Elliot Lane, Beth McFarland and Geraldine Blake respond to an article on how to make your outdoor space into a diverse habitat

I couldn’t agree more with your article on bringing wildlife into your garden (Build a hedgehog highway! 33 ways to welcome more wildlife into your garden, 26 June). If all of us who own a garden or other outdoor space could do one or two things to encourage wildlife, it would have a huge impact. There is a difference between gardening for wildlife and rewilding, and that is scale. I don’t have a large garden, so planting needs to earn its place. The trees I planted have blossom and fruit; I have three ponds, birdhouses and bee hotels; and I make sure I plant open flowers for pollinators. I was amazed how quickly the wildlife came.
Elliot Lane
Brighouse, West Yorkshire

• I live in Germany and have a garden that was a haven for my daughter and her friends growing up. I can’t bear imposing a hierarchy of my own devising on it, so I only subdue the real bullies such as ground elder and ground ivy. There’s wildlife, and I needed to make a pact with the voles. They can eat what they want after it has flowered, not before. Once they have munched their way across the garden, the ground is perfect for replanting.

From the humble Welsh to the painterly Icelandic, poppies bring joy – even when you don’t plant them on purpose. Here’s how to make the most of them

I wasn’t one of those kids who had their own plot in the garden. I count myself fortunate to have had access to a garden and a feeling of comfort in roaming the nearby fields, but I was so bookish that I preferred rainy- day indoor play to playing outside. Nevertheless, it’s interesting which plants we carry from our childhoods into our adult gardens: for me, a key one is Papaver cambricum, or Welsh poppy (AKA Notpoppies in our house, named by my Yorkshire grandfather, with according accent, after he – wrongly – identified them as such).

Tiny, yellow, rebellious: for so long I resisted such things in my own garden, preferring the grand structure and swag of Icelandic poppies (heaven in a vase) or flashier summer flowers. But your roots get you in the end, and this spring I rehoused half a dozen self-seeded “Notpoppy” plants that had smuggled their way from the garden of my upbringing into my parents’ miniature (if verdant) town courtyard. My home feels more like home with each one that opens.

The Marches, Shropshire: With the glory of summertime comes hayfever, which we are only making worse

Purple and silver: the solstice grass flowers. This is the first year that the whole five acres of Brogyntyn park has been left uncut, and Oswestry has designated it a wildflower meadow. The transformation is enchanting. The many buttercups, ox-eye daisies and few orchids have privilege, but the grasses are the liberated proletariat that have never realised its full potential before.

Common grass names have an earthy poetry: fescue, false oat, foxtail, fog, bent, brome, couch, cocks foot, timothy, rye, sweet vernal, squitch. For a couple of days it stops raining and warms up a bit. When the sun comes out, so does the pollen. VH, a red sign on the weather map, announces a very high pollen count (more than 150 grains per cubic metre of air). About half of the people in the UK report hayfever symptoms – allergic rhinitis. It can mean itchy eyes, runny noses, sore throats and sneezes for millions, but for some the reaction can be deadly serious. Dogs, cats and horses are also affected, as if sacrificing an immune system is a trade-off for domestication.