There comes a time every spring when one suddenly realises that whatever the vagaries of the British weather, spring is here to stay. The tipping point is sometimes as early as the start of March, but in other years it can be a good month later. In 2026 it seems to have come right in the middle of those extremes.

While the first two weeks of March saw a few glimmers of warmth, the overall impression was of cool days, sometimes breezy, damp (if not as downright wet as the preceding winter) and the occasional snatch of welcome sun. When Jude and I visited in the first week, it was misty and grey all day, rather chilly, and mist turning to fog in the afternoon. So we weren’t really expecting to see much in the way of insect life, and most of what we did find – masses of Seven-spot Ladybirds – were well hunkered-down or wrapped in a fur coat like this Common Earwig…

Of course Jude with her incredibly acute close vision also found some noteworthy stuff, including two colour-forms of Ten-spot Ladybird. Although this is one of the commoner British species, remarkably it seems to be the first time it has been found in the garden, at least according to our as yet incomplete biolisting. The two-spotted form was sharing a cosy niche with an Acorn Weevil and a spider.

Also new for the records, certainly overlooked in the past, was the moss Bryum capillare, its spore capsules standing bright and proud in the gloom.

And the same comments apply to the first record from the garden of a Yew gall caused by the fly Taxomyia taxi. This may be present wherever there is Yew, in gardens, parks and the wild, but it seems always to be under-recorded: the Essex Field Club map has only two spots on it.

Almost apologetically in the mirk the really special spring flowers like species daffodils and tulips were starting to appear. And Chiffchaffs were singing, probably newly in from their Mediterranean wintering sites, carried here a little prematurely by the Sahara-dust-laden winds at the end of February.

But two weeks later it was a very different picture. A couple of warm sunny days saw spring unleashed into the lives and hearts of a myriad of happy, smiling visitors. The Chiffchaffs, now perhaps half-a-dozen, expressed the joy of the season very effectively. As did two singing Stock Doves, the first time I have noticed territorial behaviour in the garden, and (now I come to think of it) possibly the first Stock Doves I have ever recorded there. Adding to the chorus were Chaffinches, at least three male Goldcrests and a Green Woodpecker in song, along with the mewling calls of displaying Buzzards overhead.

Four species of butterfly were on the wing: Comma, Peacock, Red Admiral and a rapid fly-past couple of male Brimstones. All species that overwinter as adults, it won’t be long before the spring-emergers like Orange Tips are with us!

Bees too, with bumbles (Buff-tailed and Red-tailed queens, the latter for me the first of the year) and lots of Honeybees especially on Skimmia ‘Kew Green’ and Scilla  bifolia.

The Scilla was also the focus for many solitary bees, including Andrena dorsata and A. minutula agg.

Ladybirds were everywhere, as seems to be the norm this year, AND now getting active, strutting their stuff as predators, pollinators and partners; most were Seven-spots with just a few Harlequins.

Several Dark-edged Beeflies were feeding or resting around the flowery borders: the first beeflies of spring are always a thrill!

And shieldbugs were also out in force, mostly Green Shieldbugs greening up nicely out of their brown winter plumage, together with a few Hairy Shieldbugs.

As with the previous visit, there were also new records for the Gardens. A couple of very common species whose names have seemingly evaded being written down anywhere in the past were the Common Pond-skater Gerris lacustris and the ink-cap fungus Coprinellus micaceus, equally common although of course only fleetingly visible when its fruiting bodies emerge.

On Anemone blanda there was the distinctive stripy Orange-legged Furrow-bee Halictus rubicundus, new to the garden and indeed with only a few records, mostly coastal, in the Tendring district.

And an exciting new bug for the garden was the ground- bug Graptopeltus lynceus. This is traditionally associated with Echium species but seems increasingly to be moving to other Boraginaceae, of which we have lots; it was very close to a flowering patch of Trachystemon. It is classed as Rare in Essex, with just eight scattered records, the nearest being one just west of Colchester.

And of course spring flowers of every description, no hint of apology now and a wonderful pick-me-up after a dreary old winter!

