Egglestone, Teesdale: If imperfection is your chosen aesthetic, then look no further than the goldilocks buttercup

Every year at bluebell time, the same thought recurs: spring is slipping away. In less than two weeks it will officially segue into summer and, like the last sand grains flowing through an egg timer, these final glorious days seem to gather pace. But this is an idyllic place to while away one of them.

Downstream from Abbey Bridge, the Tees Valley Way passes through deciduous woodland, which clings to a steep bank high above the River Tees. The rocky gorge below is filled with birdsong; blackcaps, willow warblers, a song thrush, almost drowning the sound of the river. Overhead, newly expanded oak leaves are as translucent as stained glass. Along the footpath, an aroma of garlic rises from starry constellations of ramson flowers when I brush against them. Florist shop fragrance saturates the air where it passes through drifts of bluebells. Tens of thousands of flowers, all waiting for a pollinator.

Willington, County Durham: The small heath makes sure to cast a tiny shadow; the dingy skipper chooses camouflage

Mid-morning, on the warmest day of the year so far. The only clouds are of wispy, plumed seeds, released from dandelion clocks and ripe goat willow catkins, ethereal “witches’ gowns” rising on thermals into a clear blue sky.

This south-facing slope, formerly the site of Brancepeth colliery, landscaped then ungrazed for half a century, is a high-quality butterfly habitat. One pace ahead of us along a path through waist-high grasses, two freshly emerged dingy skippers are engaged in a furious aerial dogfight, before seeming to vanish into the ground. Their cryptic coloration, blending with scuffed earth that they prefer to settle on, is astonishingly effective. I watch one settle, look away, and can’t locate it again. Get close enough – if you can – and it’s apparent that “dingy” is a calumny; its wing scales are intricately arranged into mottled patches and fringes, in shades of brown and cream, like threads in the pattern of a Fair Isle jumper.

Eggleston, Teesdale: In all my years of nature watching they have been distant apparitions, until today

Buzzards were uncommon here when I first became a Country Diarist, 35 years ago. To watch them then I would need to cross the North Pennines into Cumbria. Now there are few days when I don’t hear their mewing calls in the Durham dales, almost always soaring high above, ever on the lookout for carrion.

Once, on a memorably hot summer afternoon, I watched eight soaring in languid, effortless circles on rising thermals, with hardly a single wing stroke, stacked one above the other like airliners orbiting in a holding pattern. Sometimes, encounters have been more dramatic. This spring I watched as one turned on its back and displayed its talons to another flying alongside. A courting pair, or rival males? I don’t know; the sexes are indistinguishable at that distance.

Auckland Park, Bishop Auckland: All around me the grassland is teeming with life, from busy spiders to chocolate butterflies

A geometrid moth caterpillar undulates through the grass. Grip with front legs. Cast off astern. Loop the body, drawing in the tail, and grip. Let go for’ard. Stretch to measure its length, with geometric precision, along the leaf. Grip again for’ard. And repeat. I tap the grass and the caterpillar freezes, relying on its resemblance to a dead twig to keep it safe.

Dappled shade cast by a hawthorn makes this a perfect spot to sit and rest on a sultry summer afternoon. Nothing fancy for a picnic, just a cheese and chutney roll, a pear and a carton of orange juice, but the company is endlessly fascinating. The calcareous grassland of this ancient wood pasture, unploughed for centuries, is teeming with invertebrate life.

Pikestone Fell, Weardale: The year’s first great pulse of moorland energy, the upland bird breeding season, is all but over

It’s uncomfortably warm on this rare, windless morning and the horizon wobbles in the heat haze. It’s uncannily quiet too: the loudest sound is an irritating squeak that comes with every step, from leather chafing in one of my boots.

Six weeks ago, when I walked this path, I was accompanied by a cacophony of dive-bombing lapwings, hysterical oystercatchers and circling, scolding curlews, all anxious for the safety of fledglings. They’ve almost all gone now, after heading back down the Wear Valley, towards the coast.

Crook, County Durham​:​This rampant climber has the blackberry bushes in its spirally grip. There are, however, some a few striking benefits

Botanists know it as hedge bindweed, Calystegia sepium. My grandmother, who struggled to restrict its incursions into her flower borders, called it the devil’s guts. I may have inherited it from her, embedded in the root ball of a day lily that I took from her garden as a memento.

