A prolonged bout of tonsillitis this Christmas was something of a godsend – the antibiotics kept me off the alcohol and the knives-in-the-throat feeling meant that over-consumption on the food front wasn’t possible, so I arrive in the New Year thin(nish) and fit(tish) and ready to get gardening and blogging once again.

At the moment there is a scene of devastation as the tree surgeons continue their battle…

Sometimes in gardening you have to make tough decisions. For me in my new garden, the difficult choices are in having to lose some of the overcrowded trees, and right now I've got an excellent team of tree surgeons in, making dramatic changes.

Losing the 60-foot high leylandii trees was perhaps the easiest of the decisions, given that some toppled in last year's gales narrowly missing the neighbour's property. The…

Hi everyone, here I am after two weeks' absence as I went through the dubious pleasure of moving house. NOW I can really get going on the big garden restoration programme ahead of me.

But, for today, as I sit among a mountain of unopened boxes, I thought I'd just share a couple of photos of leaves from the last few weeks.

The reason for such a seemingly mundane subject is that one of the things that has been…

I thought I’d do a quick ‘photo audit’ of what is in flower and fruit in my new garden at the moment and the answer is…not a lot!

Of course, that makes me very happy because I know I can make a huge difference in the years to come.

On the flower front, White Dead-nettles are having a late flush of flower.

Notice the leaf-mine in the big lower leaf, looking like a wiggly pale trail. I suspect…

One of the staple ways of giving nature a home in small gardens is to grow climbers. Given the lack of space, it is a brilliant way of using vertical bare surfaces and filling them with foliage and flowers, with all the benefits that that brings.

But one question I'm often asked is what alternatives are there to Ivy - it might be a brilliant plant for wildlife but those aerial roots can be a right menace to your brickwork…

Last week I bemoaned the lack of fungi in my new garden.

So what then happens? Barely a couple of days later, I was probing deep under the canopy of a Holm Oak and found about five mushroom-type toadstools, big ones, the size of a saucer. Excellent - my garden isn't quite the fungal desert I thought it was.

I must photograph those, I thought, so I came back the next day with my camera and they were gone! You ought…

My RSPB day job took me yesterday out onto one of our newest reserves, the glorious lowland heathland at Hazeley Heath in Hampshire.

In summer is alive with Silver-studded Blue butterflies and, by night, the sound of Nightjars. Yesterday, it was a little quieter, although Common Darter dragonflies were still plentiful in the balmy conditions over the heathland pools and wet flushes.

You'll be impressed, however, that…

If there is one bird for me that is synonymous with October, it is the one the French call the ‘Geai of the oaks’, the Dutch the ‘Gaai’, and the Germans the ‘Eichelhaher’ – the Oak Jay.

The names Geai, Gaai and our name, Jay, are all onomatopoeic, derived from the same source – the harsh, rasping call.

At this time of year, every journey you go on you seem to see them…

Regular readers, please excuse my bad case of AWOL-ishness as I disappeared for two weeks. Yes, I went away sunning myself, and here I am freshly tanned thanks to the sun, wind and rain of what for me counts as the tropics - the Isles of Scilly.

Have you been? The place is simply glorious. Here for example are the Eastern Isles last week - I might as well have been in the Caribbean!

The islands are famed for their…

Yes, in my mission to give you yet more words you can use in Scrabble, I give you ‘'oding'’. You might already have done it without realising it, for it means to go looking for dragonflies. Honest!

Ok, so it is a term that hasn'’t quite caught on in the UK yet, but it will if I have anything to do with it, and I certainly have been enjoying oding around my new garden. Apparently, that makes me an 'oder'.…

One of the beauties of giving nature a home in your garden is that there are things you can do that are very simple but, if you like a challenge, you can try some pretty tricky things too.

My blog this week is a tribute to a couple of friends who, I’m delighted to say, have given one of the most difficult things in wildlife gardening a try and delivered superb results. It is like the wildlife gardening equivalent of…

Today's story of a little bit of the world becoming a better home for nature comes from one of my colleagues, Jenny Sweet, who is the RSPB's Volunteer Officer in South East England.

