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to Desperate Dan.At this time of year all is perfect with tightly furled funnels of foliage poking their heads through the ground. The problem begins when the leaves unravel to reveal, not flawless quilted duvets of perfection, but something moth eaten

-spring, covered in white flowers which, come the autumn, turn into deep red berries, or haws. They also make spectacular trees that reach about 5m in 10 years - although if left alone they can reach 18m. They're fantastically gnarly and twisted and every wild

. Their root systems become inseparable. Very romantic. I engineered a similar occurrence here by planting three birch saplings together and then plaiting them: now, 12 years later, they have grown into one rather singular tree.If I might wander off in a new

for garden use in the 1970s. Liquid nicotine is extremely dangerous to all living creatures and was used widely as an insecticide for many, many years. It was either mixed with water as a spray or else vaporised in lamps - in which case the gardener lit

. 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

problem: the hazel (unlike many plants) cannot fertilise itself, so needs to find another tree. How to disseminate pollen from one tree to another? Many plants use insects — bees, wasps, moths, butterflies or ants — while others draw on the services