Last week, I was fortunate enough to spend a few nights in Norfolk, enjoying long, head-emptying and soul-filling walks on the beaches and marshes.

The little flint-clad holiday cottage I stayed in had a bijou garden that I was pleased to find still had things to commend it for wildlife. It had well-stocked little flower borders with herbs, and climbers such as honeysuckles growing up the fence, ripe with berries.

I reckon there is a good chance that this autumn you will have had the pleasure of seeing a Red Admiral. Or two. Or twenty.

While many of our butterflies have been struggling in recent years, at least this beauty has had a good year, and recently they have been on the wing in numbers.

They are found either sunning themselves, or feeding on Ivy, ripe blackberries, Buddleia x weyeriana (the yellow one), juicy windfall…

Do kids still sing the 'One man went to mow' song these days? I do hope so. It was a staple song on school coach trips in my youth, and is a wonderful throw-back to days of yore when harvesting the hay would have been something that all the locals turned out to do.

Well, I'm one step closer to being a man who goes to mow, with the sowing this week of a haymeadow...in my garden.

A meadow needs to be as infertile…

This week, I had chance to drop in for a short while to the Royal Horticultural Society's Wisley in Surrey, their flagship garden.

Indulging my fascination for which plants work best for wildlife, I always like to pop down to the trial beds, because there you get to see lots of types of a particular kind of plant and compare them in action.

One of the trials underway at the moment is of 'pot mums' - bushy, flower…