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, solid bright apple green thorax and broad strong tail stripes (green in female, blue in male). This is a bit early for one of the large hawker dragonflies, which normally start to fly from mid-June onwards. I'm guessing it came from a small garden pond

couple of thrushes look curiously at the small gaggle of blue/ great/ long-tailed tits in the apple tree. Four wood pigeons hunch, bored, in the big sycamore tree. I think there’s even a robin perched way off in the distance. I only give it five minutes

are pretty resilient to attacks from snails, so we tolerate them, to a point. When it comes to them defoliating my newly planted courgettes, or shredding the irises, I admit we resort to the little blue pellets.This extermination aside, I think snails can

a decade ago. Until then, I'd always associated them with the pine plantations and heathlands of the Sussex High Weald. We now regularly get them, along with blue- and great tits, charging through the garden in a loose-knit gaggle.The RSPB put

blues, and speckled woods.The hoverflies have appeared in earnest, and bumbles, wasps and solitary bees are everywhere. There is an audible hum, usually only heard in June. They are all squabbling over the raspberry flowers. Pond-skaters are frolicking

.Butterflies are everywhere: giant and strongly coloured graylings of some sort, flap lazily around us and even settle on our clothes; chequered skippers, blues and large heaths dart in the long grass; huge silver-streaked (or washed?) fritillaries mark out their territories

simply putting up a fat ball to attract some passing blue-tits. They will not be nesting in the neat topiary or foraging for insects on the green baize lawns of Anville or any of those other stylized Lego housing developments. They will be living

increasing year on year: great spotted woodpecker up 141 per cent since 1995, blue tit up 7 per cent, great tit 46 per cent, coal tit 17 per cent, long-tailed tit 27 per cent, nuthatch 80 per cent, song thrush 13 per cent, and blackbird 23 per cent. But it

of electric blue, lime green and scarlet it's more likely to give the poor beast migraines.Anyway, there was this toad. We don't see them often, but they are definitely about and they usually turn up, like this one, when I'm doing a bit of autumn tidying