May: The Midnight Garden
The Midnight Garden
You already know what happens in your garden during the day. You have no idea what happens after dark. May is the best month to find out.
Wait until about an hour after sunset. Go outside. Don't take your phone. Sit somewhere with a clear view of the sky and as much of the garden as you can see. Give your eyes ten minutes to adjust.
Then just watch.
What you are about to discover is that your garden has an entirely separate life that runs from dusk to dawn, and you have been sleeping through all of it. May is when this nocturnal world is at its most active, warm enough for insects, long enough evenings for real observation, and the full cast of British garden wildlife running at peak.
"Most people have never sat in their own garden after dark for more than five minutes. The ones who do tend to come back the next night."
What you're actually looking for
The first thing you'll notice is movement at the edge of things. Along fence lines, under hedges, in the shadow of pots. That's where the hedgehog comes in, if you have one, and the chances are reasonable that you do without knowing it. They emerge about twenty minutes after dark and spend the next few hours systematically working the perimeter of a garden, eating slugs, beetles and earthworms. A single hedgehog covers up to two miles a night.
Look up and you'll find the bats almost immediately. Common pipistrelles are the most likely species. They emerge early, fly fast and erratically, and are almost certainly already using your garden as a hunting ground whether you've noticed or not. The insects that gather around any light source are exactly what they're looking for.
The moths
This is the part most people don't expect. There are around 2,500 species of moth in Britain, compared to around 60 species of butterfly, and a significant number of them are genuinely beautiful. May brings out the early arrivals: the Elephant Hawk-moth, which is pink and olive and looks like something from a tropical rainforest; the Brimstone moth, pale yellow and pristine; the Eyed Hawk-moth, with false eyespots that flash open when disturbed.
If you plant night-scented flowers, honeysuckle, night-scented stock, white nicotiana, you will have moths visiting them within the first week. Watch the flowers rather than the air. The moths hover at them to feed, which makes them much easier to observe than bats.
- Go out an hour after sunset, not immediately after dark. Your eyes need time to adjust.
- Sit still. Movement is what drives wildlife away. Give it at least fifteen minutes before you shift.
- Turn off outdoor lights. Artificial light disrupts nocturnal behaviour and kills the darkness you need.
- A dim red torch is fine. Red light preserves your night vision in a way that white light doesn't.
- In May, a clear night around the new moon is best. The darkness is deeper and nocturnal animals are more active.
- Leave a shallow dish of water out. It will bring in hedgehogs, slow-worms and all manner of insects.
The sounds
Even if you see nothing, which won't happen, but in case, the sounds are worth the trip outside alone. In May, a garden at midnight has a tawny owl somewhere in the middle distance, the fox bark that sounds like something being murdered, the scratching progress of a hedgehog through dry leaves, and underneath all of it, a kind of active silence that is completely different from the quiet inside a house.
Twenty minutes. That's all it takes. Go outside after dark tonight and just sit with it for twenty minutes. You will not be bored.
"The nocturnal world runs on a completely different schedule to ours. It has been running quietly in your garden every night for years. It doesn't need you to be there. But it's worth showing up anyway."