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That warm Saturday (April 26th) brought out the first butterflies of the year: holly blue, small tortoiseshell and speckled wood. They're all common garden species, but I always get a thrill when I see any of them.The female holly blue

the blue of the wooden compost bins. Yes blue. They match the shed and aren't really that bright - they've weathered to a dark rustic tone.And feeding on the fly maggots is a whole series of other insects. There's a veritable ecosystem in there. Several

. Previous clearings of the weed have led to some interesting discoveries.The first signs of dragonfly colonization were revealed in the several large larvae dredged up at once. I had seen the common blue damselfly, Enallagma cyanthigerum, often enough

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

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