By Ruth D'Alessandro, The Wildlife Gardener

The beginning of April. A dismal, grey, rainy 5-hour journey back home from Yorkshire down the A1 for la famille Wildlife Gardener. After a flask of coffee and many Kit Kat Chunkies, nature dictated we take an inevitable toilet break at the depressing-sounding Brampton Hut BP Connect service station in Huntingdon. Dodging the potholes in the lorry park, we pulled into the forecourt under a glowering big East Anglian sky. We tumbled out of the WGmobile, stretching and groaning, ‘looking forward’ to a limp overpriced BLT and a paper cup of ‘Wild Bean’ coffee that would be neither wild nor had probably seen a bean for days.

Nor were we looking forward to the service station unisex toilet experience: the joys of paddling around in truckers’ wee and losing one’s nasal cilia to the sharp combined scents of last night’s phal and industrial Haze. But this little corner of Huntingdon has a secret: possibly the cutest service station toilet in the land. And it’s a nature lover’s toilet to boot. Turn up your volume:

Yes. You heard right. Birdsong in a toilet.

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In the news on the Isle of Wight right now is the Military Road, a tourist trail of great scenic beauty that takes visitors along the south-west coast of the Island. the trouble is, it's getting closer and closer to the cliff each year, as the soft cliffs erode away. And now the edge of the cliff is just 90cm from the edge of the roadside... meaning that it won't be long before the whole thing goes. When it does, there's so far no intention to replace it, and so that through-route will be lost - although it will still be easy enough to go along the road as far as it goes, from either side. Needless to say that's causing some local controversy.

The Ranger went down to have a farewell journey along the old road before it finally fell in and took the opportunity to have a closer look than one normally gets when zooming by in a car. Of course, as ever on the Island, it turned out to have a wildlife aspect to it.

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Look at all those cherry trees. Lovely blossom, eh? Cherry is these days an almost ubiquitous tree in urban environments, and for a few short weeks in spring casts a delightful pink haze across our towns and cities.

This year the Natural History Museum has started a survey of cherry trees, because they're not all the same. Cherry trees are really easy to spot, especially at this time of year, and there are some good online resources to help ID them including a very impressive interactive cherry identification key, with a slightly more practical print-out-and-keep version too.

It'll be fun to see what sort of cherry you've got in your street, park or woods; and also helps with a wider scientific project to study urban trees.

So go on, check out a cherry today!

(thanks to Jon Heuch via UKTC)

The Isle of Wight's geology is something that it's easy to see - so much of it is on display at the edges... and we've got lots of edges. What's more, there's a massive variety of it, and it includes those all-important dinosaur fossils that make the headlines and draw the tourists.

Most dinosaur-hunters end up going to the spectacular south-west coast of the Island, maybe to see the famous dinosaur footprints at Hanover Point, for example. A less well-known attraction is the petrified forest in the north end of Sandown Bay. Locals have long known that at very low tides, fragments of petrified wood can be found washed up on the shore.

This week, the Ranger was lucky enough to find one.

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By Ruth D'Alessandro, The Wildlife Gardener

Easter Bank Holiday and la famille Wildlife Gardener find themselves in Yorkshire. After 17 years of visiting Harrogate and 17 years of pleading with Mr WG to see Mother Shipton’s Cave and Dripping Well a couple of miles down the road in Knaresborough (‘Why would you want to pay £20 to see a load of teddy bears on strings under a waterfall?’) I stamped my green wellies petulantly one more time and at last we went. Now, if I have £20 in my pocket I can think of worse ways of spending it than using it to marvel at the calcifying properties of the Nidd Gorge’s limestone geology and England’s oldest paying visitor attraction since 1630.

Mother Shipton’s Cave and Dripping Well is mentioned in my all-time favourite UK Guide Book, Bollocks to Alton Towers: Uncommonly British Days Out, an invitation to go far from the sodding crowd and follow little brown signs to quirkier, uncommonly British visitor delights. And Mother Shipton’s quirky delights are many.

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