She and husband Mark moved into their new house in February, which meant a shift for Jenny from her upper-storey flat with 'wildlife-balcony' to a much larger garden, about 40 foot long, down on terra firma.

"In one way it…

Given that I am down with a darned cold and sore throat this week, I am hugely indebted to Mary Payne who, with immaculate timing, sent me an update about the goings-on in her garden. You will hopefully recall Mary's story earlier in the summer about her Robin with no tail, Mrs No-Tail, and her ravenous Blackbird, Count Skoffalot. Well, the saga continues - enjoy (as I know so many of you did previously)! And there…

This week I had the huge pleasure of visiting the RSPB's only dedicated wildlife garden at Flatford.

For those of you who don't know the area, this is 'Constable country' in the Dedham Vale in Suffolk, with the site of The Haywain just a few steps away.

The garden is only about a third of an acre in size, but packs in so much for wildlife on a site that barely four years ago was a mass of Japanese Knotweed…

In wildlife gardening, it is so easy to only think about all the wildlife that lives above ground. But imagine all the life that lives beneath the soil. We may come across some of it when we are digging, but what is it? How is it faring? And how can you help it?

Well, this weekend I'm going to try something I have never done - being a fearless hunter, I'm going to go seeking worms. And I'm going to invite you to do the…

I'm delighted to hand the reins of this week's blog to Mark Nowers from the RSPB's dedicated wildlife garden at Flatford Mill, for an update of how their season is going and news of an event you might like to try:

Okay, tail-end of Hurricane Bertha aside, the weather has been very kind to us this year. So much so that, at the Flatford Wildlife Garden, nature's calendar has been a good two weeks ahead. A marked…

Now, in high summer, we're at the height of the butterfly season - hoorah for that! There is a whole host of species you can see in gardens if you're lucky...and if you've been doing the right things to give them a home.

There are blue ones and white ones, golden ones and brown ones. But black ones?

Well, this was the sight that greeted me when I popped into the RSPB HQ at The Lodge in Bedfordshire last…

Regular readers will remember a guest blog earlier this year when Mary Payne told us how a Robin recycled the old nest that Mary had saved in the garage. I'm pleased to say that Mary has sent through an update:

I've been busy feeding our Robins and their offspring since mid-May. My duties have involved purchasing them copious amounts of live mealworms, as well as ousting various pesky neighbours' moggies from…

I have a list of species that I want to try and give a home to in my new garden. High up on that list are meadow butterflies, species such as Meadow Browns, Gatekeepers and Common Blues, but it also includes a number of our smallest butterflies, the skippers.

And this week, as I walked the new paths I've mown through the few open areas of the garden, I was delighted to see a flash of amber dart by me at knee level, a…

Once in a while you meet someone who takes your understanding of a subject forward in leaps and bounds. Last week, it was the turn of bats.

The revelation came from a conversation I had with Matt Dodds, a leading light in the bat world in the Midlands. And he was able to share with me some emerging results from in-depth studies of the roost and nest sites of bats.

The advice that is normally meted out is to have a range…

One of the ideas I'm very keen on is anything that takes wildlife gardening out of the back garden and brings it into our front gardens and public spaces.

So I was delighted this week to find that the volunteers who look after a tiny park just up the road from the RSPB offices in Brighton have transformed it this year with some cornfield wildflower planting.

There are Poppies and Corn Chamomile and Corn Marigold…

Out there in the natural world, there are some creatures we struggle to love (the list might include Rats, House Flies and leeches, for example) and those that command instant amazement.

And slap bang in the latter category, I would claim, is this fella.

There he was, broad daylight, in my new front garden, a Stag Beetle showing off his mightily impressive mandibles. You ought to have heard my whoops of delight! …

Once in a while I come across a plant that stuns me with its power to attract pollinating insects, and yesterday I found just such a marvel.

It was this one (below), which has burst into flower in the last week in my new garden - and very happy about it I am too!

It's a Deutzia, named after a 17th century Dutchman, a group of plants mostly from China and South East Asia. My assumption is that it is Deutzia 'Strawberry…