I am typing this blog, for the very first time, in our new shed. 

When I say 'our', I really mean 'my'. His nibs will get to use it, of course, but I claim first dibs on decorating and furnishing it. It's my girly girly girl cabin. 

What I actually wanted was a caravan that I saw advertised on a local site - just 250 euros. My husband's snobbery and flat refusal have resulted instead in our 2,500 euro 'winter palace' - a shed some 10.5m square, on its own concrete square with verandah.

It is - I must admit - a place of perfect contentment, tucked away down here at the bottom of the orchard, barely visible from the house even in winter, turning its back to the slope of our neighbour farmer's hill. One side is hidden by the laurel hedge we put in as a windbreak, the other by the hedgerow line we planted some years ago. 

Getting it built has been a bloody nightmare, with the builder hurting his back, the ground freezing, the inabiilty to hire plant because of the wheat sowing, the endless rain. It took the efforts of four builders, three farmers, a digger, a concrete mixer, a whacker plate, two tractors and ourselves just to get the base in, and five days after the DH and I assembled the actual structure (which went up easy-peasy, log cabin-style), we lost the bitumen roof in a storm. 

But still, we can forget all that, now that's it's in, and it's lovely. 

There's no floor in yet, nothing on the walls and no furnishings other than a couple of recliners and a drop-leaf table, but nevertheless, it's the place in the garden that has become our daily destination. 

From where I'm sitting, I look across the pond to the small deck, the nameless acer - now leafless - the Wedding Day rose covered with tiny red hips, and on, up the slope of the garden, under the pear tree, through the cherry thicket, and on to the piggery and upper barn, almost invisible through the trees. 

The DH looks across all three ponds, to the willow hedge and the Paul's Himalayan Musk, the Kiftsgate rose and the lower barn. And the bamboo clumps that will one day be groves 30ft high. 

It is very private. There are birds singing all around me, and the comforting smell of the fir from which the building is made. The sun is traversing between the barn and the house, before it sets behind our lower barn. It's remarkably warm inside, considering there is no heating or insulation. 

I am absolutely in love with my shed, which is something I've wanted for years. A few years ago I bought a tent on Ebay and pitched that down here for the course of the summer, and it was brilliant. I came down every morning to do my yoga, opened up the zips and would find my (sadly now deceased) cat Lucy ensconced in one of the deckchairs. But this is even better. 

I now have, of course, all sorts of plans for my shed, which is going to be beach house style. A thin white wash inside, open shelving with a table and hopefully a small cooking hob. Mineral water, biscuits and magazines; a big mirror to reflect the light; curtains for the doors and windows. The flooring will be autoclaved pine planks, which have to be ordered from Rennes, 90km away (but at half the price of local offerings), and my old Heal's daybed will replace this teak recliner, with plenty of fleeces and duvets to cuddle up in. 

We've already bought a rather scary-looking Tilley lamp and if, as we intend, we can replace the doors with glass ones in time, then we'll also install a butane heater to make it cosy. In summer it will be our guest accommodation, and all year round, a shelter from the rain and cold, somewhere to work when the sun is too bright, and just a place to get away and enjoy nature. 

In addition to planting Guy's medlar tree yesterday, we managed to get the roses in.

It's two years since I planted roses, and I've missed it. It was just too expensive last year, what with the recession and all. This year I opted for mainly yellowy-buff colour roses: Gloire de Dijon, Goldfinch, Desprez a fleur jaune and Alberic Barbier - the last one supplied free by David Austin, as they supplied Auguste Gervais in error for this rose a few years ago. 

All of these roses are notable for their scent, and they're all strong growers, going to at least 15 feet as climbers, and perhaps up to twice that, but they're all been planted as shrubs, mixed in with coloured-leaved elders and cornus wands, purple berberis and philadelphus, so it remains to be seen how big they'll get. This latest planting means there are now 44 varieties of roses in the garden, most of them species and ramblers.

Guy's tree, meanwhile, is tree number 5 in the new 'orchard' that we're planting out the back of the house. Two trees - an oak and a walnut - self-seeded here, and this year we've added an apple and a greengage. By the year's end, I hope there will be nine trees, mostly small, and mostly floral so that we can look down on them from our bedroom window, which is three stories up. 

Medlars, in case you're not familiar with them, are an old orchard fruit not much grown nowadays. One reason they fell from popularity is that you can't eat them till they're rotten - you have to leave them to 'blet', like persimmons. When the skin goes translucent and the flesh goes pulpy, they're ready, and it's best to dig the flesh out with a spoon, and eat it with cream. 

I've wanted a medlar tree since I was a little girl when I used to play in my uncle's orchard, and it's a fine ornamental tree too, with a shrubby, olde-worlde shape, beautiful flowers and leaves that turn yellow in autumn. The fruit itself resembles a large green rosehip, and goes under the more colloquial name of 'open arseholes' - an accurate description, it has to be admitted...

