Some of you may know that I have always been a green gardener. You may think that it’s all about saving the planet. Sadly it’s much less worthy and more to do with being a child of the 1950s and gardening with my grandmother who was born in 1881.

Put that Victorian experience together with a strong streak of Yorkshire thriftiness (also inherited from granny) and you have someone who spends all their pennies on plants and then handles any problems cheaply — with fingers or feet.

My garden does not suffer from many pests and diseases (despite being a chemical-free zone) and I outlined why in my book The Natural Gardener.

I wrote this in 2005, but researched it thoroughly for five years beforehand. I concluded that putting plants in the right place is the best method of preventing plant disease. No surprise there, Beth Chatto had already set the tone years before. The implications are that you pick the plants that will do well for you in your own garden, rather than being a slave to plant fashion, or worse, envy. Do this and you are likely to have a supply of flowering plants from February until late in the year — another essential. Planting diversely and densely (using a mixture of trees, shrubs, herbaceous, annuals, grasses, ferns and bulbs) pulls in more insect life and looks better. When I started the book I got very hung up on chemical use affecting human beings — DDT lingering in the fat cells of people’s bodies. This is obviously a worry: I want a long ride on the roundabout of life and I want to be well enough to enjoy it.

But as I thought about the subject more, I realised that the most worrying aspect of using pesticides and herbicides is destroying flora and fauna. Once a species goes it has gone forever and that affects the balance of nature.

My own research in my garden taught me the value of establishing a living jigsaw of life. It also taught me the value of insect life and how it interacts. This is why I welcome Peter Marren’s Bugs Britannica (Chatto and Windus, £35) about insects, bees, spiders etc. This isn’t a dry text either, it enters into history and the arts etc, and it will satisfy a wide spectrum of interests. Take wasps. They one of the most useful creatures in the green garden — honestly! They are meat-eating bees and Chris Packham defends them as caterpillar-eating carnivores. They are the only creatures I have ever seen tackle a mature cabbage white caterpillar flavoured with mustard oil ingested from brassicas. To watch them carving one up is an amazing sight. They take countless caterpillars and grubs in the summer, when they need protein most, long before they develop their sweet tooth (needed for hibernation) in autumn. Last week, I gave a friend a quick lunch of ham rolls, and quite a good-sized snippet of ham fell on the table. It was immediately grabbed by a wasp, much to the amazement of my companion. At the moment there are hundreds feeding on the nectar dripping from my tall red hot poker — ‘Prince Igor’. They’re not having it all their own way though, there are several strung up close by in a garden spider’s web.