CABINET OF CURIOSITIES

 I first noticed this beautiful golden hoverfly Myatropa florea by the sound it made - a load buzz - when it was hovering close to my head ...

Yarrow Achillea millefolium is a later summer wild flower that provides easily-accessed pollen and nectar for visiting insects, right up u...

Wildlife gardening evangelists frequently exhort us to plant native species in our gardens - quite rightly, as there are indeed many native...

Some insects in our garden undergrowth (it's a jungle out there!) An anxious cabbage white butterfly, checking that the coast is ...

The tops of the broad beans in our garden are infested with aphids that are breeding at a phenomenal ra...

This is the commonest hoverfly in our garden at the moment - Rhingia campestris . Here it's on sweet rocket Hesperis matrionalis . W...

Owls are famously capable of swivelling their heads so that they can look directly behind them, but hoverflies have even more flexible necks...

Hoverflies, without stings, are well known for mimicking the colours and patterns of stinging wasps so the standard issue markings...

It was what my granny used to call "a clearing-up" shower.  The ferocity of the rain hammering on the car roof drowned out our...

Buttercups are amongst the commonest of all wild flowers and tend to be taken for granted because of that, but they represent a vital, r...