bit, and it is pouring with rain. At least it gives me a bit of time to sit at the computer to write this post. Til next time, “Happy Gardening”!