It was a close-run thing between the medlar and a nashi pear, which is another fruit I've always wanted in the garden. More commonly known as an Asian Pear, a nashi is round like an apple but tastes like a pear, and the specimen I saw also had attractive bronzed foliage and masses of white blossom, so would make a good garden tree. Ah well, maybe next month... 

I've been truly delighted this year at the number of butterflies in the garden.

Apart from the swarms of Painted Ladies - a massive hatching that was noticed back in Morocco in the spring and which, right on time, hit France a couple of months ago - this year has also seen Red Admirals, White Admirals, Small Tortoiseshells, Peacocks, Clouded Yellows, Brimstones, various small blue butterflies that don't stand still long enough for me to see them, Swallowtails, Cabbage Whites and Marbled Whites in greater profusion than I ever remember. As you walk past our buddelia bushes, the butterflies rise up in great clouds. This year I even left some ragwort in the hopes of encouraging the Cinnabar Moth, and have seen hoardes of their stripy yellow and black caterpillars, so my hopes are high. 

We've tried wherever possible to plant our garden - formerly a bleak, windswept field - in a way that encourages wildlife. We have pheasants and partridges, which wander in from a nearby copse; a family of rabbits (regularly killed by our cats, sadly); red squirrels; innumerable voles and moles galore (whose molehills I collect as beautifully-turned garden soil).

There are also one male and three female deer that regularly visit the garden - preferring my rugosa roses to pretty much anything else, and stripping the willow and cherry bark in springtime. Therefore we leave every seedling tree, knowing that the deer will kill at least a third of them. They're partial to rosebuds and rosehips too, and only those out of their reach survive. This, however, is a loss we're willing to accept for the occasional thrill of seeing one ambling along in the dawn or twilight, munching casually. We are on a deer migration route and they were here long before we were. 

We aim at biodiversity in the garden, so we allow patches of nettle and bramble, and allow the wildflowers such as kidney vetch and clover to flower, along with grasses which are the food plants for many caterpillars, especially those of moths. We also scatter hogweed seeds around, and honesty, foxglove, euphorbia - anything that will grow and fill up a corner. Nettles are an important food plant for the Red Admiral caterpillar among others, while Swallowtail caterpillars like the feathery fronds of fennel.

Even more important than the butterflies, of course, are the bees, especially given that we have an orchard. I have looked into beekeeping but find the idea a tad intimidating at the moment. But it is an easy matter to make life easier for bees, while at the same time making your garden more beautiful. Here are 10 tips to make your garden more bee-friendly.

1 Plant flowers in the colours blue, yellow and purple. These are the colours that bees prefer. I have a lot of white, so need to skew the garden a little. Lavender, lilac, asters etc are all useful plants.

2 Don't use chemicals, of any kind. Ever. 

3 Plant flowers with single flowers, rather than double-flowered varieties where the bees can't get at the pollen. Single-flowered roses; buddleia (where the flowerhead is made up of hundreds of tiny single flowers); and 'umbelliferae', where the flower-heads are shaped like umbrellas (think yarrow, hogweeds, cow parsley, elder etc) are all bee magnets. So, of course, are flowers such as foxgloves, which break all the rules for colour and shape - but only the bumbles can get in!

4 Plant flowers in big, plentiful swathes, and have some diversity in there so the bees can forage around and get different sorts of pollen. Don't make some poor insect fly across acres of lawn and then find only a couple of flowers to harvest. Mix up the flowerbeds with flowers of different kinds and choose a mixed hedge rather than a single-species hedge. 

5 Have some water around, including shallow, muddy areas (some bees use mud to make nests and some butterflies like to drink muddy water). Even an old saucer laid on the ground and filled with water will soon turn into a haven for insects, toads, frogs, you name it. In larger containers, add some rocks at one corner so that animals can climb out if they should fall in. We have small water containers in every flower bed - some deep, some shallow, to act as waystations for wildlife. When we walk around the garden, our dog and cats regularly stop off for a drink.

6 Plant for year-round flowering. Our early bees come out to play for ivy flowers in January (good food for the birds, too, with its plentiful berries), then move onto willow in February and March before the cherries and plums come in, in April. Planting for year-round colour results in a beautiful garden for humans too.

7 Provide some habitat. A corner full of old twigs and brushwood; a rotting log hung up in a tree; a log drilled with holes. All of these make great houses for bees and other insects such as beetles. If a tree dies, leave it where it is and grow a climber over it such as a rose or clematis (or both).

8 Don't tidy up too much. A messy garden, full of dying vegetation over winter provides habitat for animals. Don't clear up until spring. 

9  Favour native plants. A native oak is scarcely less beautiful than a scarlet oak, but it will support hundreds more species of native insects.

10 Choose plant varieties with lots of pollen - don't worry about your allergies, these are caused by wind-born pollens, not the heavy, sticky pollens of insect-pollinated plants. 

Tomorrow: encouraging birdlife

Today I'll be indulging in one of my favourite pursuits of the year - making flower syrups.

