Had an orange tip butterfly in the garden this morning and we are close to the city centre, (they don't overwinter, so hatched this spring). Not seen one of these for a long long time.

We also get the occasional sparrowhawk and you don't see many songbirds in the garden for a while after!

There is a great loss of habitat from gardens being turned into gravel deserts or worse still covered in plastic grass substitute and the obsession that some people have that a lawn must be grass and nothing but grass so all the wild flowers get a squirt of weedkiller. Let your gardens grow a little bit wild, leave a few nettles for the butterflies and some dandelions for the bees.

Plenty of bees in my garden at the moment, but I do have plants that attract bees, on purpose. It's nice, and encouraging to see them, and hopefully many of them will have survived the mild winter.

If you want to help them, try to get shrubs that flower early as well as later - winter honeysuckle is a great one for flowering from Feb onwards so that the bumblebees get an early shot of nectar on warm days before it turns cold again. It smells fantastic too, like lemon sherbert.

I do get concerned at the lack of insect life when walking along the edges of the arable fields though. Spraying has obliterated any type of wild flower and it looks very sterile. I wish they could leave margins for encouraging wildlife. On the upside we never used to have Buzzards but there seems to be a good number of them now. I heard a Skylark last week.

I am a member of the Woodland Trust, and they do great work by replacing some of the trees to make up for areas that are getting obliterated by ignorant councils and developers.

I would like fewer roadside hedges. Driving along European country roads is often more pleasant than the UK because you can actually see the relatively hedgeless countryside. In Devon and Cornwall tunnel vision ceases to be a handicap. Us Brits also have a tree fetish. Many old country houses are blighted by leafy monsters looming too near the building. The National Trust is disgracefully guilty of allowing spectacular views from many of its lower level Lake District paths to disappear. A classic example of its neglect is Waddesdon Manor, a grand house built on a hill to enjoy 360 degree views which must have been fabulous 100yrs ago but have now gone thanks to the immense arboreal weeds surrounding the house. Some unfortunate people hardly see the sun from their cold shaded houses because of huge and often ugly common forest trees they are not allowed to remove thanks to TPO-happy council officials.