‘Get off the mud, please, Stanley,’ says Ellie. Three years old and already in love with an allotment? No chance, sis. Absolutely none at all.

Stanley’s fondness for ‘pumpkins’ led to his parents taking him to a pumpkin farm to harvest his own Jack-o’-lantern for Halloween. I’m not sure how he managed it but he came away from the farm with eight pumpkins, one of which he carried around with him for three days.

‘Stanley’s in the bath with his pumpkin,’ texts Ellie. I beam proudly.

‘He’s one of us,’ I tell Dad on the phone a few days later. ‘He’s got the gene.’ Dad wasn’t around for long when I was little, but when he was it was me and him on the veg patch, me and him harvesting runner beans and puddling in leeks, me and him adding sticks to the bonfire on late summer evenings, me and him against the world. Suddenly Dad and I both know exactly how we’re going to spend our time with our little green man: outside, loving what we love, together.

Ellie doesn’t have that ‘gene’, the calling for the outside that Dad and I have. Just two years younger than me, she had every opportunity to develop the same love and wonder for the natural world as I did but it never happened. She feels inadequate about it but she needn’t, it just isn’t in her. But it’s in Stanley, which is both hilarious and wonderful.

‘Sis, how am I going to support him in this when it’s so alien to me?’

‘You’ll work it out,’ I tell her. You can develop an interest in gardening without being completely consumed by it. It doesn’t have to be all or nothing. You can learn enough to take joy from it yourself while helping to feed your child’s obsession. It needn’t be your everything, you don’t even have to be good at it.

They’re moving house soon and Ellie promises me Stanley will have his own vegetable patch.

‘Remember he’s only three,’ I tell her, and wonder how much Mum can be relied on to water things I plant for him. Or indeed if Ellie, pregnant with nephew number two, would know how to keep plants sated, if she even had the time to do so. It’s times like this I wish I lived closer. Or they did.

She sends videos of the new garden, which is mainly lawn but has a small greenhouse at the end and a sunny bed overrun with hypericum and euphorbia, which could make a nice spot for pumpkins. ‘Can we grow runner beans?’ she asks, ‘and sweet peas?’ We agree for me to go up one weekend in spring and set up some sort of veg patch. There are also roses to prune and a hedgehog highway to create, plants to identify. Mum has claimed the greenhouse as her own, which is a blessing as she will teach Stanley how to water, feed, weed and pinch out, and she will keep an eye on his veg patch when I’m not there. He’ll grow into a fine gardener yet.

Common darter dragonfly, Sympetrum striolatum

The common darter is a dragonfly that regularly colonises new ponds. Males are rusty red and females are more of an ochre, fading to a dull red as they age. They are narrow-bodied and ‘dart’ out to collect prey, which they take back to their perch to eat. The male will tend to use the same perch from which to defend his territory – if you sit and watch you will see him jump up to scare off a bumblebee or butterfly, before settling back down again to guard his space.

Climate change is, at the moment, working well for British dragonflies, which thrive in warm weather. The State of Dragonflies in Britain and Ireland 2021 report states that 19 species have increased their distribution since 1970, compared to five that have declined. We have gained eight new species since 1995 and two others have reappeared after a long period of absence. Most species are moving north and west into areas that were previously too cold for them.

The common darter appeared in my garden within weeks of me digging the pond. The following spring I conducted pond dips and found the chubby nymphs in my net, along with those of skinnier damselflies and mayflies. The nymphs eat tadpoles and other aquatic larvae before climbing up the stem of a plant growing out of the water and completing their final stage of metamorphosis into an adult.

When mating, the male and female form a ‘wheel’ where the male holds on to the female by the back of her neck with claspers at the end of his abdomen. If she likes him she will lift her abdomen up to the base of his thorax to allow him to transfer his sperm. They then travel together to the pond, where he holds on to her as she dips eggs into the water.

October

A call from a wildlife rescue. ‘We have a young male hog here, would you take him?’ I say yes, of course. I clean out one of the empty boxes and fill it with fresh straw, and drive up with another box of straw to carry him home in.

He doesn’t have a name. He was found in someone’s garden with two siblings, both female, in summer. It looked like the nest had been abandoned by their mum, as sometimes happens, and the three hoglets were out and about far too early to survive. They were scooped up and taken to my local rescue centre, where they were fed puppy formula until they were big enough to be released.

‘We didn’t want to release the boy with his sisters,’ said the centre worker. ‘They’re not the brightest, are they?’

The females go back to the garden where they were found and the male comes to live with me. He was the smallest of the three, weighing just 43g, about the same as a small egg or two tablespoons of butter. He weighs over 700g now (two cans of pop or a loaf of bread), and with the recent warm, wet weather, the gardens are having a second, pseudo spring. The lawns are lush and green, the trees and shrubs are putting on new growth, there are caterpillars and beetles breathing a sigh of relief after the long hard summer. It’s unseasonably, scarily mild but if you’re a young hog needing to cut your teeth on the big wide world before settling down to hibernate, it’s pretty perfect.

I call him Tiny, even though he isn’t anymore. I scoop him into gloved hands and whisper a gentle ‘Welcome’ before placing him in front of the entrance to the hedgehog box. I have been taught to do this – never place a hedgehog in a box but at the entrance hole to it, so they can enter of their own accord. Sometimes it can take half an hour before they go in, but they are nocturnal mammals and they will always seek darkness over light, or so I have always been told. Tiny won’t go in. I stand with him for 30 minutes and he refuses to budge. I wonder if the box smells of bigger, scarier hog or if, as a rescue, he’s not as nocturnal as he perhaps should be. I have released many hogs into this garden and none has behaved like this. I head indoors and stand at the upstairs window, instead, to see how he gets on.

