I really loved this, and it hit me right in the heart when I wasn't expecting it to. Written in a casual style, The Bumblebee Flies Anyway follows the story of Kate as she takes up residence in a new home and sets about turning her tiny urban deck garden into a wildlife dream. The book tracks her progress through the transformation of her garden, and notes the uphill battle she fights to maintain the wildlife of the world while neighbours clear their gardens away in favour of decking cover and sanitary 'gardens'. The love of the outdoors, plants, trees and critters is clear in Kate's writing and you find yourself deeply emotionally invested in her small corner of the world. A must read for any gardener, beekeeper or sustainability advocate.

It's been a great year for bee books, but this one really stood out! It's thoughtful and well-crafted, and Bradbury's warm and down-to-earth narration offers a charming glimpse into how our connections to nature inform our understanding of 'home'.

When I heard that The Bumblebee Flies Anyway was about reclaiming a decked over garden for the wildlife, I thought this is my kind of gardening book. When we moved into our house, the small garden (front and back) had been covered in concrete paving and gravel, not a bit of green in sight except for the occasional resilient dandelion. Why do people hate living things so much?

When Kate Bradbury moves to Brighton her budget is tight but she manages to find a basement flat with a small patch of garden. She sets about removing the decking and installing her bee hotels, planting species that will attract wildlife back into her garden. On either side, the gardens are all the same, barely any sign of life, does urban wildife stand any chance of finding her?

She talks about the different species who call Brighton home, how modern lifestyles and the ever increasing need for housing has made life difficult for wildlife. There are a vast variety of different bee species and I learned a bit about our resident solitary bees that are nesting the the holes left by a satellite dish. We thought they'd abandoned it but now I know they will stay in there over winter and emerge in spring.

Whilst Kate wants to give over her whole garden to wildlife, she also highlights how even little things can help. A small pond will attract frogs soon enough. A few climbing plants or shrubs can give small birds privacy. A hotel made out of hollow stalks and a few bee-friendly flowers will soon get helpful bees hanging out to pollinate your veg.

I loved the gardening and wildlife bits, but like most nature memoirs these days, there is a large portion about personal tragedy. Kate's mother suffers a stroke, and the change in the woman is heartbreaking. Yet it's not really what I wanted to read about when I picked this book up.

What an inspiring book! Telling the tale of an unloved garden being nursed back to health, mainly for the bees, birds and butterflies to enjoy, we are taken through the process with all its ups and downs. Interwoven with this is a personal story. The author has a passion for gardening and for all the creatures that rely on it. She takes their welfare very seriously and goes to great lengths to nurture them. She is particularly interested in bees and I found it fascinating. I didn't realise there were so many different types. I always thought my garden was creature friendly, but I have learned I could be doing so much more. A joy to read. Thank you to NetGalley and Bloomsbury Publishing for an ARC.

An excellent book on wildlife in our gardens and how with a bit of thought we can all help preserve what little garden wildlife is left. This book should be in schools encouraging the young to put aside social media and step into a more fascinating world just a few steps outside their families back door.Fully recommend this book.

This is a lovely book. It makes you feel like getting outside and tending to your own plants and trees. I, like Kate, love Bees and have a Bee hotel and have leaf cutter bees in my garden. If you like nature and gardening you will like this book.

Kate Bradbury moves into a basement flat in Brighton, and sets about creating a wildlife garden from her decked backyard. We hear of her successes and stumbles, as well as her frustration as, for every creature who finds refuge in her small plot, she sees a neighbouring habitat cut down or paved over. This was an easy-to-read, but quite sad book, comparing a wildlife-surrounded childhood with the distance we now have from nature, as well as chronicling her mother's recovery from an aneurism. It was, though, a right-book right-time read for me, and I'm left wanting to make a species log for my own tiny decked-with-a-slither-of-wild yard. With no hint of preachyness, she's also made me so much more aware of the role of individual microhabitats in our towns and cities, and the positive impact we can make, even in a small space.

The first thing I noticed about this book is that Kate has a very unique writing style. This reads like a diary, almost, with a lot of run-on sentences and half-formed thoughts. It's beautiful to read, once you get used to it. Her descriptions of the garden are extremely evocative, from the sunless, unloved little concrete box she buys, to the life-filled, colourful garden she creates - it feels as if you can see it at each stage. I wish there had been pictures, but in a way, I can see why there aren't, as the beauty of the garden lies in its heart and its soul, not in any particular photo.

I loved reading about the patience and frustrations of planting the garden from scratch - as a beginner gardener myself, it's very difficult waiting for results when you know you may have to wait years to see things grow! I've been growing a honeysuckle for three years, and this is the first year it's had more than one flower on it, so I particularly warmed to Kate's attempt to cultivate her honeysuckle cuttings. 

I also found the description of the bird-life that she saw to be very informative - I had no idea about a lot of the habits she described, so that was lovely. A lot of her reminiscences about her childhood experience of nature are bittersweet, and there's a real sadness in the way she discusses the decline of spaces for wildlife, and the decline of the wildlife itself. You can tell that she feels this passionately (though I couldn't understand why, if city life depresses her so much, she didn't move to the countryside). 

Unfortunately, the second half of the book was extraordinarily uncomfortable and disappointing to me. Like in H is for Hawk, I picked up this book to read about nature, not about grief and pain. While I have every sympathy for Kate and her family dealing with her mother's illness, and it is beautifully discussed, this is not something I would ever choose to read about, and quite frankly, it ruined the book for me. There is no warning in the description or blurb about this.  So if, like me, you have a low tolerance for peering at other people's misery, be warned that this is not a happy book, and it is not about Kate's garden at all after her mother's aneurysm.

So, three stars from me, purely because it made me want to get out into the garden and appreciate my plants and wildlife more. But overall, I would not recommend this unless people know what they are getting - if that's your cup of tea, you may well love it. But it isn't mine.