How gardens put the 'diversity' into biodiversity

You find me somewhat gloomy. The builders who were due to do our soffits and fascias today turned up while I was at work yesterday and erected the scaffolding - all over my butterfly border. Plants trashed and trampled all over the place.

So I'm cheering myself up by dipping into the glorious book I've splashed out on - Jennifer Owen's 'Wildlife of a Garden'. It is a brand new title published by the RHS which sets out the results of a 30-year study by Jennifer in her suburban Leicester garden.

Now Jennifer has just a normal garden, a corner plot on a busy road. Ok, so it's about 60m (196 feet) long, which is enough to get me envious. But there's nothing unusual about it - borders, lawn, small pond, some bushes and small trees.

But using her skills as an ecologist and hoverfly expert, and calling on friends who are specialists in all sorts of different creatures, Jennifer trapped and collected and netted and recorded anything and everything she could find in her garden.

Guess how many different species of wildlife she identified in that time? Go on, guess! The answer is at the foot of the blog.

The book lists all the species she has found, and the totals of each year by year, with some commentary on the results. So, for example, throughout the 30 years Jennifer recorded seven species of mammal. She saw 54 species of bird. Between 1972 and 1979, she hand-netted (and made records of) 16,606 butterflies of 17 species.

But it is when you move onto those kind of creepy-crawlies that we might normally not even notice that it begins to get impressive. For example, between 1975-2001, Jennifer caught 6686 solitary bees of 45 species. The commonest was Andrena fulva, the Tawny Mining Bee, with 1338 captured. The next was Colletes daviesanus, a mining bee that you might get coming to Tansy or Anthemis.

It all adds up to the most impressive picture we have of the wildlife of a British garden. Suddenly you realise how accurate the 'diversity' bit is in 'biodiversity'. And all those riches are out there in all of our gardens.

And that all important total number of species? 2673!