Hedge bindweed regenerates from the smallest root fragments. I’ve dug out yards of its brittle underground stems, which resemble white worms and exude milky latex when broken. William Withering, the 18th-century physician who discovered the medicinal properties of foxglove and was always on the lookout for other therapeutic native plants, advocated these as an alternative to scammony, a violent purgative extracted from roots of a related Middle Eastern species, and used to expel tapeworms. His patients must surely have wondered whether he had let loose the devil in their own guts.

Deerness Valley Way, County Durham: We watched the whole performance – a bewildered, stumbling wasp, unable to resist another floral visit

It has begun to feel autumnal here. Today, this tree-lined footpath was strewn with fallen leaves, shed during the heatwave, but enlivened by a blaze of end-of-summer wild flowers: purple willowherb and knapweed; yellow loosestrife, tansy and ragwort; pink umbels of angelica.

The plant we had come to look for – broad-leaved helleborine, with its demure greenish-purple flowers – might be more subdued, but it has an intoxicating sex life. Epipactis helleborine likes edges and verges, embankments and cuttings. This disused railway line, linking former pit villages, is all edges. It skirts woods and old quarries, sheep pastures and meadows where curlews nest, snaking downhill from Stanley Crook towards Esh Winning.

Crook, County Durham: It is almost miraculous that this tiny beauty is here at all. Now it has to contend with an upset climate

In the cool hour after sunrise on 5 August, a scorching day during the heatwave, I watched shafts of sunlight piercing the hedge, sweeping across the garden. For a moment, a spotlight fell on a garden spider’s half-finished orb web, its owner threading the final silken spiral on to radiating spokes.

As the sun rose, the sunbeam shifted and the snare became almost invisible, a deathtrap for any passing insect. A small, vulnerable butterfly, jinking between the shrubs, settled on a conifer branch nearby: a newly hatched holly blue, with immaculate wings like pale azure silk.

Wolsingham, County Durham: In 1665, Robert Hooke’s Micrographia opened up a world that is still as captivating to me now as it was in my childhood

September 1962: a group of 11-year-olds armed with hand lenses, members of the school natural history club, sit around a table. The biology teacher Ken Murch, introducing us to wonders of nature that lie beyond the limits of the unaided human eye, hands us a ripe spore capsule of a moss: “Look at this, but breathe on it first.”

Sixty years later, I still carry a hand lens. Today I followed Ken’s instructions again, looking at a capsule of capillary thread-moss, plucked from a wall. A ring of tiny peristome teeth around the capsule mouth, regulating the shedding of spores, clenches and unclenches in response to moisture in my breath. Exquisite natural micro-engineering, as captivating now as it was all those years ago.

Warkworth, Northumberland: Redshanks and breaking waves provide a perfect soundtrack in crystal clear air

This saltmarsh has a slow, rhythmic pulse. Twice daily, the conjunction of the moon’s gravitational pull and the Earth’s rotation draws saltwater into the Coquet estuary, sending it creeping along brackish, muddy channels, through Spartina grass, between sand dunes and fields.

It’s low tide. A little egret, waiting for the first trickle that will coax crabs to sidle cautiously out of their mud burrows, keeps a wary eye on us as we pass. The last spring tide left a broad ribbon of reed straw, driftwood and moulted seabird feathers – from gulls, waders, even a few from geese and swans – along the edge of the dune, all the way to the high point that overlooks Amble on the far bank of the river.

Bishop Auckland, County Durham: The southern hawker is known for being inquisitive, but today its attention is on the feast at the ivy

A still, warm autumn morning, and ivy in full bloom is cascading over the wall around Auckland park, seething with insects: comma and red admiral butterflies, honeybees and bumblebees, bluebottles, wasps, drone flies and hoverflies.

Does the ancient ivy support the crumbling wall, or vice versa? Its glossy leaves and lime-green flowers hide the stone completely. The inflorescences are spheres of florets, each with a coronet of five stamens tipped with golden pollen, surrounding pools of nectar droplets that glisten in the sunlight. There are no other nearby food sources for nectar drinkers and pollen nibblers: this is their last chance saloon, before winter arrives.