Beth Chatto Gardens, THE place to be at this time of year. Where else would you find Lesser Celandines blooming in the lawns rather than being hounded out as ‘weeds’? Do visit, and help Rewild your Minds.

February continued the pattern of the preceding winter: rain, lots of it, and grey gloom. So while I like to get into the gardens to witness the arrival of spring, in practice that meant only two occasions, early and late in the month. Such was the lack of spring-ushering sunlight that the three week difference saw rather little change in nature.

At the time of my first visit, Winter Aconites, Spring Snowflakes and most Snowdrops were pretty much at their peak, albeit without the sunshine to open the flowers fully. Anyway it was too dank for insects to be flying …

Three weeks later, Snowdrops and Aconites were mostly past their best, but it was time for the lovely, endlessly varied Hellebores to pick up the floral baton:

And Daffodils, Squills and Crocuses were coming up fast in the outside lane, the latter with numerous queen Buff-tailed Bumblebees, bumbling out of torpor for a welcome meal in the weak sun.

More than I’ve ever seen before at this time of year, presumably related to last July’s bumper influx and favourable overwinter conditions, Seven-spot Ladybirds were out, crawling and trawling for aphids.

Harking back to midwinter, every Sarcococca sat in its own pool of olfactory pleasure…

… and trunks and branches showed off their lichens and mosses, so much easier to appreciate in the full light before bud-burst:

Skylarks were singing over the surrounding fields and Dabchicks diving on the Reservoir, while Robins, Blue and Great Tits, and at least five male Chaffinches serenaded the spring.  And as if on cue, the next in the line of flowers were bursting through, a blossoming that will grow inexorably over the next few months:

How quickly spring will arrive depends on the weather over the next few weeks, but come it will. And whatever, the garden is always visit, whether in rain or shine!

Working with the Beth Chatto team gives me all sorts of opportunities to explore the wildlife of gardens, not only the actual Beth Chatto Gardens, but also other gardens in which we have an interest. Below are two blogs I wrote for the Beth Chatto website in January 2026 relating to survey work I have undertaken at Colchester’s Meanwhile Garden and Chattowood, respectively.

Wildlife at the heart of the City: the Beth Chatto Meanwhile Garden

Original post: Wildlife at the heart of the City: Colchester’s Meanwhile Garden

POSTED 29th January 2026

 

 

The county of Essex, much maligned, has a rich diversity of wildlife and wild places, with its coastlines and ancient woodlands widely recognised as of the greatest priority and value. But a close third to these are its brownfield sites, a legacy of the proximity to London and a gentle topography, ripe for development.

‘Brownfield’ or ‘previously developed’, call them what you will except ‘wasteland’. These places are anything but wasteland, full of wildlife, and bringing the benefits and joys of green into the lives of anyone who lives nearby, especially important to those of limited mobility.

Brownfield sites come and go with the ebb and flow of development, abandonment and redevelopment. Each is unique as a response to its history and locality. Each contains a unique mix of plants species, a multicultural mix of plants from around the world, that generally arrive under their own steam (eg members of the daisy family and willowherbs with long-distance wind-dispersal) or emerge spontaneously from a long-buried seed bank.

 

The latest addition to the ranks of Essex brownfields is the Beth Chatto Meanwhile Garden in Colchester. For many years a bus station, when demolished it became an area of urban rewilding. But then a partnership between Colchester City Council and Beth Chatto Gardens saw the arrival of the gardening influence, to enrich it botanically for human and insect visitors alike, and to hold back the march of monoculture (especially buddleja and ailanthus) which would overwhelm its open sunny biodiversity in a matter of years if left unchecked.

 

To some eyes it may not look much like a garden: bare ground, rubble, twisted and rusting metal, a mix of planted specimens and things that have just moved themselves in. But that’s Nature for you, and why should the ‘trimmed and tidied, primped and preened’ look be seen as desirable compared with this unplanned urban jungle full of life?

 

The summer of 2025 represented the first full summer of the Meanwhile Garden since its creation in 2024. We followed its colonisation by insect and invertebrate life with monthly visits from April to September in fine weather. Each visit was only an hour long so this must be regarded as only scratching the surface of its biodiversity, a series of spot-surveys that nevertheless revealed lots of interest.

