Things to look out for in the garden - October

This is the month for the conker - fruit of the horse chestnut tree. Introduced to Britain from the Balkans in the late 16th century, it was not until over two centuries later that horse chestnut fruits were used to play 'conkers' - prior to that, the game was played with hazel or cobnuts or snail shells. Conkers are eaten by deer and cattle and in the past were sometimes ground up as meal to fatten sheep. To play, drill a hole through the middle of the conker, thread a string through, knot, and then take turns, with a partner, at aiming blows at each other's conkers. The winner is the one who breaks the other conker.

Blackthorn or sloe - If you only plant one native plant in your garden, let it be this one. It's a superb hedging plant, being both thorny and dense, and easy to keep in shape. In appearance, it has white flowers in spring followed, in late summer, by dark blue berries known as sloes. The sloe provides good shelter for birds, many small species actually nest in the spines because this protects them from predators. Sloe flowers, which appear before the leaves so making a fantastic show against the black stems, produce nectar for humblebees and early-flying small tortoiseshell butterflies and the leaves provide food for the larvae of dozens of moths and butterflies including: black and brown hairstreak butterflies, common emerald moth, feathered thorn, swallowtail, brimstone, blue bordered carpet, pale november, and sharp angled peacock - names to conjure with! In fact, blackthorn or sloe supports around 153 species of wildlife. And in the next few weeks those blue berries will be ready to pick and infuse in gin ...

Red deer are active, and sometimes very noisy, around now, as the six week rutting period peaks in mid-October. Fights between stags are common and can cause serious or fatal injury. The severity of these fights is directly related to the degree of threat, that is, the bigger the stag, the bigger the fight. There are also a number of other activities that are associated with the rut which are:

• Roaring - this can be either as challenge or a demonstration of size or, after fighting, the reinforcement of status - we hear this very often in the winter months around dusk.
• Barking - used to reinforce a warning to young stags after they have been chased away. This is more commonly heard in daytime
• Thrashing and wiping - the scent marking of an area by rubbing antlers and scent glands against the ground and prominent landmarks. This leads to torn up areas of countryside which are very interesting to dogs!
• Wallowing - the stags immerse themselves in muddy pools, many of which contain urine. This is why autumn deer often look as if they've been in a mud-fight.

Garden October conker photograph by StormyDog, used under a creative commons attribution licence.

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