Wasps

Found this lovely sleepy wasp in the garden this afternoon, yes I did say 'lovely' because I'm a great fan of wasps - not when they sting me of course, but then again they don't do that gratuitously. But generally, they're great pest controllers around the place and actually they're amazingly handsome. I remember a couple of years ago sitting in the tea room at Corfe Castle with Philip sharing his scones and jam with wasps ("I've got lots, I don't mind sharing") - he was entranced with them nipping to and from his plate. Now, they can be a pest and last year we had to have a nest dealt with for the first time; normally we just leave them be up in the eves but this one was in a place where they could have been nasty. But generally, I reckon we ought to learn to love wasps.

Bright and sunny

The warm weather has really kicked the garden into life, with stuff coming up all over. The new hedging plants have all come into bud so I've had 100% survival over the winter and with an entire growing season now they've got their roots down I'm hoping for some serious growth this year. The frog-spawn has hatched into tadpoles, though we do have an iminent hosepipe ban in prospect so we may be topping up the pond with buckets as filling domestic ponds is banned - though the water board do say they make an exception for filling fish ponds. I've emailed them, copied to our local wildlife trust, to see if that exemption extends to wildlife ponds in domestic gardens...and if not why not? With garden ponds being so vital for wildlife these days I would have thought there was a strong case for it.

I also saw the first bats airborne this week, which is always good :-)