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, was a fat, green caterpillar. I've no idea what the caterpillar was; there are so many green caterpillars, and not all of them are the small cabbage white. I grudgingly decided that butterflies and moths are far fewer in number than foxgloves, and a new

couple of weeks had been moth heaven in East Dulwich. During the day the Jersey tigers had competed with the butterflies in colours and numbers and it was almost impossible to walk in the garden, or up the street, without being batted by one on its mad

imported topsoil, then tried (and failed) to sow a lawn from seed.I watched the evolution of the plot from courtyard to garden as more and more creatures visited it - blue tits and great tits, a robin, blackbird, bumblebees, butterflies, moths, slugs

living specimens. And just by chance I had been finding them that very week, flying about in my garden.It’s a minor claim to fame, I know, but despite the elegant flutterings of the abundant butterflies, the whine of flower-visitors, and the gyrations

and her immature colony. Similar starts and flounderings are happening throughout the insect world, in similar warmth-loving creatures, from bugs to butterflies, with the hatching of vulnerable eggs into vulnerable larvae at exactly this time. A good year

on your fat balls.(If you hear swifts screaming above you in the evening, the RSPB would love to hear about it.)Gardeners aren't traditionally fans of insects, except pretty ones, like butterflies and bees. They're not made welcome in areas of intensively

crops to kill 'pests' dramatically reduces the amount of food available to them.Luckily, there's a lot gardeners can do to help. If you garden for amphibians, birds, bees and butterflies, you will have already created a fantastic bat habitat. You can

– they gather to mate on the heap. Then hoverflies turn up to lay eggs on it. Once, a common blue butterfly spent the night on a particularly smelly mound of semi-rotted compost. What powerful antennae these creatures must have...

flower and patches of bare wall, I think about the ivy growing on the canal down the road. It's just coming into flower now, and is buzzing with the last of this year's hoverflies, bees and butterflies. Ivy would be a great choice for my garden - it

.Only one butterfly graces us today, but what a beast it is; the red admiral is a truly regal creature, with its inky black splashed with red and white insignia. Even its mottled and camouflaged undersides are beautifully marked and always remind me of cut