Summer is here at last! June is when you can make the most of your garden and enjoy the long summer evenings. There’s also plenty to do to help wildlife in June when there are lots of baby mouths to feed. Keep the bird baths topped up Water is so important for wildlife and when the sun shines it’s easy to forget that birds and small mammals need to find watering holes. Insects and pollinators, such as bees, also need water but it needs to be shallow so they don’t drown. A shallow...

Woodlark The swifts duly arrived a few days after the house martins and are now entertaining us with their screaming flypasts on the warmer evenings. They were closely followed by the first cuckoo that has taken up residence in the Seven Bridges area, awaiting the arrival of a mate. That area continues to be one of the most bird rich patches in the parish, and on one morning we watched a pair of reed buntings and a pair of grey wagtails plucking flies out of the air in bright sunshine. The...

Red Campion May - or Floreal in the old French Republican calendar - is the floweriest month. What other wildflowers provide such sheets of colour as bluebells in our woods or buttercups in our meadows? The verges are livened by the froth of cow parsley, which some people know better by its folknames, Queen Anne's lace or 'keck'. One of the brightest of our Maytime flowers is red campion. Though 'shocking pink' rather than pure red, the flowers mass together on verges, accompany bluebells in...