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After last week's excitement about the ladybird party on the BBC allotment, I was delighted to learn that the UK Ladybird Survey had a stand at this year’s Gardeners' World Live.There’s always a few wildlife charities at the show and each year I

and Their Haunts by the Rev. C.A. Johns, was published in 1862 by the Society for Promoting Christian Knowledge, on the back of his success with Flowers of the Field (1851). Both books were in print for over a century, and it's easy to see why.To start, Johns

2007 will be remembered as a very good year for wasps. But before people start complaining about their vicious stings and bad tempers, I must point out that wasps are actually our friends. After birds and spiders, they are the most important insect

Three out of the 16 raised beds up at the allotment are now looking a bit neater, thanks to the surplus pallet timber supplied by our neighbours. The beds were certainly due for an overhaul. The lower parts of the previous planks had turned to dark

The first bumblebee of the year flies past like an animated boot brush. It's a huge queen of the buff-tailed bumblebee, Bombus terrestris, looking as big as a mouse as it drones about the allotment. It comes and goes several times as we're digging

It was blisteringly cold on Sunday, and the water butts were frozen over, but it was not a deep frost. So repairing and replacing the raised beds up at the allotment was relatively easy. The old scaffold planks we put in four or five years ago have

After writing an article on how and why to keep a garden wildlife diary for BBC Gardener's World Magazine, I've been invited to go electronic and turn it into a blog. My handwriting is atrocious so maybe this will be a good way of keeping the diary

woodpeckers in East Dulwich, and I've noticed them more regularly over the last few years. I often see them up at the allotments by Dulwich Woods and sometimes in Peckham Rye Park. Even at a distance there is no mistaking the distinctive undulating flight

.So there I am digging up at the allotment last week and there are worms all over the place, much to the amusement of nearly 3-year-old who examines them all. We find the biggest and the smallest, the fattest and the thinnest, the reddest and the darkest. It

, there are more butterflies up at the allotment. A peacock, Inachis io, greets us at the car park, but dashes off at full tilt after brief introductions.Then, perhaps my favourite of all British butterflies, an orange-tip, Anthocharis cardamines. The orange