Wolsingham, Weardale: Snails, fungi and countless insects will thrive on this ash, which has joined other fallen specimens from decades ago

There’s a carpenter’s-workshop fragrance of freshly splintered timber in the air. Last night the first high winds of autumn brought down an ash tree, now lying across the footpath. The Weardale Way is narrow here, between woodland and river, so we are forced to skirt around the obstacle by climbing the steep escarpment. The ground underfoot is soft, cushioned by decades of ankle-deep leaf mould releasing its rich aroma of fungal decay.

It’s an ill wind that blows nobody any good, goes the old saying, never more apt than when applied to fallen timber that’s left to rot, to be colonised by host of opportunist organisms. The newly stricken ash is about to begin its afterlife, in a cycle of decay as a succession of fungi moves in, secreting enzymes, softening, digesting. An old section of fallen trunk that carried a crop of stump puffballs last year is now covered with serried ranks of sheath woodtuft, taking their turn to feed on the fallen. Some casualties from previous gales are so old and rotten that they are merely cylindrical, moss-carpeted hummocks that crumble to the touch.

Meeting of the Waters, Teesdale: Humans have to be wary of poisonous yew trees. Not so these masked bandits

A treasured old guide to wildflowers, a birthday gift 60 years ago, sits, dog-eared, on my bookshelf. It warns of poisonous plants with a bold, black letter P, in the kind of gothic typeface usually seen when the credits roll in a Hammer House of Horror movie. Botany with a frisson of danger, plants with a chilling story to tell.

Few are deadlier than yew, fatal to cattle and horses if they browse its foliage, a favourite with assassins and still an occasional accidental killer of unwary people. The lethal dose is small, there’s no antidote, and death inevitably follows swiftly from heart failure. Add the tree’s ancient, funereal association with churchyards and you have all the elements of a gothic horror story. Every part of the tree contains the toxic alkaloid taxine, except for the watery, gelatinous red cups surrounding each seed; botanically they’re called arils but my grandmother in Sussex, who gave me the flower guidebook, knew them as “snotty-gogs”.

Wolsingham, Weardale: The long-tailed tits are avian acrobats, scouring the twigs for food

The annual ride on the ferris wheel of the seasons was approaching its lowest point: the winter solstice, the shortest day. Dank preceding days of fog, relentless rain, mud and dawn-to-dusk grey skies brought the temptation to curl up on the sofa and enjoy nature vicariously through the pages of a good book.

But then a north-westerly Arctic wind delivered today’s crystalline frost, frozen puddles and blue skies. A shivering, brisk-walking sort of day, until a small flock of birds had me frozen to the spot. Long-tailed tits, a dozen or more, bounding along the hedgerow in my direction. A troupe of avian acrobats, searching every twig for food morsels, never still for a second, like excited schoolchildren on a class outing.

Willington, County Durham: Kestrels and fieldfares thrive on this grassy hillside that is steeped in history

The growl of high-street traffic had barely faded as we walked uphill, away from the town centre, when we saw the kestrel. She was sitting on a leafless branch of a cherry tree, feathers fluffed, her back turned towards the icy wind. She seemed reluctant to fly as we drew closer. Cautiously sidling around her, we could see that her pale eyelids were closed; dozing in the early morning sunshine, perhaps digesting her last meal.

Then her head swivelled and our eyes met; mirrors of polished jet glared down at us. A shimmy of plumage, to smooth ruffled feathers, and she was away, chestnut wings scything across the grassy hillside.

Egglestone, Teesdale: Crouch down at this time of year and you’ll see the irrepressible energy of new foliage, fresh shoots and spring’s promise

In leafless crowns of trees at the top of the bank, high above the Tees, a relentless wind clatters twigs and bends old branches until they groan. It is a relief to escape the constant buffeting and descend into the shelter of the river’s gorge, into still air heavy with woodland aromas of wet soil and decay. Ahead, a wren– furtive, wary, tail cocked – glances in my direction then vanishes among fallen leaves.

On one side of the narrow footpath, there’s a steep drop into the river; on the other, a low cliff where my line of sight is level with lichen-encrusted rock, tree roots, tangled ivy and an emerald carpet of mosses under elegant, arching fern fronds. Tiny, translucent, ephemeral toadstools digest dead leaves’ soft tissues, until only the skeleton of their veins remains.

