It’s been a while since I checked on my garden guests and as you know, I have been a bit of an indoors hermit of late working on my new website and shop which I hope you like by the way.   I went out to check our snail mail in the early evening and something made me walk over to my citrus trees.

After inspecting, I saw a few tiny garden guests and one favourite critter of mine that I have recorded before but not seen for ages so I forgot about the mail and went in to get my camera instead!  Much more fun than bills in the letter box!

Plant Hopper

It was amazing that I actually saw this tiny critter because my eyesight is deteriorating with age and I badly need stronger lenses in my glasses. He was sitting peacefully on a citrus tree branch and he is only the size of your thumb nail.

Close-up of his face and he is such an unusual looking insect which you don’t see that often, certainly not to the naked eye.

The next critter I saw, a garden Orb-weaver, was having an early evening kip, all curled up and reasonably safe inside this curled leaf.

On the next citrus tree I saw this even smaller spider perched on the edge of a leaf and he was very active.  I’m not sure about my identification here but he may be a jumping spider as at first I thought that he was trying to hide from me and my lense because he jumped from a high leaf to a lower leaf.  I then realised that he was actually weaving his web and I could see it attached to him and when he jumped, it then became attached to the lower leaf.  Quite fascinating.

lynx spider on a palm stem

I think that all of the spiders must have been out at this time of the day as there were a lot of them around.

A tufted ant

On my way inside, I passed our allamanda flowers which are in full bloom at the moment and looking spectacular. I saw this busy little ant sucking nectar? just a guess as he is right inside the centre of an allamanda flower.

In the end, I got so caught up with my garden guests that I forgot about the mail and had to go back outside to collect it!