Search - Articles

There's not much happening in my garden this week. I think we're scaring everything away. And I can't just blame the cats stalking their quarry; Saturday's bouncy castle and baker's dozen of squawking three- and four-year-olds hasn't added much

anything from 6-12 weeks for the spawn to develop into a tadpole and then into a frog. Interestingly, when we returned to check that the spawn had settled in, other frogs had laid their eggs near by. This is a very good sign as it means that the transposed

these wonderful creatures in my back garden. South London is now about the only place in the UK where you can regularly see these awesome monsters. My supposition is that when the housing boom spread across the area 100 to 150 years ago, it was one of the most

The only wildlife I've seen this week has been the rather dead-life brought in by the cats - three and a half mice and a rat not much smaller than our guinea pig. I'm more or less calm that we have mice in the compost bins, but I'm uneasy about

on the grass seed and that I can continue to persuade our cat that the area is not a huge purpose-built litter tray.

. This is in preparation for a new series that I am writing for the magazine which is planned to be published next spring. So that everything did not blow away we set up in one of our multi-spans. Of course one of my cats, in this case Basil, had to get in on the action

sink is the flowering currant with its limply hanging pink flowers. Not only is it extremely boring but the slightest contact with the leaves releases an unmistakable smell of cat pee. (I could just about accept Ribes sanguineum King Edward VII if I

Scott's tree planting habits).- The Merry Hall Trilogy. I adore these books: beautifully written, light and fluffy sagas about a new garden taken on in the 1950s by novelist Beverley Nichols. He writes very amusingly about people, places, plants and cats

to chalk up 15 of my 124 target actions. These are mostly by the simple expedient of not cutting the grass, not winter deadheading, clearing out the pond when I repaired it and by having more than my fair share of thickets.The thickets are obviously paying

the garden, but our resident south London foxes liked to play with them and many have been damaged or gone missing. Those that remain are nailed to the shed and the flagpole. The sheep jawbone eventually also fell apart because of their meddling, but the cat