Scenes from a back garden: The most successful residents of our garden are often the accidentals – a fine flock of aquilegias, which arrived uninvited, for example. The “let’s leave it and see what it grows into” principle has served well. The lace-cap hydrangea and the weigela grew from bits accidentally broken off their parents (bought from garden centres). The parents died off years ago, but the broken bits, just pushed into the soil and well-watered, have flourished. Recently, when cutting the grass (it wouldn’t be right to describe it as a lawn) I spotted (wrong word) some distinctive leaves, just in time – and having managed to protect them from the mower, they’ve thrown up shoots with flower heads – common spotted orchids. Now why couldn’t they have come up in one of the borders?