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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Behold! The portal is opening... and what's inside? Is it a trans-dimensional gateway to another star system? No, it's a new UK government website about non-native species. Probably a lot more useful than a cosmic wormhole. Well, stabler, certainly.

Amazingly, despite having the not-at-all saucy and snappy name of the GB non-native species secretariat they made a website with a memorable URL: nonnativespecies.org, even if it immediately comes up with dismal government URLs once you are in it. Still, you can't have everything. But web addresses don't really matter except to tedious nerds (ahem). The real question is, is it any good? The Ranger took nonnativespeices.org for a test drive. Here's the results.

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