Any new habitat has to be colonised, and unless it is right next door to an existing habitat, insects are more likely to find it if they are powerful fliers. Many butterflies and moths are therefore good colonisers, and included Painted Lady among the array of summer butterflies, attracted especially to Buddleja davidii, often known as Butterfly-bush.

 

Moth colonists included three species with very distinctive caterpillars. The black-and-yellow-spotted Mullein Moth is common everywhere, while the Toadflax Brocade, more stripy but a similar colour pattern, is a relatively recent recolonist of the UK, and a specialist of brownfield sites and gardens in the south-east. Similarly the green Small Ranunculus, wonderfully camouflaged among the dead flowers of its foodplant prickly lettuce: extinct in the middle of the 20^th century but now on brownfield sites across southern Britain.

 

Given the lack of water in the Meanwhile Garden, all damselflies must have come some distance from their breeding ponds and rivers. We found two species, the Common Blue Damselfly (below) and Azure Damselfly.

 

But not everything flies so well. Take spiders: they have no wings. But there were plenty around the garden in the first summer, presumably having arrived on the wind as spiderlings, ballooning on silken strands. Three of the species we found were the Zebra Jumping-spider, Cucumber Spider and Gorse Orbweaver, the latter more typically associated with heathlands.

 

Bagworms are moths that spend most of their lives in a silk bag adorned with bits of their environment. Indeed females spend all their life in the bag. So they don’t fly. Grasshoppers can fly but not far, so to find three species suggests they have come from a nearby grassland. And Firebugs, another new arrival in the UK, are generally wingless. So how did these get to this brand-new site? Of course, there are lots of people passing by and through the garden, so it may be that the visitors inadvertently bring hitchhikers on their footwear or clothing.

 

Visiting the flowers throughout the summer were many bees and wasps, attracted especially to the plants introduced by the Beth Chatto team. The selection below includes rare species, some brownfield specialists, and all are pollinators: particular note should be made of the Spined Mason Bee, Little Blue Carpenter Bee, and Pantaloon Bee, all of which are very scarce in the county, found mainly in the Thames-side brownfields. Bee Wolf was similarly rare until its recent explosive spread northwards, fuelled by climate change. All could well be breeding around the site, but one we know certainly is, the also-scarce Four-banded Flower-bee, taking advantage of the bee-hotel.

 

I could go on through all other taxonomic groups – flies, beetles, bugs and the rest – and pick out special features of the garden in the same detail as the above. But suffice to say that in its first summer, Colchester’s Meanwhile Garden was packed with biodiversity, species both common and rare, many specialists of brownfield habitats and many that have benefited from climate change and are spreading northwards using these stepping stones in the landscape. The insects are using all members of the brownfield plant community, the showy garden plants especially for nectar and pollen and the spontaneous flora as larval food plants.

Our final sighting to mention is one of the most surprising to us. July 2025 will be long remembered for the almost unprecedented influx of ladybirds and hoverflies to coastal Essex, probably from the continent. Sadly, the influx which lasted about a week didn’t coincide with one of our surveys. But two weeks later we could still see its remnants, with Seven-spot and Harlequin Ladybirds in abundance (although the latter seemed not to feature among the hordes of incomers).

 

But what attracted our attention was the number of a much smaller beastie, Adonis’ Ladybird. This is another scarce species in Essex, and one that seems to be concentrated close to the Thames, on brownfield sites and arable margins. Prior to this visit we had seen only a bare handful ever in Essex, and the first record from Beth Chatto Gardens was during the influx two weeks earlier. But in the Meanwhile Garden we found dozens, in the July and two subsequent surveys. Most were found on Fennel and Teasel, conveniently at eye-level, but they were everywhere. Will this be carried over to the second full summer? We hope to find out, continuing these surveys for the whole of the coming summer. And we do expect to see changes, some species lost, others appearing: the dynamic lifeblood at the heart of brownfield biodiversity.

