Highlighting the needy with Anthony Bernard.

The Jolly Gardener is a pub in Moneyrow Green where our daughter worked during university vacations. Despite later qualifications in economics, banking and finance, she learnt cash control from the pub landlord! It is a shame that Post Office executives didn’t learn honesty from pub staff and customers, where no-one gets short changed without a challenge and trust is taken for granted among the team and the regulars.

A busy gardener tends flower beds to make the place look beautiful. Tulip bulbs would be planted hoping for a grand display, but would actually flower after squirrels had dug them up and reburied them elsewhere for food! Pretty flowers attract snails and slugs for hungry thrushes to gather round. There are more players in a garden than just the busy gardener!

A lazy gardener patiently spends time watching and waiting while plants establish themselves. Years ago, going for a walk at dusk, I remember a car pulled out of its garage, with a cloth on top and a bucket beside it. The garage lights were on, revealing the owner in a deckchair reading a book! His garden was growing by itself and his dirty car was fully functional!

A weed is a happy plant, growing where it chooses. Weeds are often very colourful and intricate, deserving serious attention. They grow on the side of streets, between tarmac pavement and a wall. Motorway managers now realise that interchanges have large patches undisturbed, provided people do their driving in the road! These become wildlife havens, where insects, small mammals and birds can thrive unchallenged.

In 1990 we moved into a property with woods as well as a formal garden which had received minimal maintenance. Dead leaves carpeted the woodland, trees had died. Plants, bushes and saplings had grown wherever they could! The ground had become a haven for an enormous variety of insects. Dead trees were full of woodpeckers' holes, an ornamental pond had dried up, hedges overgrown and honey bees made a hive in a hollow tree.

This attracted an amazing variety of birds, butterflies, moths and crawling things! The lawn had ants, the great green woodpecker gobbled them up. Greenfly on the roses were cleared by tits, if the ladybirds didn't get them first. The pond was lined, filled with water and oxygenating plants added. Newts, frogs and others immediately moved in before fish could be added to eat their young!

Ivy had grown everywhere, climbing trees and embracing hedges. One late November a neighbour heard buzzing and panicked, thinking he had a wasp's nest. It was a large crowd of honey bees, gathering pollen. Ivy produces flowers and fruit surprisingly late which makes it vital as winter sustenance for birds and insects, hence the midwinter song about the holly and the ivy, turned into a Christmas Carol.

Grass under the trees had grown to knee height, but mowing late revealed a whole world of insects, grasshoppers, baby frogs and others who had made their homes in the lush damp undergrowth. So mowing was adjourned until late winter, after the residents had moved on!

The lazy gardener enjoys watching birds, bats, foxes, hedgehogs and insects beyond counting, all leading lives unmolested by man-made organisation. He does just enough to keep things tidy, while leaving plenty of space for the wildlife.

"One is nearer God's Heart in a garden" as the poet says.