I spent more than thirty years turning our half-acre rural-coastal garden from a bleak, open field into wildlife heaven. We get an amazing diversity of spiders, insects, birds, reptiles, amphibians and small mammals and I love that. But this year we've had a swarm of honeybees actually living in our shower room under the shower tray (accessed by a tiny hole in the exterior stonework we hadn't even noticed), a wasps' nest right over our front porch, a plague of grey squirrels (alien), a plague of rabbits (alien), masses of cluster flies all over the garden, pheasants (alien) trashing a section of our lawn and destroying my fuschia hedge, wood pigeons demolishing my broad bean crop, an absolute plague of large white butterfly caterpillars and a horrid resurgence of Dutch Elm Disease which has killed several large trees already and which is threatening lots of others. In chapter two I'll tell you about the nice bits...