 

The Beth Chatto Meanwhile Garden is a brownfield site like no other, at the interface between natural urban habitat development and gardening. We have no idea how long it will last: the idea of a Meanwhile Garden is that it represents a productive use of an area of land that may ultimately be destined for development. If it ends up being lost, that would be a sad loss for the city centre, but we can at least be happy that the site has pulled its weight for the natural world in the interregnum, and formed an inviting, attractive talking point about the way we want our urban surroundings to look.

Chris & Jude Gibson (with thanks to other occasional surveyors – David Gates, Eleanor Mucklow and Angie Reid)

Chattowood and its insects: the first four years

Original post: Chattowood and its insects: the first four years

POSTED 12th January 2026

Some of our readers may have seen the Beth Chatto Gardens outreach site Chattowood recently on BBC Gardeners’ World (catch up here). When, some five years ago, a neighbouring developer wanted to use the name ‘Chattowood’ for a new housing estate, Julia (Beth’s granddaughter) agreed on condition that they worked with us on the landscaping for the estate.

 

Chattowood sits atop the same ridge of low hills as our garden, so we had a useful model to work towards. In our garden, Beth and Andrew came up with the concept of ‘Right Plant, Right Place’, using plants suited to the soil and climate conditions to minimise the need for further intervention, especially here in the arid south-east the need to avoid having to waste water on droughty soils.

Unfortunately, although lying on the same underlying geology, London Clay with a capping of Thames gravels, the recent agricultural history of the Chattowood site meant it was covered in a veneer of excessively fertile topsoil, really out of character if what you are seeking to something akin to Beth’s revolutionary Gravel Garden.

So the first thing was to lose the topsoil, stripping off some 30cm, and replace the same depth with locally quarried sharp sand and gravel, effectively making the place ‘right’ so that the ‘right plants’ could be brought in, based upon a palette of those in our Gravel Garden. One key requirement was drought-tolerance, another was attractiveness (to us – these are in effect front gardens) and the final one, benefits to wildlife, especially attractiveness to pollinators and other insects.

All that was needed then was for the garden management to be taken out of the hands and vagaries of individual householders, and Chattowood was born. As the Gardeners’ World piece showed, this is turning out to be broadly popular among the owners, some having even taken to try and replicate this in the back gardens they still control! The gardens look good with flowers throughout the year (see plant list), without any need for watering, even in drought conditions, and so resting lightly on the world in respect of its ecological footprint.

 

At the outset we realised this could be an important template for future development, at least in similar climate zones, so we set about trying to evaluate the importance of these gardens for wildlife. It just happens that immediately adjacent is a ‘traditional’ estate, all mown grass and lollipop trees, an ideal comparison against which to judge the success (or otherwise) of the Chattowood approach.

Since the first planting I have been monitoring the use of the Chattowood gardens by insects in side-by-side comparison with the next door estate. I spend the same time in each estate, logging everything larger than a ladybird, and identifying it where possible without interrupting the flow of the survey, trying to do each estate in 20 minutes to reduce the degree of double-counting of often very mobile insects.

This is not so much a biodiversity survey (which would have taken much more time to ensure correct identifications) but a bioabundance survey. While everyone is, or should be, concerned about biodiversity loss (ie extinctions), the lower abundance of life we are seeing is just as concerning. Remember that your average Blue Tit won’t mind if it eats one or ten species of aphid, so long as it gets enough to eat! Arguably, it is bioabundance, not biodiversity, that underpins all food chains, including those that support our own species.

A high level overview of the surveys shows most importantly a constant, significant imbalance between the Chatto-style gardens and the adjacent traditional front gardens. It would appear that there are typically ten times as many macroinvertebrates (mostly pollinators) on our side of the divide. I think it may be best not to pay too much heed to the data from 2022 which indicated an even greater imbalance as surveys were undertaken that year only after midsummer.

year	surveys	total number of larger insects in Chattowood	total number on the other side, the traditional estate	ratio Chattowood: traditional
2022	6 (19 Aug-22 Sept)	120	6	20:1
2023	6 (17 Apr – 4 Sept)	233	28	8.3:1
2024	7 (7 Apr – 17 Sept)	240	25	9.6:1
2025	6 (24 Apr – 19 Sept)	426	39	10.9:1

The message is clear: plant the right plant in the right place and it will reward not just us but also the natural world. And what are the right plants in this context? Clearly this will vary across the country, but here in Essex, salvia, oenothera, verbena, lavandula, buddleja and santolina seem favoured and these should be suitable in most areas provided that free draining ground has been created to avoid the roots becoming waterlogged.

