As I announced last week, fate has dropped into my lap one of the biggest challenges of my life – a new garden an acre in size and a bit like a mini Lost Gardens of Heligan. Once much-loved, it is now overgrown and effectively abandoned.

As a friend said to me when she visited this week, “I wouldn’t have a clue where to start.” Well, in my view the first step in a new garden is actually the easiest – stop and find…

For a number of years now, I have been reliably blogging every Friday with barely a hitch.

And then in the last few weeks it has all gone to pot. I'm hoping you'll forgive me, because I think I have got the most amazing wildlife gardening excuse.

This:

Yes, I've bought a new garden. It's big. And it's in a right old state!

My dream garden would be an absolute blank canvas. But this is a close…

When you give nature a home in your garden, you will always see things that you never see anywhere else.

It's not that these things don't happen elsewhere - it's just that in the garden you spend quality time and see all the detail.

And this week I was fortunate enough to see something new for me - dancing Dunnocks.

Now some of you may know the Dunnock by one of its old names - the Hedge Sparrow or Hedge…

I love hearing your stories from your own gardens, and this week Mary Payne got in contact with a heart-warming (and undoubtedly egg-warming) tale.

Mary is in Buckinghamshire, and last year she and her husband, Chris, were terribly upset to find a dead Robin inside their garage.

They felt even worse when they discovered she had built a nest in a plastic storage box inside the garage (it is just the female Robin that…

In my day job with the RSPB, I spend much of my time out in the communities local to the projects I'm involved with.

And this week, I was delighted to visit the home of a parish councillor, who not only is a joy to work with on a major project creating the new RSPB Medmerry nature reserve (the largest realignment of the open coast in Europe, I'll have you know!) but also has a lovely garden in which he does loads…

For a long time, it was accepted 'knowledge' that the best plants for wildlife to grow in gardens were 'native' plants.

It was the Biodiversity in Urban Gardens in Sheffield (BUGS) project, driven by the uncompromising Dr Ken Thompson, that began to challenge that assumption. After all, what plant do we all consider the best for nectaring butterflies? Yes, Buddleia, from Asia (although now there are concerns…

With every passing year, I get ever more of an emotional response to the signals of the seasons. It's that bittersweet acknowledgement - and comfort, it seems - in recognising in nature the rhythms of time. Do you get that feeling too? Tell me it's not just me!

The emergence over the last week (down here on the south coast at least) of spring butterflies really got my hormones sloshing around in that excitement…

How many times in life do you get something for free?  Sometimes it’s something you don’t want, like flu or woodworm.

But here’s something for free that you’ll probably welcome – wildflower seeds.

The opportunity is because of a project called Grow Wild. It is being led by the good people at Kew, but the RSPB is a willing and committed partner.

The idea of the project  is to get…

A little ring of gold sparkled in the border as I walked down the path one morning this week. I looked; it looked back!

My Blackbird has certainly been full of the joys of spring for the last three weeks, singing from well before dawn. And it is a sound that I will happily doze to, it is so rich and soulful.

And by the look of him, he is clearly in fine fettle too. His plumage is immaculate, and the yellow of the…

Amongst all the early bulbs that are beginning to flower in my garden weeks early (and which today got splatted by an immense hailstorm), there is one plant that has been merrily flowering for the last 12 months non-stop.

Here it is, a gorgeous little fuchsia all the way from Mexico where the little candy-pink pendant flowers, barely a centimetre long, are visited by hummingbirds.

Now in its homeland it is thought…

The sun came out today here on the south coast. Only briefly, you understand, but enough to gladden the heart.

I set about some weeding - plants with tap roots such as Alexanders and Cow Parsley were coming up quite well in my chalky soil, although I realise that for anyone on clay the idea of weeding in gloop is out of the question.

As I crawled around on hands and knees, it was lovely to see the unfurling shoots of…

You all will be aware of the big dates on the calendar, I'm sure. And we've had some huge ones lately, as I'm sure you are aware.

Last week, of course, it was the international Winnie the Pooh Day, for which I ceremonially ate some honey. Ten days ago, I know you will all have been active participants in National Dress Up Your Pet Day. I jest not.

