Patience a prerequisite in garden filled with wildlife

I’ll admit it — I feel a little smug when a variety of critters decide that my yard offers a friendly enough ecosystem to set up shop in. Tree frogs and toads are friends I love to meet up with, and I know when I see them that they have the food and shelter they need.

But the wildlife-friendly gardening approach is not always easy, and some of the repercussions call for more patience than others.

A couple weeks ago I noticed an infestation of aphids on my ‘Kintzley’s Ghost’ honeysuckle (Lonicera reticulata). It’s a beautiful and vigorous vine with silver-toned foliage that I grow as something of a shrub by pruning and training the vine into a 4-foot tall mass. And like most plants in the garden, it has responded very well to a rainy spring by putting on lots of new growth. All that tender growth is a prime target for aphids.

I have, at times, used a hose to rinse off aphids, which still leaves plenty for valuable aphid predators to have a good meal, but on this occasion I decided to leave the honeysuckle alone to watch how the issue would play out without intervention of any kind.

It wasn’t a great hardship. The honeysuckle is easy to prune if needed, and had it not been front and center in the garden, I probably wouldn’t have even noticed the infestation.

The vine is now covered in ladybugs, merrily noshing on many thousands of aphids. The foliage at the tips looks rough, and there are still a lot of aphids to be consumed. A few birds seem to swing by for a taste on occasion as well.

And I continue to feel good about sacrificing a little bit of beauty to support my garden’s ecosystem. But it does feel like my patience is being taken advantage of.

An effort to clean out a planter in the middle of the garden so I can replant it for summer was stymied by an all-out assault. I noticed a bit of movement coming from the viburnum next to the planter, then a shriek that I kid you not sounded like an alarm, followed by a bird coming straight for my head.

It was a brown thrasher, who it turns out has a nest in the viburnum. A quick study on the stately looking birds with brilliant yellow eyes and very sharp beaks revealed that they are fierce defenders of their nests.

A second attempt to access the planter from a further distance to the nest led to a coordinated attack by both parents, one of which perched on top the planter and stared at me with that yellow eye so there was no misunderstanding about the rules — the planter was not being touched until those babies fledge.

Patience, it appears, is not just a virtue, it’s required in a garden with a healthy wildlife population.

I will not offer the same grace to the deer and rabbits, however. With no pointy beak to deter me, I’ll continue that fight.