A beautiful pair of tawny owls who sit in a nearby tree and impatiently wait for us to leave in the summer time (usually well after dusk). And a woodmouse who was so cute that I not only forgot my rodent phobia, but even allowed her to keep the stash of almost ripe strawberries that she had pinched. A thread elsewhere has people yearning for Sean Bean and Angelina Jolie on their plots, but I'd love David Attenborough on mine, just so he could tell me what everything was. We also watched a mother hedgehog lead her young across our plot last year and frequently see foxes.

I know none of this is particularly rare, but we are only a couple of miles from an industrial city's centre