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I can see strange things from the patio decking today: five grey herons, a swathe of spotted redshanks, curlews by the dozen, three little egrets (with their yellow rubber-glove feed), four or five cattle egrets, a couple of grebe-like things way

? Decking. I'm not sure what the received wisdom on decking is, but we have a thoroughfare near the end of the garden between the lawn and a secluded patio. Overshadowed by apple tree and creeper-covered pergola, and trodden underfoot by children stampeding

; by the time she had four paws on the patio, the squirrel would be off up the fence and gone. She’d tried many times before, all to no avail.But her swishing tail made me look up at what was so agitating her. At first I could not quite make out what was going

A few weeks ago, I was rather disparaging about some gardens local to me, which are so immaculately laid out, so minimalist, and so trimmed, that they are all but devoid of wildlife. I now intend to take my anti-gardening stance further (this may

I'm on my way through the old city of Strasbourg, and gardens here are vanishingly small. The occasional secret courtyard houses a giant ginkgo or has its walls swathed in lobelia and Virginia creeper. The breakfast patio at the Hotel du Dragon has

themselves are very tough. I was astonished to find the specimen pictured above in an East Dulwich garden. It was lying on the patio waving its legs in the air. At first sight I thought it was something new, a pale-bodied weevil, rather than the usual dark

bare clipped lawn, a fair amount of old concrete paths, and naked chain-link fence. Now we have several rambling thickets of rose, ivy, clematis and vine, a 'secret' sun-lit patio beyond the pergola (I'm still extremely proud of my construction), a pond

, the drain is perfect for it. It receives a tiny dribble of rain run-off from only a very small part of the roof, and gets plenty of organic material from the soil particles and spilled food flushed down when we occasionally hose off the patio. In effect, we

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