I do this perhaps six days a year, when the elderflower and roses are in bloom. Elderflower syrup is one of those glorious gifts of nature - the plant itself, in the green version, is as tough as old boots and will grow on any wasteland or crack in the paving into which it can set seed. In its garden varieties - sambucus nigra Guincho Purple, sambucus nigra Aurea and the various variegated and lacinated varieties with their cut leaves, it's also a beautiful shrub, and flowers equally well.

The syrup has a wonderful, evocative smell and taste and I generally make enough to get myself through the winter. 

The recipe, if you want to try it, is quite simple:

Eight heads of elderflower

Pound of sugar or a one-pound jar of honey

Juice of one lemon

Gather the elderflowers in the morning after the dew has risen but before the heat of the day gets up. Strip the flowers off and pick out the insects and dead blossoms. Place in a glass or ceamic bowl, mix in the sugar, add the lemon juice and give it a good stir, then store somewhere sunny, covered in clingfilm, for 24 hours. It should liquefy, but if it doesn't, add a little water or alcohol to get it going.

Strain off the juice and bottle it. I use small Schweppes Tonic bottles and freeze them until needed, only unfreezing one at a time. Wonderful over ice-cream, or with gooseberries to add a muscatel flavour, as a winter cold cure in hot water, or with fizzy water in summer. It also makes a good flavouring for kir with a cheap white fizz. If you don't want to freeze the syrup and you're using sugar, bring it to the boil for a minute or so, then bottle in glass bottles. You don't need to do this with honey, as it's a natural preservative. 

You can do the same with the berries come winter, cooking them up for 10 minutes or so, straining and bottlling while hot, but for some people the berries are purgative and I am one of them. If they don't affect you, however (and most people are unaffected), they are very high in vitamin C and make a good cough syrup. 

For the rose syrup the method is the same but you need an awful lot of rose petals - about eight good handfuls, which would mean decimating the average garden. Luckily I have whopping great rambler roses some 20ft high and wide, and highly scented species such as Rosa Californica Plena, so more than enough to go round. The rose syrup makes a particularly special kir. Pull the petals off the rose rather than removing the whole head, if you can. 

As a final tip, if you gather the flowers in a colander, it gets rid of most of the insects and spare pollen, thus saving you fussing later. 

As a devotee of the works of the late Rosemary Verey, for some years now, each Christmas morning, I've gone around the garden to see what's in flower.

Ms Verey's book The Garden in Winter is what first gave me the idea. Winter is my most dismal time of year and by February, after months of rain and fog I'm usually at a very low ebb. So when I first began to plant my garden, about seven years ago, my first priority was winter interest.

I've never bothered with herbaceous planting, as it will take me the next 20 years just to get the backbone of this garden in, so my focus has always been on trees and shrubs. That's paying off in spades now, which is the happiest part of woody plants - they may be expensive to buy, and an effort to plant, but every year they just get better and better. 

Quite by accident, this year my bouquet contains more flowers than other winter interest (berry, bark and evergreen leaves). The biggest surprise was the Graham Thomas roses, of which there were half a dozen still in bloom on Christmas Day. My Graham Thomas is a complete thug and flowers prolifically despite its windswept Western-facing site. Each year the wind rips it free of the wall and today I'll cut it to the ground in the hope that the new growth will face upwards rather than straight out at 45 degrees. 

Also in flower was rosa Evelyn, another English Rose by David Austin, and much more tender. So too was mahonia media 'Charity', planted over the body of our beloved cat Worthing, and abelia grandiflora with its pinkish flowers and modest, shiny evergreen leaves.

An unknown spiraea which flowered in the spring and once again in autumn this year has lent its tiny white flowers, and my subtle parrotia persica is in flower too, with tiny dark-red flowers encased in brown velvet, which betray its relationship with the witch hazels. Real hazels come next, with their dull winter catkins, and finally, there is the mimosa, often cut to the ground by the Normandy winter, but always reappearing, a little forward of its old site. Its flowers are still in bud, but if it makes it through the winter, they'll be heads of fluffy, yellow, vanilla scent by March.

Yesterday I forewent the peeling bark of rosa roxburghii, preferring to let it grow a little more before I prune it, but I took the dark red twigs of cornus 'Gottschaud',  the fiery-red twigs of cornus sanguinea 'Winter Beauty' and the egg-yolk yellow stems of salix vitellina. For a bit of structure, I also added stems of salix tortuosa - the Devil's Claw Willow - which has shot to 20ft high in six years in spite of the steep, barren north-facing slope on which it's planted.

The lovely red berries - disliked by the birds - are from cotoneaster cornubia, which shares that same slope and even though it was split right in half by the wind five years ago, still towers over my head. 

Walking around the garden in the bitter weather is a wonderful reminder that the earth isn't really dead and that plants need their winter hibernation like human beings need their sleep. Gathering my Christmas Day bouquet each year gives me a real lift, with its memories of summer and the promise of spring.