I WONDER WHEN the memory of tapioca pud will fade altogether from the national consciousness. It must be decades since that supremely uninviting dish was last served to resigned queues of schoolchildren: slick, globular, unchewable, and generally decorated with a sticky pink spoon of rosehip syrup (good for you), which made it taste like cough medicine. Frogspawn we called it, as all schoolchildren did. Now frogspawn has gone from our lives, along with blancmange, semolina, Instant Whip and jelly-and-Carnation.

We have frogspawn in the garden, to our great delight, and every time I see the stuff, I am amazed how exactly like tapioca pud it looks. Green rather than white, but otherwise identical. A female can lay up to 3,000 eggs: a full, brimming, wobbling plateful. It’s a lot of frogs, but frogs are resilient beasts.

The biggest threat they have faced has been the lust for knowledge. They were once collected in huge numbers so that schoolchildren and students could cut them up. This was an ingenious educational ruse designed to make sure that people who like animals had no wish to study them. Polluted waterways and the loss of agricultural ponds has also affected froggy numbers.

So here’s some good news to savour. There are more and more garden ponds these days, and frogs love them. The pond has become an essential for all right-thinking gardeners: what agriculture has taken away, the suburban householder is putting back. And soon it will be warm enough to sip a drink in the garden: the best way of savouring the habitat. A drink tastes better when there are frogs a few feet away.

• TALKING of gardens, I had a garden tick this week. Not a noisome insect, but a new bird for the garden. I don’t keep lists myself (despite the fact that Bill Oddie claims that all birdwatchers keep lists, even if its only of the number of times they tell people they don’t keep lists) but a new bird for the garden is always a bit of a treat.

  It was a slightly classy tick as well: Mediterranean gull, a bird that was once a wild exoticism in this country but which turns up all the time these days. There were two of them flying over in a flock of very similar black-headed gulls — that’s the gull you see and hear most of the time, the bird that says “three quarks for Muster Mark” in Finnegans Wake, thereby inadvertently naming a subatomic particle.

  I was able to pick the Med gulls out of the flock because they spoke to me. “Eoh!” one said, in tones reminiscent of Lady Bracknell and received the reply “Eoh!” The Med gulls join other garden whoopees: marsh harrier, barn owl, kingfisher and, most dramatically, a flight of whooper swans flying over the place at midnight guided by a read-the-newspaper full moon. Everybody else in the family ha d seen a little egret in the garden, but I was away that day. I am still sulking.

  I tell you these garden treats not just for the pleasure of boasting, but also to celebrate biodiversity. So many different kinds of living things: the wonder of it never fails to befuddle. Every list, made or unmade, is a hymn to biodiversity: so many! I had not thought life could exist with so many.

• THE LISTING tendency has been having a great time in Peckham this week in pursuit of the American robin, a lost, windblown straggler hurled haplessly over the Atlantic. Alas, I cannot see an American robin — and I have seen them only in America — without feelings of murderous rage. And all because of Mary Poppins.

  In the sweet-as-sick film Julie Andrew sings: “A robin feathering his nest has very little time to rest while gathering his bits of twine and twig.” The movie is, you will recall, set in London. The film then cuts, unsurprisingly, to a robin feathering his nest and — do you know it must be the first and only recorded instance of an American robin breeding in London.

  American film, American robin. Screw London. Screw truth. The two birds are not remotely alike: the American bird is the size of a blackbird, three times bigger than a robin robin, and quite different in every way. Ornithological pedantry? Not a bird of it. American arrogance, rather. A nation that could bring an American robin to London out of ignorance, arrogance and insularity was never going to sign up to the Kyoto Protocol, and was always going to continue its global ecological vandalism. Normal rules don’t apply to America, you see. Screw the world. Screw life.

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