Crook, County Durham: After the delight of finding this magnificent butterfly overwintering in our house comes the dilemma

Dozing-off at bedtime, yawning, reaching for the TV remote control – and suddenly I’m wide awake. There’s a butterfly on the screen. A real butterfly, a peacock, wings pressed against the glass, hiding the newsreader’s face. It must have found its way in during those mild, late autumn evenings, perhaps roosting behind an armchair, now roused from its winter sleep. It circled the ceiling light, then headed for the door, into the kitchen.

We don’t see many overwintering insects in the house these days. When we moved in, more than 30 years ago, it was cold, damp, with ill-fitting doors and windows and gaps between the floorboards. Then, it was no surprise to find silverfish and devil’s coach horse beetles in the kitchen, queen wasps and lacewing flies hibernating behind picture frames and herald moths sleeping through the coldest months under the stairs. Since then, energy-efficiency improvements have kept the heat in and the wildlife out – apart from daddy-longlegs spiders, useful fly-catching residents that can’t survive outside.

Deerness Valley Way, County Durham: These beautiful little finches have been fixtures this winter, feeding off scraps in unremarkable spots

A misty, watercolour winter morning. Windless, perfectly still except for one shaking stem among a dense stand of tall seedheads of last summer’s rosebay willowherb. The perpetrator – a redpoll– appeared, methodically working its way up each sun-bleached stem, running each dry, curled pod through its beak to extract the few remaining seeds.

On our weekly walks along this former railway line, we’ve often seen small flocks of redpolls, usually mingled with siskins, always in the treetops, silhouetted against the sky. They raided silver birches, sending down showers of tiny winged seeds as they tore into last autumn’s seed catkins. Lately, they have plundered the alders, extracting seeds from woody cones. Never still for long, though, often erupting for no apparent reason into skittish flights before settling in another tree. We’ve watched their antics without managing to get a really good look at one.

Wolsingham, Weardale: The cock bird, an operatic tenor in immaculate evening dress, delivered a avian aria that I could hear above the tumult of the river

Upstream, the river glides past, a liquid mirror reflecting the overhanging alders. Here, tumbling over rocky ledges, swirling around boulders, it fizzes with bubbles. There must be a dozen wriggling riverfly nymphs attached to the underside of the first rock that I lift from the water. When these stone-clingers are washed into the collecting tray, they squirm with convulsive energy, then settle: a broad head, a yellow, flattened body, legs with brown zigzag tiger stripes, a trident of tail filaments, abdominal gills beating furiously, extracting oxygen from the water. They are yellow May duns, common mayflies in this stretch of river and, along with stonefly nymphs, are here because the water is clean and well oxygenated. And dippers are here because they are here.

I watched a pair courting on this spot in early February. First the female arrived, fanning her tail, fluttering her wings. Then the cock bird, an operatic tenor in immaculate evening dress: black plumage, spotless white bib, chestnut cummerbund around his portly midriff. Drawing himself up to his full stature, stretching his neck skywards, he delivered an avian aria that I could hear above the tumult of the river. Sometimes, his startling white eyelids closed. Blinking, cleansing the eye surface? Or winking, sending a signal?

Crook, County Durham: The tree currently wafting out clouds of golden pollen is also called Harry Lauder’s Walking Stick. But why?

There have been some fine displays of catkins in hedgerows here, but none compares with the corkscrew hazel flowering outside my window. It’s a mutant form of native hazel, with a compact canopy of sinuous branches that have lost all sense of direction: they spiral, twist, curl, bend and sometimes double back on themselves. For the last two weeks, they have been smothered in a curtain of long golden catkins. This afternoon, tree sparrows are using the tree as a staging post, en route to the bird feeders. When they land the catkins dance, shedding ephemeral, will-o’-the-wisp clouds of golden pollen.

Corkscrew hazel is horticultural Marmite: some gardeners love its sculptural quality in winter, especially when it is iced with a light fall of snow; others dislike its grotesquely distorted, dark green, hispid summer foliage. But it has a story to tell that is as convoluted as its limbs. It might have languished unnoticed in a hedgerow, but for a passerby with an eye for the unusual, a generous vicar-botanist, a music hall celebrity and generations of gardeners skilled in the ancient art of grafting.