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feeding, nesting and hibernation preferences. Tongue lengths determine which flowers the bees can feed on, so grow flowers with long corollas like red clover, honeysuckle and foxgloves to attract long-tongued bumblebees like the commmon carder (Bombus

pretty garden and home-grown veg.Starting indoors, there's a propagator, containing seedlings of basil and garlic chives, which are in dire need of transplanting. I also need to pot on the sunflowers I'm growing as part of the Gardeners' World sunflower

. They are easy, cheap, and fast growing, but they're also short-lived and therefore disposable. I'd rather wait for my perennial plants to grow into the borders and sow a few cosmos seeds in the gaps, than get into the cycle of buying - and replacing - annual

survive if the pond freezes over - especially in ponds with lots of plants growing in them, as plants can still photosynthesise under ice and produce oxygen. But if there aren't sufficient oxygenating plants growing in the pond, if it contains lots of leaf

grow for the sole purpose of attracting the speckled wood, which breeds in long grass.When the news broke that sales of artificial grass are soaring, it struck me that a fake lawn might have been a better option for my small patch (roughly 4m²). I

Last Sunday was International Tulip Guerrilla Gardening Planting Day. To mark the occasion, guerrilla gardeners (so called because they grow plants on public or private land without permission), planted tulips all over Europe in tree pits, neglected

Dog violets, Viola riviniana, appeared almost as soon as I laid the topsoil of my new garden. They’ve been here for three years now, slowly bulking up in corners where nothing else grows.They thrive in the shadiest parts of my garden, flowering just

the offending plants and what to do if you have them growing in your pond (remove and compost them, basically).Great. But what should we plant in our ponds to replace the offenders? My blog on dead frogs highlighted the need for oxygenating plants to maintain

at night and reopen in the morning, providing bumblebee queens with the perfect overnight accommodation prior to finding a nest. It's a shame I can't grow them in my garden, but avoids the temptation of getting up early to see if any bees are snoozing

their cousins the cabbages.Adam suggested imperial fritillaries, which can have quite a foxy odour, especially on sunny days (they too have a smelly relation, the stink bell, Fritillaria agrestis, which grows wild in the heavy soils of California). But his wife