High summer, those languid, lazy days of sunshine and leisure…if you are human. But for the rest of the world, a time of frantic activity, flowering, seeding, feeding and breeding. Many of the flowers are fading, evidence their job is done, though some like Echinacea and Asters reserve their finest show for the later months, just as the throngs of insects need it the most.

And what a range of insects and other invertebrates, from butterflies and bugs to micromoths and flies, with as always spiders taking their share:

But  wear and tear on leaves is also a positive sign, indicative of the feeding activity of those mobile garden adornments which will bring movement, excitement and joy to next year’s borders.

Down by the water’s edge, summer was only just bursting, with swathes of colour, and flashes of magic from dragonflies and damselflies.

But all was not as serene as it seemed. Large clumps of flowering Thalia dealbata in the ponds were clearly a magnet for insects of all sorts, hunting nectar and pollen…

…but on closer examination, each flowerhead was riddled with corpses – hoverflies, lacewings, bees, wasps and blow flies – a mortuary for those valuable garden assistants, pollinators and predators alike, all stuck headfirst into the mouths of their nemesis.

The scale of the carnage, was quite simply shocking. Some, still alive, like this Honeybee we managed to release, but most were dead. Lost to the world.

Reference to the internet shows this is a recognised phenomenon. The plant has no reason to kill its visitors – it doesn’t digest them like a truly carnivorous species: it seems that the flowers have an elastic style, used in explosive pollination which can and does trap insects In its native central American range it is normally pollinated by large and powerful Carpenter Bees, capable of extricating themselves from the flower’s fatal embrace. Anything smaller, mere collateral damage, cannon fodder in the battle for life.

But at times of an Extinction Crisis, that is one pressure our array of pollinators, necessary not just for the plants but for our species’ continued existence, can do without, dozens of pollinator lives extinguished unnecessarily for each flowerhead. The Beth Chatto online sales catalogue does at least draw attention to this antisocial behaviour of Thalia, but none of the other websites I have visited, nor the RHS make any reference to it. Time for a campaign, maybe a ban, but at least removal of the flowering spikes before they open. It’s not as if they are especially attractive, the main value of the plant being its architectural emergent foliage.

On a happier note to end with, one of the great advantages of being naturalists is that people bring us specimens. And so it was today when a proffered pot revealed its treasure, a Tanner Beetle Prionus coriarius that the Education Team had just found, something that neither of us had seen before.  A large, blackish longhorn, it is considered to be rather rare in Britain, found at scattered localities in the south of the country, and is usually associated with ancient woodland or extensive natural landscapes like the New Forest. Its larvae, like those of Stag Beetles, develop over several years inside rotting wood, and the National Biodiversity Network map shows one previous record close to Elmstead Market, but very few others in and to the east of Colchester.

It’s a garden, so yes there were flowers. Spectacular blooms, interesting forms, a multicultural mix of plants from over much of the world.

But it wasn’t the flowers themselves which grabbed our attention this time. It was the insects, burgeoning biodiversity benefitting from the floral resources, and repaying the debt with pollination and pest control, sprinkling the garden with stardust for anyone with an eye to see and appreciate them. No names here; indeed, we don’t even know some of them. But names are not the point: what is important is that they are here, delighting us, inspiring us, and doing their jobs.

This unpaid army of garden workers, not just bumblebees and honeybees, but solitary bees and wasps, sawflies, beetles, lacewings and a whole lot more are all too easily overlooked and ignored. And abused.

So it is good to hear that there are changes underway in the garden management phlosophy and practice at Beth Chatto’s. A trend away from over-tidiness and manicuring. No more slug pellets. Progressive reduction in the use of sprays, those poisons which now drench our world and threaten its life-blood. Step by step, every step of the way is one more step on the road to a sustainable future. All it needs is a more relaxed mindset: there may be some holes in the Hostas, shredding of the Solomon’s–seal,  but think of those as natural art installations, a badge of honour instead of a sign of ungardenerliness….

Would Beth have approved? Maybe, maybe not. She did of course come from a very different gardening era, when perhaps it seemed that it didn’t much matter what was done in the garden because there was abundant wildlife out there in the countryside. But no longer: as the wild world outside has become more and more depauperate, so have gardens assumed an increasing role as a haven for the little things that make the world go round. So thank you Beth Chatto Garden for moving with the times, and stepping up into your role as inspiration for gardens of the future.