Tiny has absolutely no intention of going in the box. As soon as I leave he starts exploring. He sniffs all around the edge of the box, around the wider vicinity of the box, and tries to climb on to the box. I stay watching him; it seems irresponsible not to. Suddenly he rolls on to his back and starts self-anointing, a process in which hedgehogs salivate and lick the saliva on to their spines, perhaps as a way of familiarising themselves with the scent of whatever they’re in contact with (no one really knows). They mostly do this when encountering new things, of which everything is right now. Imagine being Tiny, found the size of an egg on your first foray out of the nest and then raised in captivity with your siblings. Then, suddenly, there’s a huge world to explore, starting with a New Box. Little teenaged Tiny, finally set free. Anything is possible.

Except he should be sleeping.

He shuns the box I prepared for him and, instead, enters the box opposite, which doesn’t have a resident but which I haven’t cleaned out and filled with fresh straw (there is old straw). I wait for five minutes and he doesn’t come out. I wonder if the other box is more homely to him, smells more of sleeping, safe hedgehog. I wait another five minutes and he still doesn’t come out. He’s settled then, finally, nearly an hour after I brought him home. I relax a little and get back to my work.

Later, Emma comes home with Tos. Tos asks to go outside and I check for signs of Tiny first, before letting her. She runs out, as she always does, to the end of the garden, but stops in her tracks as she picks up Tiny’s scent, and does a big sniffy U-turn to the boxes. Like Tiny, Tosca sniffs and sniffs, taking in messages I couldn’t begin to imagine. ‘Yes, we have a new hedgehog,’ I tell her. ‘You done? Come on now.’ She reluctantly leaves the boxes, then continues with her existing mission of Seeing-Who-Has-Been-In-My-Garden-Since-I-Was-Last-Here, growling at the two exits to ward off any would-be intruders, and doing a wee. Eventually, she comes to a stop next to the compost bin and sits down, giving me what I can only describe as a withering look.

‘What?’

[Hard stare]

‘What? Do you want to show me something?’

If Tosca could talk I think she would tell me how sick she is of me bringing new animals into the garden. How much she hates the foxes, how annoying the squirrels are, how those stinky little spiky things are the bane of her life and how dare I make homes for them and feed them. How the newest spiky thing is sleeping under the pallet that the compost bin sits on.

‘I’ve had enough,’ say her eyes. ‘I’ve had enough but you should know the thing you think is in the box is not in the box. It’s here.’

I get on my hands and knees and use a torch to look under the pallet, and sure enough there’s Tiny, fast asleep. It’s a mild, dry day so I’m not overly concerned he’s curled up with no bedding, but it’s no place, really, for a hedgehog. I thank Tos but lock her inside and retrieve a sturdy plant pot and fresh straw from the shed – if Tiny decides to make this his den he must at least have the means to make it comfortable. I set up the trail camera in front of the compost bin and head inside.

Tiny is free now, and he’s a wild animal. If he wants to sleep under a pallet he’s perfectly within his rights to do so. There are some rescue centres that insist on a so-called ‘soft release’, whereby you release the hog into a box within a cage (I have a rabbit run), so they can familiarise themselves with their surroundings for a few days before going into the wide world proper. I have done this before, but prefer not to, and most rescues these days choose to just let them go. There are studies that suggest this method is less stressful, at least for the hog, although not the human watching them having a party through a window.

I wonder if a soft release would have been better for Tiny as it would have stopped his excited wanderings, but it’s too late now. He’s not where I intended him to be but he’s wild and he’s asleep during the day, as hedgehogs should be. This is enough. He weighs 700g and will no doubt find the dish of kitten biscuits on his adventures around the garden tonight. He’s a young, excitable thing, he’ll be OK.

Later, I check the trail camera and it tells me Tiny continued his adventures. He woke from his slumber beneath the pallet and headed back to the box (no, not the one I prepared for him). He found the kitten biscuits. Over the next few days, I see that he is using the garden as his base but adventuring down the alley and hopefully into other gardens. This is good news, he’s settled in well.

Emma comes home, shouting, ‘Where are you? I have something to tell you!’

I head downstairs and she tells me she’s just bumped into our dog-walking friend Vicki, whose kids Stan and Minnie have just seen a hedgehog in the park.

‘They thought you should know,’ she says.

It’s dusk. ‘When did they see it?’ I ask.

‘Just now.’

‘What was it doing?’

‘It was sitting beneath the zip wire in the children’s play area,’ she replies. ‘Are you not excited? They saw a hedgehog and thought to tell you!’

But it’s dusk, which is neither day nor night. And it’s autumn, which is when food starts to become scarce. And it was… sitting beneath the zip wire? A hedgehog out during the day at this time of year is in trouble. A hedgehog just sitting there is… odd. It’s Friday. We have beers and a takeaway to order, catching up to do. I find a box and a pair of gloves and head out into the night.

I enter the play area and walk around with my box. There are teenagers and dog walkers in the distance, but no one I could ask about the whereabouts of a hungry hedgehog. It’s no longer beneath the zip wire. It’s not in the play area at all, and it’s too dark to go venturing into the wooded area. I search the whole park and find nothing. I go home and post in my hedgehog group: ‘Please look out for any hedgehogs out during the day or at dusk.’ I open beer, I order a takeaway, I have my Friday.

The next day I bump into Stan and Minnie, who tell me it was not only sitting beneath the zip wire but that it had its nose in a packet of crisps.

‘How big was it?’ I ask.

‘Small,’ says Stan.

‘Medium,’ says Minnie.