Search - Articles

from late summer to autumn, attracting bumblebees, honeybees, butterflies, moths and hoverflies.HebeA trusty, late-flowering favourite. The plant's pink flowers make the perfect landing pad for pollinators such as butterflies, moths, bumblebees

again, I’ve been dreaming about a big, leafy, watery garden. But why three ponds? Well, they would be of different sizes and depths, and therefore attract a wide range of wildlife. I would dig a large, deep pond, a medium-sized pond and a small, shallow

Last week, Butterfly Conservation published a report called The State of Britain's Larger Moths 2013. It makes a depressing read, demonstrating a marked decline in the number of our larger moths over the last 40 years. The survey, conducted

year, they’re as regular as clockwork.The birds usually arrive in the first week of May, and carry out a recce of the garden to make sure it can still meet their needs (i.e. that it has a good supply of caterpillars and sunflower hearts). Then I see one

To Soicherons, Villars-Dompierre, in the Cote d'Or region of France for two weeks and the wildlife here is subtly different to that in East Dulwich. For one thing we are surrounded by large flowery meadows, hedges dripping with Mirabelle plums

for this simple fact, and I was very quick to put them straight on it. [Technically, bumblebees do make an extremely small store (a few millilitres) of thin nectar regurgitation, but this is nothing like the huge stocks of thick, sterile, sweet gloop stored

when the wooden beams are more hole and beetle droppings than supporting timber, and the sponge-like shell finally gives way. At 5-7mm long, death-watch dwarf other woodworms and make considerable galleries in the wood. But in the meantime examine

today, nearly 150 years later."I have known one make its way habitually through a zinc pipe into a green-house, and do much service there by picking aphides from the slender stalks of herbaceous plants, which bent into the form of an arch under even its

, froghoppers, moths, butterflies and bees. (The frogs I rescued and brought in.) I’m determined to make sure my garden provides the perfect home for wildlife over winter, and if I have to compromise a little on aesthetics, so be it. I've already made

towpaths. Guerrilla gardeners range from those who do not have gardens of their own, who want to improve the look of the local area, to those who want to make a political statement, such as the planting up of a protest camp in Parliament Square. Technically