Midsummer’s Day, and the garden is in full flow. At last the season has caught up with the calendar after a couple of relatively cool months, and spring is but a distant memory.

Now is the time for sweeping vistas of colour, but also more detailed plantscapes, celebrating the skill with which the garden display has been orchestrated.

And not forgetting the innerscapes of the plants themselves, the often surprising details of which are revealed by close up images.

The summer garden show-offs, Alstroemerias and Lilies for example, try to steal the show, but for at least for their evident value to nectar- and pollen-feeding insects, it is hard to beat (and even harder to walk quickly past) the Astrantias and Thalictrum.

So many insects, which way to turn? But speed was of the essence, as life was rushing by in the heat.

And where there are insects there are things that feed on them, valuable additions to the gardeners’ army of helpers in the control of what some may call pests.

As the water warms, so the lakes come into their own, with five species of dragonfly and damselfly seen in just an hour and a half.

And for the first time this year, butterflies in some abundance, with a total of ten species.

Lest we start to get maudlin, with the nights starting to draw in, at least the garden left me with a strong sense of the invertebrate riches to come, in the diverse forms of the nymphs of all sorts of late summer attractions. Nature has its way of healing both body and mind!

Late May, and the gardens are burgeoning – flowers are flowering in abundance, insects and other visitors are active everywhere. And this year, the green bits are still green, such a contrast to last year when we were already in the grip of a severe drought. In fact this year overall the rainfall totals have been low, but there have been just enough downpours to keep the garden going. And with temperatures through May being on the low side, the flower colours set against the canvas of greens is simply vibrant. Feast your eyes on these, from plant panoramas ….

…to the finer details, the inner plantscapes:

It’s always a pleasure to see in the Beth Chatto gardens that the ‘gardeners’ curse’ of overtidiness doesn’t feature too much. While some may find long grass and dead flower heads unsightly, others – especially the insects and birds to which the garden is a home – don’t. Nature’s bounteous growth harbours food and provides shelter, all part of the natural ecology of the garden:

All of the insects and other invertebrates we found were exciting, but two bits of behaviour we had never seen before were thrilling to observe.  A pair of Malachius bipustulatus (Two-spotted Malachite Beetles) indulging in courtship behaviour, ‘kissing’ to transmit pair bonding pheromones….

… and it was especially good to see the first emergence of Scorpion-flies of the summer. The males have the eponymous ‘scorpion tail’ although it contains no sting, just a genital capsule, but both sexes have a protruding snout with jaws located at its tip. Widely supposed to be an adaptation to extracting insects from spiders’ webs without alerting the owner, this is certainly not the whole story. For the first time ever, we found one feeding, its beak deep in the body of its hapless prey – a spider!

Three weeks since our last visit. Three weeks which would normally see one of the greatest transformations in a garden, from winter to high spring: not this year though, when unseasonably warm spells in both mid-February and early March lit the flames of spring very early, and the cool northerlies of early April then held its advance at bay.

But the daffodils were largely over, their place being taken by fritillaries and Erythroniums…

…  Epimediums, Archangel and Uvularia.

Time for interesting angles and close-ups…

… and celebration of the spring greens, punctuated and highlighted by splashes of  colour.

From beds and borders, unfurling ferns rearing up like cobras…

… and Alchemilla leaves bedecked with dewdrop pearls, some magnifying the russet tooth tips, others reflecting the sky, before coalescing into the mercurial pools which give rise to the name of the ‘little alchemist’:

As always keeping our eyes open for the animal inhabitants, the more sheltered areas produced an array of basking bugs – Squash Bug and Green, Hairy and Gorse Shieldbugs:

… and beetles, including an almost spotless Harlequin Ladybird, and Rosemary Beetles, here transferring their allegiance to sages:

As befits the season, love was in the air for pairs of Green Shieldbugs and the large, wing-marked crane-fly Tipula vittata:

A few butterflies were on the wing, including our first Green-veined White of the year:

And of course, with insects showing, their predators were out and about, with Zebra Spiders well camouflaged on lichen-covered walls, and a Heliophanus jumping-spider waiting with hi-viz palps raised, ready to leap upon a suitable morsel.

Anyone who loves photographing flowers will know the feeling: when a burgeoning Spring releases a cornucopia of blooms in every colour that the past winter of relative inactivity is brought greedily to an end with an irrepressible flurry of snapping…

The urgency of this need, for me at least, is so strong that it goes well beyond the ‘normal’ approach to flower photography. Of course, the standard portraits are not ignored….