 

The broad data also show clearly how much better 2025 was across the board than either of the two previous years. On the Chatto side, there were some 75% more, while on the other side of the great divide there were around 50% more, although it must be recognised that sampling effort was not exactly consistent between years. This pattern was widely repeated everywhere, so we cannot claim it as one of the successes of Chattowood!

The vast majority of the larger insects attracted to Chattowood were pollinators, species that habitually trawl around the landscape to find flowers with appropriate nectar and/or pollen resources. Just over a half of the thousand or so counted in my surveys were bumblebees, of at least five species. Another 15% were honeybees, with 5% solitary bees.

 

Flies made up about one-tenth of all observations, half of which were hoverflies with the remainder from a range of families.

 

Of course many of the most showy insects are butterflies and moths, whose numbers together made up just 5% of all observations. A total of nine species of butterfly were observed, together with two noticeable day flying moths, hummingbird hawk-moth and mint moth.

 

 

With the passage of time it has been noticeable that the number of ground nesting insects has increased in the older Chattowood plantings: I suspect that as a crust has developed on the surface of the sand nest holes don’t collapse. Three species at least colonized from 2024 onwards: bee-wolf, ivy bee and sand wasp. The first two are not too surprising given that they have undergone significant spread from southern regions in recent decades due to climate change, but the sand wasp is different. It has always been found in appropriately sandy areas, for example along the Suffolk coast and around Tiptree Heath, but is not known in the Beth Chatto Gardens nor anywhere nearer than maybe five kilometres’ radius from Elmstead Market. It just goes to show that these habitat-specific creatures are moving around our landscape, often much more than we imagine, and that if we provide the right habitat, so they will find it.

 

Our garden staff also reported finding earthworm casts on the pure sand in autumn 2025, and fungi growing out of it. Both are significant, indicating that organic matter is collecting in the upper layers, perhaps related to the crust that allows bees and wasps to nest. The bare sand is developing an ecology: what lies beneath the surface is adding complexity and life. The gardens are still changing, and changing for the better for wildlife, and as long as there is something to learn I shall be out there counting!

Chattowood is a tribute to Julia’s vision and persuasiveness, the hard work of the Beth Chatto and Lanswood teams and the forbearance of the householders, and provides a vision of a sustainable future for gardens and housing developments, especially living in the global greenhouse. What an antidote to the sterile, ecopathic trend for ‘plastic grass’ and the like!

 

Dr Chris Gibson, Beth Chatto Gardens’ Wildlife Advocate

In midwinter, the Beth Chatto Gardens get a well-deserved rest. No visitors for a month, while the staff get on with essential maintenance and preparing for the growing season to come.

So I thought a visit would be in order to see if and how the birds around the garden are responding to the relative lack of disturbance. Aside from a few more Mallards on the ponds, though, I could see and hear very little difference: Robins and Song Thrushes in full spring song, along with Blue and Great Tits constituting the bulk of the soundscape.

High in the treetops, bands of Fieldfares and Redwings were on the search for ripe berries, while finches foraged in the seedheads still standing proud in the borders and beds.

It really seems that the birds we share the space with are not significantly impacted by our presence: the human garden visitors are respectful of nature and significantly because the visitors do not come trailing dogs, the greatest disturbance factor of all.

What I was hoping to see was the Otter that was reported by the garden staff a few days earlier, the first time one has been seen there. Alas no, but I did see an unfamiliar mammal, a Muntjac in the Woodland Garden. Although very common in the surrounding area, I have never seen one before in the public part of the garden. This is very likely to reflect the month-long lack of disturbance. And of course if anything needs to be disturbed and displaced it is the voracious Muntjac!

