Spotted by Ruth D'Alessandro, The Wildlife Gardener

Southern fried chicken and chimps, anyone? Mmm.

It had to happen eventually - I'd been wearing that old hat for years, and eventually I lost it, somewhere in a wet field near Reading. Yes, gone, the very hat that appears in my picture on this blog. Still, it was probably for the best. It was a tatty old thing that had seen much better days - it didn't even keep the rain off particularly well.

Look at the state of that hat! It looks as if it's been sat on many times. You can probably guess why it looks like that.

So this spring I went down to SCATS to see if they had any Barbour hats.

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By Ruth D'Alessandro, The Wildlife Gardener

According to the saying, an oak tree’s life is:

Three hundred years growing

Three hundred years living

Three hundred years dying

Which means, metaphorically speaking, that the Wildlife Garden’s oak tree at about 175 years old, is only just experiencing adolescent pimples and hormones. But recently we went to visit an oak that had long since abandoned its Zimmer frame, and would be lucky if it sat in its wingback chair for very much longer.

Ah, the February half term. Possibly the longest week in the school calendar: inevitable rain, cold, nearly everything closed, many people off skiing (although quite why anyone would want to spend a fortune to stand around in MORE snow, or eat fondue...) you get the picture. In an attempt to get the Junior Wildlife Gardeners out for some apple-cheeking fresh air, we headed to Knole Park in Sevenoaks. Closed. Then we pointed the WGmobile in a straight line and headed to Penshurst. Aha! Penshurst Place in the Weald of Kent, the sprawling ancestral stately home of the Sidney family, set in ancient parkland.

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By Ruth D'Alessandro, The Wildlife Gardener

The Wildlife Gardener has many and varied Favourite Things, among them being good puppet theatre, war stories and farm animals. So my ears metaphorically pricked up when Michael Morpurgo’s First World War novel, War Horse was adapted for the stage, featuring unique, life size horse puppets created by the Handspring Puppet Theatre Company, stage design based on the paintings of Paul Nash and a wistful folk-tinged score reminiscent of Vaughan Williams at his most lyrical. We heard so many good things about it that we finally got hold of a couple of gold-dust-like tickets and headed to the New London Theatre on a gloomy February night.

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We heard you wanted to see a picture of a simply gigantic water bug.

So here it is. This is a giant belostomatid water bug. This picture is from the website Fishpondinfo and was taken in Ecuador by Kevin from Kentucky.

These bugs are the largest insects in the order Hemiptera, and occur in freshwater habitats in a range of locations worldwide, mostly in North and South America and East Asia. They have some unusual reproductive habits, and are also particularly popular in Thailand: can you guess why?

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