Looking into the formal pond in front of the house, I've seen newts. The pond is slightly failing in its role as an ornamental feature, as a carex that formed part of the original planting has seeded into all the other containers and largely overwhelmed the rest of the marginal plants, while the water surface is a mess of duckweed, and the body of the pond choked by the submerged oxygenators that have multiplied wildly. As a wildlife feature it's doing a great job. The actual water is limpid, crystal clear, and full of life. The newts have grown crests for the breeding season, but since they are very small, and when I see them the rest of the time they are crestless and the usual common newt brown and orange, I'm sure they are common ones and not great crested (if I thought there was any danger we had great crested newts in the front garden I would keep very quiet about it). The newts swim about the edges of the pond, tiny toes outstretched. When I disturb them around the garden while weeding at other times of the year they sham dead, to deter me from eating them. The first time one did this I thought I must have somehow killed it, but have since discovered that this is normal newt behaviour. As well as the newts I saw a couple of what looked like small flint cylinders, with tufts of weed growing on them, bumbling about, and I presume these were the larvae of some insect. I need to clear the pond out at some point, but this is definitely not the right time.
I found a toad as well yesterday, while I was weeding in the back garden. I picked it up carefully and put it in the middle of a Podocarpus where it wouldn't get disturbed again. Toads have a very poor sense of self-preservation. If uncovered by somebody weeding then instead of shuffling off as fast as they can crawl to put distance between themselves and the potential danger, they move about a trowel's length and stop as soon as they are hidden from view, so in a few minutes they get dug up again.
I find the presence of amphibians reassuring, apart from the fact that I like toads, as it makes me feel that the garden must be reasonably healthy and unpolluted. We very rarely get frogs, but I have been told that they tend not to co-exist with toads. I don't know why not.
Fired up by the question about climbing plants for a windy garden right by the sea, I re-read one of my few books about coastal gardening, Gardening at the Shore by Frances Tennenbaum, published by Timber Press. They are north American publishers, and she is an American author whose examples are all drawn from north America, so it requires a little intelligent thought to extrapolate her views to gardening in Felixstowe, but many of the points she makes are just as applicable this side of the Atlantic. Neither the text nor illustrations make much mention of climbing plants. As is often the way with this sort of book, there is a final section on suitable plants for the matter in hand, and the section on Vines only names two. One is Carolina jasmine or Gelsemium sempervirens, which sounds very useful, apart from the fact that I can't recall ever seeing for sale here. The other is Parthenocissus quinquefolia, Virginia creeper. I'd never thought of that as specifically good for coastal conditions, but she says it will grow on dry dunes and even the ocean shore. In the body of the text in the earlier chapters she suggests that it is worth experimenting with roses, if they are given a modicum of shelter.
I checked the list of shrubs and climbers for specific purposes in the back of Graham Stuart Thomas's excellent Ornamental shrubs, climbers and bamboos, but the only climber included among shrubs for exposed gardens at the seaside was Muehlenbeckia complexa. Then I tried the RHS on-line plant selector, going for climbers for a coastal position, and leaving all other conditions such as soil type and flower colour entirely open. This came up with a list of 24 names, including quite a lot of different honeysuckles, common jasmine, wisteria, a few rose varieties, plus, rather bizarrely, one Raymond Evison clematis, the variety 'Rosemoor'. I can't believe that 'Rosemoor' is so uniquely gifted among all other clematis varieties as to wind and salt tolerance, but there it is. The RHS doesn't mention muehlenbeckia. Maybe they don't count it as a climber.
After my quest for knowledge I felt that on the whole gardening experts didn't associate climbing plants with coastal gardening any more than I did. I don't think this is just down to habit, prejudice or fashion. Leaving aside other parts of the world with very humid climates where forests grow close to the sea, coastal vegetation around the UK and northern Europe tends to be low-growing, due to the blasting effect of salt laden winds. The reason why plants evolve a climbing habit is to hoist themselves up to the light, whether by mountaineering up other, taller plants, or by scrambling up rock faces. If you come from coastal conditions where there aren't other tall plants to block the light, and the general name of the game is to hunker down low out of the worst of the salt wind, you don't need to climb. That's not to say that some climbers from inland areas won't turn out to be salt-tolerant, but there's no reason to expect that many will be. UK gardens close to the sea that do manage to grow tall plants inevitably make use of extensive shelter-belt plantings, to cut down the effect of wind and salt within the garden, and in the case of the great Cornish gardens are often tucked into valleys that give additional protection. The wonderful garden made by Derek Jarman at Dungeness, which was an immediate response to the shingle and the sea, with no shelter belt, did not use climbing plants.
So I'm afraid the pleasant couple from Felixstowe, with their series of big arches that they want to cover with flowering climbers, have set themselves a difficult challenge. If they had been designing the garden with respect to its surroundings and the wider landscape maybe they shouldn't have had big arches. Or if they want pergolas covered in flowering climbers maybe they shouldn't have chosen to live right by the sea. But I will try to get down to the sea-front gardens at Clacton at some point this summer, and see what's growing on the pergola there, and how it's doing.
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