But I like to think that they all pale into insignificance…

Once you are into your gardening, have you noticed that every day, even in the midst of winter, seems to throw up something garden-related to think about.

Yesterday it was a seed catalogue that fell onto my mat.

The day before it was a gorgeous red sky at dawn telling me that more rain was due - can my garden cope? (My water butts certainly can't!)

And at the weekend there was a short dry spell in which I was…

Have you noticed that, by the turn of the New Year, there's barely a berry or fruit left on garden bushes and trees for any Fieldfare, Redwing or (we should be so lucky) Waxwing that comes a-calling?

So what garden plants will hang onto their fruits as a post-Christmas feast for the birds?

Well, here are my top tips, plus a photo I took this Christmas to prove just how fruity things can be at this time of year…

"And so this is Christmas, and what have we done?"

Yes, it's that time again, a chance to reflect, to wonder where the year went to, but to remember the good times in the garden.

For me, I've had a great year, so excuse me while I indulge in a little bit of retrospection about some of my wildlife gardening highlights of the year, and I hope it will stir some happy memories for you too.

Getting to…

I've been sorting through my photos this weekend from the year just gone. Digital photography, eh? It's all very well but you do end up taking a trillion photos and then spend days discarding the trash.

This photo caught my eye, taken on a lovely day on 1 June. Yes, its a lilac (Syringa). A beautiful bush, gorgeous scent, and you'll find plenty of texts that say 'Great for wildlife; great for pollinators'.…

We humans do love to put names to things. It means that the world of garden minibeasts can seem quite impenetrable because they can be so difficult to identify.

It is nice, therefore, to find a creature that is relatively easy to tell apart from the others. So here is one I photographed in my garden this July.

To give you a sense of scale, it is about the size of a Honeybee, but is clearly darker and much stouter…

A couple of weekends ago, while on a walk along the coast near my home, it was sad to see all the bushes bare of leaves, reduced to colourless twiggy skeletons.

All, that is, except for this one:

What a beauty! Its leaves were still almost all in place and were set off by a dense crop of bubblegum-pink fruits.

This is a small native tree that hides its light under a bushel for the rest of the year, and only now shines…

One of the biggest joys of gardening for wildlife for me is feeling that I have responsibility for a piece of this world of ours. It may only be a little piece, but it is still part of the living surface of the only living planet we know of in the universe. What a privilege! And what an opportunity to make it as rich as possible for life.

What you can't control, however, is what goes on over the garden fence. And this…

Last weekend I created the best solitary bee and wasp box ever! The best ever for me, that is, which isn't hard given that my carpentry skills leave a lot to be desired. But this one looked almost decent.

I'm afraid I can't show you a photo, because it would spoil the surprise in the next issue of the RSPB's Nature's Home magazine which comes out next February.

But what I can do is show you one of…

No, not the title of a Beatrix Potter book, but the latest little wildlife drama to unfold in my back garden this very morning.

There I was, zipping up my work bag ready to go and catch the bus, when I saw a big gingery form slunk into my tiny back garden. I watched, motionless, as a Fox pottered along the path barely ten feet or so from me.

Oh, how I had had my camera to hand as normal, but no, on this one occasion…

I hope your gardens all withstood The Storm, although I'm sure that, for some of you, some beloved tree or shrub was damaged and maybe some fencing too.

Nothing came down in my garden, although it did strip my Crab Apple of all its fruit where I was hoping to have Redwings and Fieldfares later this winter.

But what The Storm did do of course was send leaves flying about everywhere. And that means one…

On my recent writing retreat to Norfolk, I dropped in at a garden that is in the midst of a five year restoration. It is at a place called Holkham Hall where they have 6.5 acres of walled garden, originally created in the late 1700s.

I visited on a warm late September day and the thing that it really reminded me was how much time and effort is required to restore a garden that had for a long time been a bed of brambles…

Well, phew!, hello everyone. After two years of weekly blogging, I've just been AWOL for three weeks as I encountered something I never have before - life filled beyond the brim.

In my day job with RSPB, the project I've been managing - helping the Environment Agency undertake the largest realignment of the open coast ever undertaken in Britain - has been reaching conclusion. It's nothing to do with gardening, but…