Strange things have been happening in my little strip of garden over the last few months. I have two window boxes on the ledges outside my living room window which I fill with various plants, according to the season. I've got accustomed to them regularly being dug at by various nocturnal creatures, but I wasn't prepared for what I found when I went to replant them after the summer. As I turned over the earth, my trowel hit something hard. Thinking it was a stone, I put my fingers in the soil and pulled out an egg. A chicken's egg, just like the ones you buy in boxes in the supermarket.
It perplexed me for some time. I asked friends and colleagues for suggestions as to how it could have got there. Several people suggested that a squirrel had buried it. I know squirrels bury nuts but I doubt that a squirrel is big enough to run around with an egg and hold it under one paw while it digs a hole with the other. Eventually I put it down to a one-off unexplainable mystery.
Time passed and I forgot about the egg incident, until the end of September when the runner beans I had grown in pots in the back garden had finished their season. I dissembled the bamboo cane pyramids and pulled out the long tendrils that had held the beans. I gave a tug and out came the roots - what also came out of the earth was another egg. What was going on?
I did some internet research this time and found out that foxes often bury food too, to be dug up at a later date. That seemed to solve part of the mystery. A fox could feasibly carry an egg in its mouth. Where it would have got not one but two from (and months apart)still remains a puzzle.
One morning a few weeks ago I left the house for work. The glorious leafy shrub that stood resplendent in the middle of the front garden had been stripped bare. Not a leaf was left on it yet there were none laying on the ground. It was as if a plague of night-flying locusts had swarmed down and devoured it down to its bare branches. Why was my garden being picked on?
Yesterday though, things took an even stranger turn. Going into the back garden to check on the progress of my carrots (they're still the size of my little toe) I noticed something poking out of the earth in the - now moved to the back garden to avoid more disruption - window boxes. I bent over and pulled at the object. The attached picture is what I unearthed.
Surely this is not the work of some wild urban mammal? It looks like witchcraft to me. Have the Colliers Wood coven been cavorting in my back yard of a moonlit night? I'll keep you posted.
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