So as the garden reopening approaches we can all think of visiting with a clear conscience! And what a treat is in store. The Snowdrops and Winter Aconites are coming up to their best…

… along with other winter-flowerers bursting into bloom for the first bees.

Blowflies were out already, taking advantage of the weak sunshine, and Seven-spot Ladybirds were just starting to become active, rousing from their winter clusters, ready to keep the plants free of aphids.

And it was also good to enjoy some of the unintentional garden delights, especially the lichens that are so easily overshadowed and overlooked at busier times of the year. On tree bark, there was Flavoparmelia caperata forming large patches, and the locally scarce Ramalina fastigiata forming several new clumps. Given that the latter was considered extinct in Essex in the 1970s due the the impacts of air pollution, this is very good news.

And much more widespread but surprisingly not recorded from the Gardens previously was the Trumpet Lichen Cladonia fimbriata, showed to me by the gardeners in the Scree Garden. I am so happy to have these interested eyes and ears on the ground!

The Gardens reopen on Tuesday February 3rd. Treat yourself to a breath of Spring!

Mid-December, just a week from the solstice, and I am back in the gardens for my final walk of the year. Yes, the wind has stripped all the leaves from the trees that shed them, but it still feels more like autumn, with above-average temperatures (perhaps the norm nowadays) despite thick grey cloud with just a few glimpses of weak sunshine.

Brown is the dominant colour, a sign that nature is dying back before the renewal to come.

But there are splashes of colour, the berries that will feed our winter thrushes over the colder months, along with untrimmed grasses, their flowerheads still full of seeds for the finches.

And just starting to ripen, the Ivy berries, which will become the main, vital food resource should the later winter period turn cold: they will keep the Woodpigeons, Blackbirds and many others alive when all of the rest of the fruits are gone.

There are still a few insects – bees and hoverflies mainly – on the wing, and they are taking full advantage of the relatively few flowers. There are the hangovers from autumn…

… the typically winter-flowering shrubs and climbers…

… and the first few harbingers of the spring that will surely come.

At the same time, new, fresh leaves are emerging, starting to push aside the brown autumnal carpet. The new year is on the starting blocks! And the birds sense it too, with singing Robins and Song Thrushes filling the still air with joy.

While this may be downtime in the garden, it does give us opportunity to look closely at some of the less showy inhabitants that keep on going whatever: mosses in the paving cracks, including Grimmia pulvinata and Tortula ruralis.

And in the Woodland Garden the Collared Earthstars that made their first ever fruiting appearance for the garden team a couple of weeks ago are still going strong!

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So another year comes to an end in the Beth Chatto Gardens. Time to look back on what has been a quite remarkable year for wildlife. For me, the highlights began in March when a couple of Treecreepers were creeping around the Silent Space, although only briefly – the larger trees of the Water Garden became their summer home. Other bird highlights included the first garden record of a Cetti’s Warbler, in October.

Often a spring highlight but never wholly reliable is one of our most delightful little butterflies, Green Hairstreak. This year was a good year for them, from mid-April into early June.

Insect numbers started to shoot up from June, and there were more Four-spotted Chasers around the ponds, often posing perfectly, than I have seen before. A sawfly (possibly Tenthredo colon) taught me something of which I was previously unaware, that some sawfly adults are predators, this one demolishing an Alderfly.

And our Moth Morning the same month produced excellent numbers of Elephant Hawk-moths and (here) the scarcer Small Elephant Hawk-moth.

June and July produced hitherto unprecedented numbers of Jersey Tiger moths around the garden…

… while early July witnessed the ‘insect blizzard’, a remarkable influx of hoverflies and ladybirds in particular, which cleared the garden of Black Bean Aphids in just a few days before they moved on through. And associated with this influx was rarer fare, including a couple of Long-tailed Blue butterflies, a first for the garden and perhaps only the seventh record for Essex. Ever!

Another influx was of Stomorhina lunata, the Locust Blowfly, a parasite of locusts originating from much further south in Europe, or perhaps even Africa. We have had one previous record of this fly (in 2016) which was only the third in Essex (and perhaps 30 nationally), but in August and September we were seeing them in multiples of ten or more at times, part of a surge of records nationally.

