A late-flowering plant, Autumn gentian displays pretty, mauve, tube-like flowers atop its reddish stems. It favours dry, chalk grassland and sand dune habitats.

Cushions of clover-like, pink Thrift are a familiar sight of cliffs, shingle beaches and sand dunes around the UK. Also known as 'Cliff Clover', it makes a good garden plant.

Soft brome is a tall, annual grass of roadside verges, waste ground and meadows, and is a 'weed' of arable land. It has long, grey-green leaves and loosely clustered flower spikes.

The small blue's name is a little misleading: it is our smallest butterfly, but only shows a dusting of blue on brown wings. It is scarce, occurring on chalk grassland, mostly in southern…

A ferocious and agile predator, the green tiger beetle hunts spiders, ants and caterpillars on heaths, grasslands and sand dunes. It is one of our fastest insects and a dazzling metallic green…

Rare summer visitors, honey buzzards breed in open woodland where they feed on the nests and larvae of bees and wasps.

The garden tiger is an attractive, brown-and-white moth of sand dunes, woodland edges, meadows and hedgerows; it will also visit gardens. In decline, it is suffering from the 'tidying up…

A plant of chalk and limestone grasslands and sand dunes, Yellow-wort has butter-yellow flowers. Its distinctive leaves sit opposite each other, but are fused together around the stem.