This is a truly beautiful, golden butterfly with black-inked markings. It usually tears up and down woodland rides, stopping for the occasional feed on bramble flowers. The males are very territorial, constantly on the lookout for rivals to chase away. They quite often fly straight at you! The one that visited us liked my scabious flowers and returned each day for about a week. Essex Wildlife Trust is monitoring this species at present because, until quite recently, it was found only in the south-west of England. Milder winters in the east have enabled it to breed successfully and extend its range. It may be a very beautiful indicator of climate change.

Another on the Trust’s watch list is the small tortoiseshell, as numbers have fallen drastically in recent years. As a child, I would regularly see this pretty little butterfly in our garden. And my butterfly identification book (published in 1986) describes it as “one of our commonest butterflies”. I especially love the delicate, sky-blue, scalloped edging along all four of its wings. However, since the 1970s, populations have fallen by 75%. A number of factors may be influencing its decline, but it seems to be particularly susceptible to a parasitic fly that is enjoying our warming climate. I hadn’t seen a small tortoiseshell in the garden for years until one turned up in May of this year. Subsequently, we have also received visits during August.

This little, golden-brown butterfly looks a lot like a moth. Whereas most butterflies rest either with their wings held erect and together, or broadly spread in a horizontal plane, skippers hold their fore and hind wings in different planes. I always think they look like tiny paper aeroplanes. We’ve been taking part in No Mow May since before it was a thing, and this year we actually have a few wildflowers appearing in our front lawn. And this is where we found our first ever skipper, perched on a seed head. However, it, or a buddy, soon became very fond of my lilac-blue perennial scabious in the back garden, which made great photographs as the flowers complemented its own colours beautifully.

Well, I never thought I’d see one of these in the garden! It was just passing through, but what a delight to witness its azure-blue fly past. Like the skipper, it appeared to have been attracted by the uncut grass. We see its paler cousin, the holly blue, fairly frequently, but this feisty little butterfly normally lives on chalk grassland, cliff tops and heaths. It’s another species being closely monitored by the Trust, so it was great to be able to record its visit.

Another first for the garden this year, and a truly unexpected find. Purple hairstreaks actually look more dull brown than purple, not very big, and are very easily overlooked. They spend most of their adult lives fluttering around the canopies of mature oak trees. Here, they feed on the honeydew secretions of oak aphids and seldom descend from the canopy. Whilst we do have an oak tree in the garden (planted by a jay or a squirrel about 15 years ago), it is far from mature and we hadn’t even thought to examine it for purple hairstreaks. And yet, here was one on a sunny July afternoon, feeding on a shasta daisy in the flower bed. To say we were surprised would be a huge understatement.

Our most recent, first-time visitor arrived in August. At rest, it looks very much like a common blue, but on opening its wings in the sunshine, it revealed itself to be a brown argus. This cousin of our blue butterflies is chocolate brown with a border of exquisite orange chevrons edging both pairs of wings. It was painstakingly visiting each individual floret of one of my early-flowering dahlias that I have growing in a large terracotta pot on the patio, not two metres from the back door. What a joy to watch!