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In two large pots I am growing big white lilies (lets not talk about the dapper scarlet lily beetles and their repulsively slimy offspring at the moment - too depressing) and a luscious deep red dahlia called Arabian Night. Around the feet

ladybird. The rest are the usual suspects: vine weevils (No.3 on the list), lily beetles (No.9) etc.No matter how depressed we may get with cushion scale (No.4=) or the depredations of berberis sawfly (No.7) there is always a silver lining. There are worse

This is prime iris season: a few weeks when these hugely flamboyant flowers come into their own. I grow two different sorts of iris in my garden: the Siberian iris and the bearded iris. Siberian irises are smaller flowered, have thinner leaves

. The first is relatively straightforward: the mullein moth caterpillar. These are stripy chaps that start quite skinny, but rapidly become as fat as witchity grubs by eating verbascum leaves at a terrifying rate. I grow the gorgeous Verbascum bombyciferum