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the growing conditions to discourage moss and help the grass fight back. Encourage the grass to grow vigorously by feeding it and avoiding mowing too closely. In autumn and spring, scarify the lawn with a spring-tine rake to remove any moss. On compacted soils

predators in the garden and they attack all manner of real pests including caterpillars, aphids and flies. They feed the chewed remains to their grubs back at the nest. The last five years have been really bad for wasps; either the hibernating queens have

, pinks and yellowy greens.The nondescript green or brown caterpillar feeds on a huge range of native and cultivated plants, but it's usually very secretive and never a pest. It was sitting in its distinctive pose: head down body slightly raised with its

from high up in the branches of a tall tree or send out a barrage of screeches as they fly across the open sky. But I was able to eyeball this one as it sat on a low branch, just a couple of metres away from me. It was too engrossed in feeding to notice

the ground at speed. It is now upright, though it has acquired a worrying wobble. Interestingly, the birds were still feeding from it when it was still flat on the ground. I wonder if they were the usual locals, or were they looters?We also had some

of damage. They tend to feed on exposed areas of the foliage, so it's not too difficult to spot and remove them before they've decimated the plants.Of course, you may not want to remove them from your prized plants. Some gardeners choose to leave them be

; they scavenge in wasp nests and eat all the left-over bits of dead insects brought back by the wasps to feed their own brood.Volucella zonaria is now well established, at least in southern England. The same, or another one, came back later to buzz lazily around

, not brown!It was all my own fault. I had a photography day planned in my garden to take pictures for the What to do now section in Gardeners' World Magazine. Autumn lawn care was on the agenda, so some nice practical shots of applying an autumn lawn feed

one carefully constructed from one cut-out circle of foliage. Inside will have been eggs laid by the leafcutter bee, along with a store of nectar and pollen for the emerging grubs to feed on (we didn't dare look in case we disturbed them).We carefully

So many of my favourite plants come from South Africa, a place that certainly feeds my appetite for bulbs. Moving on from the summer delights of agapanthus, gladioli, eucomis, galtonia, crocosmia and a host of others, I enter autumn with pots