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There are so few plants that do well in my small, shady garden, but those that do thrive deserve a medal. This week, honesty is taking centre stage, with its tall spires of brilliant white flowers, towering above more subtle spring blooms.I love

nibbled by caterpillars and I don't have any white foxgloves.The planting schemes in many of the gardens this year were superb. The Bradstone Biodiversity Garden was richly planted with cirsium, alliums, aquilegia and iris, and it seemed to be doing

garden. (They remind me of a grubby area outside White City tube station.)I’d sooner have a garden packed with wintersweet, Chimonanthus praecox, which comes alive in later winter with drop-dead gorgeous flowers and a heavenly fragrance. Another favourite

into their many nectaries. I wondered what colour this parent plant would be, praying it would be white, or at least purple, but definitely not 'apricot'.I finally planted it out in January when the topsoil arrived. Normally I wouldn't recommend jolting a plant

, Epiphyllum anguliger, or rickrack cactus, which produces large yellow-white blooms at night, to attract bats. He describes the scent as a cross between lemon and bleach. He doesn't mind the smell, but his partner makes him put it outside whenever it flowers

pascuorum) and the garden bumblebee (Bombus hortorum), and white clover, lavender and the mountain cornflower (Centaurea montana) for smaller-tongued species like the buff-tailed bumblebee (Bombus terrestris). Providing a wide variety of flowers with long

the cliffs around Lulworth Cove, I saw marbled whites, common blues, fritillaries (I don't know which) and the Lulworth skipper.Butterflies have been enjoyed by enthusiasts for hundreds of years but this world was very new to me. It made me realise that, if I

, scented, white-flowered daffs with dark red, jagged centres. I planted them in a large terracotta pot, next to a few pots of 'Minnow' - a dwarf, creamy-flowered variety with contrasting yellow centres.Both varieties are quite late flowering in April

pots of zinnia one evening. "Did you find any little white grubs in the compost"? I frantically asked. "No". Phew! "But there was one in the strawberries. It was cute and wriggly. And an earwig".

as the harlequin, and is orange with white spots. It has orange legs and its crocodile-like larva is yellow with black spots. It was once considered an indicator of ancient woodland, but is now expanding its range into habitats like London parks, where I found mine