The stiff, spiky and upright leaves and brown flowers of hard rush are a familiar sight of wetlands, riversides, dune slacks and marshes across England and Wales.

The Marsh helleborine is a beautiful orchid of fens, wet grassland and dune slacks. Growing in profusion in places, look for reddish stems and white-and-pink flowers.

Pellitory-of-the-wall is a small to medium-sized herb that frequently grows from cracks in old stone walls, pavements, cliffs and banks, and churches and ruins.

This colonial creature looks like an old-fashioned quill - that's where the name sea pen comes from.

The striking black-and-white checks of the marbled white are unmistakeable. Watch out for it alighting on purple flowers, such as field scabious, on chalk and limestone grasslands and along…

This brown seaweed lives in the mid shore and looks a bit like bubble wrap with the distinctive air bladders that give it its name.

This sponge is found on rocky shores around the UK and looks like a thick bready crust (if you use your imagination a bit!).

Unsurprisingly, the chalkhill blue can be found on sunny, chalk grassland sites in southern England. Clouds of this beautiful blue butterfly may be seen fluttering around low-growing flowers.

The tightly packed, thistle-like purple flower heads of common knapweed bloom on all kinds of grasslands. Also regularly called black knapweed, this plant attracts clouds of butterflies.

The whinchat is a summer visitor to UK heathlands, moorlands and open meadows. It looks similar to the stonechat, but is lighter in colour and has a distinctive pale eyestripe.