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, in Bethnal Green. Cars, buses and lorries roared past, a city squirrel buried its head in an empty packet of crisps, and I stood in a tiny thicket of hawthorn and dog rose thinking “Is that… a goldcrest?”It reminded me of the recent news that Britain’s rarest

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

Two years, I felt the need to grow a local, native plant in my garden. I gathered rosehips from a field rose at the edge of a nearby canal, soaked them in water and sowed the seed in coarse compost.The pots sat in a corner of my patio, doing nothing

whipped up. So I’ve been battling the elements again, trying to re-fix my cloches and pop-up covers to the ground. But the soil is so wet that the usually efficient pegs just don’t work. I’ve also had to tie in a large wild rose, whose flailing stems had

New Year’s Eve. A defining moment, the joys and traumas of Christmas behind us and the blank page of 2013 stretching ahead like a freshly hoovered carpet. The question is whether, for us gardeners, that carpet will be lush shag pile or meagrely

blown away by their scent. I also like Viburnum x bodnantense ‘Dawn’, which produces clusters of tiny rose-pink flowers on bare stems from October to March. However, I’ve seen too many viburnums growing in ‘municipal’ settings to want to grow them in my