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My garden - like yours - is looking fantastic at the moment. Plants that were just poking from cold ground a couple of months ago are now enormous and luxuriant. Bees buzz, roses overflow and lawns are lush.Rather than just brag, I thought I

eating and growing until just large enough to transform into the fleeting adult.Although I find them regularly, I've never seen vapourer caterpillars in any great numbers, but according to several of my moth books they can occasionally be so numerous

long trusses dripping with fruits like my 'Gardener's Delight' and other greenhouse varieties, beefsteak tomatoes set just a handful of fruits per truss, and sometimes just two or three. Greedy? No, I don't think I'm being unreasonable in expecting

the right plant for the right place can be a difficult task, and the reality is that often the site we have is far from ideal.Take the left-hand border in my garden. A beautiful silver birch sits close to the boundary fence, but at about 10m or more

was loading cans of paint and three new plants into my boot! Each plant had produced numerous short, branched stems topped by a characteristic cluster of violet/purple flowers. They've made their home in a large terracotta pot, planted simply as a group

: the desolation and heartbreak are soon forgotten.A large copper beech in my mother-in-law's garden fell over in February: this was a tree under which my children had crawled and we had eaten many, many Sunday lunches. It seemed that life would never be the same

Hamilton actually collecting leaves fallen from trees along his road, so keen was he to make the most of Nature's bounty. Well, why leave all this lovely material for the council to collect when you could use it in your garden?Shredded leaves will rot down

remove healthy trees" was their initial answer.The environmental and wildlife grounds for getting rid of it were overwhelming. The tree was not large enough to be of much benefit to nesting birds. Leyland cypress is a foodplant for next-to no