September in the wildlife friendly garden

With the summer holidays nearly over and the kids on the cusp of their return to school, you might be forgiven into thinking that summer is done. Not so in the wildlife-friendly garden.

I thought I'd raid my collection of photos-past to reveal how glorious September can be.

Blocks of pollinator-perfect, late-summer flowers - such as these Monarda and Helenium - present a thousand landing pads for bees of many species to come to nectar.

Perennial grasses begin to put on their own shooting show, with species such as Pennisetums having almost as much colour as the flowers. While they may not offer the nectar that flowers do, we now know that many beetles love to squirrel themselves away down at the base of the grasses where the mass of stems provide excellent protection.

Perhaps the stars of September are what we used to call Asters but now include ther Symphotrichums. Heck, let's just call then Michaelmas daisies!

And where there are Michaelmas daisies (or at least the single varieties), there is a good chance of autumn butterflies such as Red Admirals, even after what has been a dreadful butterfly year.

If you haven't yet seen, our quick 'n' easy Giving Nature a Home activity for September is to offer your butterflies a little bit of banana mush as a treat. It is a technique that is widely used in the tropics but - until now - it has never really been promoted in Britain.

Follow the link or see last week's blog to see just how easy it is, and please do log in and let us know if you've tried it. Today when I looked, 313 people had given it a go.

And if I tell you that all the photos above are from the second half of September, you can see how much summer there is still there is still to enjoy. So keep those shorts and t-shirts on, and revel in nature's fireworks display.