You might think ponds are complicated things with liners, but you can make one from a washing-up bowl

Do you remember the 90s, when everyone was obsessed with “water features”, mostly thanks to Charlie Dimmock? A simpler time. Perhaps I’m hanging out with the wrong garden designers, but I rarely hear much talk of water features now. For years, Chelsea flower show gardens have featured subtle Cor-Ten steel-clad trickles or elegant mirrored ponds. There have been a fair few naturalistic streams (such as A Rewilding Britain Landscape by Lulu Urquhart and Adam Hunt, with beaver-gnawed twigs, which controversially won best in show in 2022), but scant fountains or burbling rocks. Water features are out, I guess. Ponds are in.

My mum built one the other day. Hers is smaller than a piece of A3, lined with rocks and terracotta seedling pots, with two metal ducks stuck around the edge in a boggy bit of her compact urban garden. You might hear “pond” and think complicated things involving liner and algae, but you could make one from a washing-up bowl – and there are plenty of benefits to doing so.

In wet weather, garden snails can seek shelter in letterboxes – and find a feast there waiting for them

We’ve all heard of snail mail – a term popularised since the advent of electronic mail – but who knew that snails eat mail?

We have it on good authority from the ecologist Simon Mustoe – who said snails ate his letter from Sir David Attenborough – a BBC report announcing the closure of a Northumberland Royal Mail postbox because of snails “munching the mail”, and desperate people on the forums of the Australian hardware chain Bunnings claiming snails have “a real appetite for postal letters” and can “eat a whole letter in two days”.