Mind The Gaps

Provide plenty of shade and cover – and avoid gaps – if you want ground beetles in your garden, says Val

AS some of you may know, I’ve written a book about my garden called The Living Jigsaw, which was published by Kew about a year ago. It involved trying to photograph everything that moved in my garden and that meant the bees, butterflies and countless insects. One creature that proved an impossibility for me was the ground beetle. It scurried away so quickly that every photograph I attempted was blurred and I hadn’t the heart to put them in the fridge and slow their metabolism down. Buglife (www.buglife.org.uk) kindly lent me a photograph in the end.