Spider city

There are spiders everywhere in the garden, it's like an inner city tower block between some of the plants, so many of them have taken residence.

It's supposed to be a bumper year for them, perfect temperatures and conditions earlier on have led to an explosion of our eight legged friends.

That should be my eight legged friends. Lizzie is absolutely petrified of them. One night when I was at work I got a hysterical call from halfway along the high street to tell me she had left the house because "the biggest spider I have ever seen" was sitting on the stairs. This was initially met with concern, seeing as the tree ferns had just been delivered from Australia and I remembered we had laid one of them down beside the house, level with an airbrick, before taking them into the garden.

So after her dad had ejected said spider into the garden we searched through Spiders of Australia on the net, none of which turned out to be as scary as that which Lizzie had witnessed on the stairs.

It turned out to be a huge house spider. I don't know if it actually was huge because I wasn't there, and she's screamed at some tiddlers in her time, but apparently even her dad stepped back when he set eyes on the monster.

The spider in the picture isn't a house spider, he's a common or garden tiger striped looking spider who looks like he's eating quite well, even though he also looks like he's lost a couple of legs. These spiders are OK by Lizzie. So OK in fact that when one made it into our kitchen, she adopted it (this was part of an exercise to become spider-acclimatised).

Trouble is, living in the kitchen almost killed him, because he had nothing to eat. So one night I released him from his hell and transplanted him to the blueberry plant.

Is this him? Who knows. If it is, he's moved to a different part of the garden. Then again there's hundreds of them out there, and they do all look the same.