… but the visceral impact of the massed ranks simply cannot be ignored…

Equally, to revert from the big picture to the minutiae of Nature reveals the ‘Art in the Detail’, all too easily overlooked and unheralded….

… while interesting lighting and a focus on parts other than the flowers can bring other artistic rewards:

Given the cold northerly wind on the day of our visit, insect life was not as abundant, or obvious, as we had hoped. But in the woodland garden, the tree trunks served as something of the wind-screen and the absence of expanded leaves allowed sunlight through, enough to encourage the basking and feeding of some bugs and beasties:

And we were very pleased to see our first Dark-edged Bee-fly and Box Bug of the year:

Last of all, a question: coincidence or design? Is this Cicadellid really actively seeking to pretend it is a leaf serration?

February can be the cruellest of months. Spring is on its way, but so often just out of reach, held at bay by gloom and cold. Not so this year: mild daytime temperatures, often cloudless skies, gentle southerly airflows, and barely a trace (yet…) of ‘normal’ winter.

Our monthly venture to Beth Chatto’s was on one of those wonderful days of ‘Spring before its time’. After a winter’s dormancy, Nature displayed flagrantly to our hungry eyes – never mind the flowers, everything looked fresh and enticing, whether set against an azure sky….

…. or covered in mercurial dewdrops….

….or bathed in dramatic shadows cast by the low sun, throwing the saw-toothed leaves of Melianthus into sharp relief….

…or igniting the shreds of Paperbark Maple, as flames licking their way up the trunk.

Of course the flowers delighted as well, carpets of Snowdrops, Crocuses and Aconites sweeping colour through the garden:

The spring flowers en masse sometimes overwhelm the senses, both sight and smell, but such has been the dearth of flowery photo opportunities since last year, each flower beckoned, almost straining to show off its wonderful inner landscapes:

Even the less showy flowers have much to reveal in close up – witness the yellow pompoms of Cornelian Cherry and the translucent jade bells of Spurge-laurel – and of course getting up close and personal for a photo also highlights their fugitive scent, often lost among the brash wafts from the likes of  Christmas Box.

All the spring flowers have one function, to attract passing pollinators – sometimes in short supply – to their nectar and pollen resources. Look closely at a Winter Aconite and the bounty becomes clear: yellow petal-like sepals surmounted by a ruff of green leaves, embracing the pollen-bearing anthers and crucially the cup-shaped petals, in this species modified into nectar-pits:

And today the investment in flower resources was paying off. Despite cool overnight temperatures, all sorts of insects were on the wing and raiding – hopefully also pollinating – the flowers: Queen bumblebees, Honeybees, solitary bees, hoverflies and other flies,  amongst others….

One hoverfly gave us the runaround in identification terms, looking like nothing we have seen before. Nor like anything in the books.  So it was the internet which came to our rescue, showing it to be the unusual dark form of the familiar Marmalade Hoverfly:

But best of all, if only for the gruesomely-minded, was spotted by Jude. Her insect-eyes,  under-employed over the winter, latched onto the form of a fly at the very top of a spindly sapling, about 2 metres from the ground. In close up, the horror revealed itself: the fly had been devoured by an entomopathogenic fungus, now erupting from its abdomen and liberally producing a halo of spores, each potentially a death sentence to a passing fly. But before the end, the fungus takes over the mind of its host, changing its behaviour so that it crawls to the highest point available, all the better to be able to disperse the deadly spores into the wind…..

The burnished fires of Autumn were rampant under crystalline skies as we strolled round Beth Chatto’s today:

Foliage and fruit – a colourful feast for the eyes as well as the hordes of berry-eating thrushes:

Usually a feature of the autumn, in common with most of the droughted south-east it seems, fungi were few and far-between:

And the remaining flowers: some expected, others more surprising hangers-on from the summer, but all valuable sources of nectar or pollen for late-season insects:

But amazing to see the number of insects on the wing, a nod to the wonderful summer past and a promise that the days will again be getting longer in just six weeks’ time. Hornets, Red Admirals and Common Darters are perhaps to be expected, at least until the first hard frosts, but Caddis Flies and Willow Emerald Damselflies? Strange times are afoot as the seasons disintegrate…: