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. A colleague found it a couple of years later on the same garden shrub in Essex, but as far as I know this is the sum total of its known occurrences here. Curiously this was almost exactly the same time that the now widespread berberis sawfly arrived

to and fro from their home in a thicket of shrubs to the feeder, some waiting their turn as others fed. They were hard to count, but the most at any one time was eight; there were probably more. The tits came and went, blackbirds scurried around on the ground

A few weeks ago I wrote about trees for small gardens. Among the comments (well, to be honest, 33% of the comments) was a request from Daphne for very, very small trees - "very small being up to three metres".Tricky. Three metres is barely a shrub

... round shrubs, roses and flowers, along the base of the hedge, around fruit trees and bushes, and over the veg plot. Beans get a good, deep mulch of compost to help conserve soil moisture, too, but it's not just water retention that mulching is good for

leaved shrub for a sheltered corner. I first saw this at the marvellous Stone House Cottage Gardens. The flowers are exquisite, like an underwater pincushion (and if my new garden is somewhere warm I will get fruit as well).Persicaria polymorpha

-nesting bees and wasps (I'll drill ready-made nest holes for them). I'm slightly surprised that there is no action "prevent ponds from becoming overshadowed by nearby trees and shrubs" on the website. I've always taken this as one of the cardinal rules of pond