Houghton Lodge Gardens

For some reason, we'd never visited Houghton Lodge Gardens, even though it's only about half an hour drive from home. Time to remedy that!

In terms of butterflies, the planted borders were very attractive to them.

We saw masses of red admirals, peacocks and commas.

The Japanese-style pond gave us our first golden-ringed dragonfly of the year ...

... and walking along the river Test, we saw loads and loads of banded demoiselles.

Throughout the day, there was a bit of a contest in terms of numbers of butterfly species and damseldragonfly species, but the butterflies were victorious in the end: 14 vs 11. Here are the tables (one = 1; few = 2-4; several = 5-9; many = 10+):