"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…