Of concern to rhododendrophiles maybe, but that beautiful creature the Rhododendron Leafhopper put in its long-anticipated first appearance in September. This was to be expected as it seems now to be found on Rhododendron almost throughout Essex, but for some reason had missed us out.

And for me the absolute highlight of highlights (from October) was the appearance of another parasitic fly, this one on shieldbugs, called Ectophasia crassipennis. Another most beautiful insect, this was only the second time it has turned up in Essex, and was the first time I have ever seen it away from the Pyrenees.

In a few days time, the cycle of the year will start to turn again, and we will see the return of the light. I for one look forward to 2026 being just as exciting, if not more so, than 2025.

My two visits at the end of November could hardly have been more different. The first was a wet day, very wet indeed save for a brief dry hour giving me the chance to savour the winter browns under leaden skies.

Leaf-fall in the previous wind and heavy rain coated every surface of the garden with the dejecta of Swamp Cypress, Dawn Redwood, Ginkgo and others, their groundscapes merging seamlessly into the gloom.

Too cold by far for any insect interest in the remnant flowers…

… and even the berries seemed not to be attracting the birds: the feeding station by the tearoom was the epicentre of activity.

But our oldest garden inhabitant looked magnificent, its grandeur undiminished by the lack of light.

In fact removing all colour from the scene draws attention to the sculptural qualities of its ancient bole:

A week later it was all very different. The intervening days had seen a fair amount of rain, along with a couple of frosts, the first of the season. But the sky was blue, Robins were singing and the sun was warm, although even at lunchtime frost still lingered in the shady corners.

Winter sun coming from a low angle served to intensify every vestige of colour in the landscapes and plantscapes and add drama to the shapes and shadows:

Birds still visited the fast-food joint, but were also active throughout the garden. Large numbers of Blackbirds, with a few Mistle Thrushes and Fieldfares, were devouring berries, with Jays chasing acorns…

… and  Goldfinches, Redpolls and Chaffinches eating seeds high in the Birchtops.

In the Gravel Garden, a fresh flush of Sickle-leaved Hare’s-ear formed a flowery filigree, as Seven-spot Ladybirds carried on resolutely hunting aphids.

But the flower of the moment was Mahonia. In full sunlight and full bloom, its Lily-of-the-valley scent pooled intoxicatingly in the still air and it was teeming with flies, especially Calliphora bluebottles, feeding at the flowers and basking on the leaves. Many might not get excited by such creatures, but we do! They pollinate as well as any bee, they are food for insectivorous birds, and without their maggots we would be knee-deep in unrotted animal carcases…

It is at this time of year, when leaves are off most of the trees and trunks illuminated by winterlight, that thoughts turn to lichens. Just a few from a wander round the car park included two that seem to be pretty scarce in Essex. Ramalina fastigiata, extinct in Essex in the 1970s due the the impacts of air pollution, has shown a slow recolonization since, but mostly in the westernmost fringes of the county – the latest map from the British Lichen Society shows only a single spot in the Tendring Peninsula, around Weeley.

There is a similar dearth of Lecidella elaeochroma records locally, with just two in our neck of the woods, from just west of Clacton and Elmstead Market respectively.

Then there were the commoner species, grey ones such as Physcia adscendens, Physcia tenella, Punctelia subrudecta and Flavoparmelia caperata…

… along with the very common Sunburst Lichen Xanthoria parietina, those in full sunlight more golden than those in partial shade, and one showing the pink spot of the parasitic fungus Illosporiopsis christiansenii, another apparent rarity in Essex with the National Biodiversity Network Atlas showing just one Essex site, near Southend.

Of course, comments about the scarcity of lichens and lichenicolous fungi should always be caveated by the fact that few folk record them, and perhaps their apparent distribution actually reflects the distribution of active naturalists. Nevertheless, despite their lack of popularity, lichens are wonderful structures and form lovely lichenscapes that add interest and splashes of colour to the winter scene. But please don’t feel you have to stay in the car park: the garden has so much more to offer at every time of year!