Sparkling with early morning dew, a spider’s web stretches between a phlox stem and a buddleia branch. At the centre the spider stays motionless ready to pounce on anything that flies into its trap.

Below, in a sunlit patch of Michaelmas daisies, a bee is busy on the mauve petals gathering valuable nectar from the flower’s golden centre. I savour such autumn morning sights when I walk into the garden at the Wildlife Trust’s Sutton Courtenay Environmental Education Centre, near Didcot. The spiders and bees are stocking up their reserves before settling down in their winter homes. One of the best ways you can help wildlife in your garden right now is to avoid ‘tidying up’. But if you do feel the urge to clear up you can make bug homes by tying together bunches of canes or hollow stems and hanging them in a sheltered place, and sweeping leaves into a pile in a corner. Mini-beasts like centipedes and woodlice will move into that pile, and then blackbirds and dunnocks will scatter those leaves vigorously as they search for juicy morsels. At Sutton Courtenay Environmental Education Centre the wildlife gardening group has been busier than usual this summer, making lots of different homes and spaces for mini-beasts to move in during the autumn. A pile of logs with a few branches and leaves in one corner makes an ideal home for hedgehogs and slow-worms. There are breezeblock and pallet ‘hotels’ with nooks and crannies for small creatures, and I expect frogs and toads will soon move into larger crevices. Beetles have found a new home in a vertical log pile that looks like a natural sculpture. Children visiting the education centre are exploring these areas on their mini-beast hunting expeditions and learning so much about creepy-crawlies.

Standing tall in the garden at Sutton Courtenay are teasel seed heads, the perfect larder for goldfinches to raid in noisy twittering groups or ‘charms’. If you’d like to see more birds in your garden, keep a few windfall apples to throw out for blackbirds and fieldfares during the winter. Hedgehogs are finding hibernation sites and that stack of branches and scrap wood you’ve made for a bonfire could be just perfect, so please check for prickly sleeping hogs before you set light to your bonfire!

It’s a delight to see butterflies still feeding. Brightly-coloured comma butterflies go for late blackberries as well as Michaelmas daisies. These beautiful butterflies will soon be heading for sheds and attics to sleep through the winter, although you may catch sight of them on a warm February day if the sun has woken them.

Autumn is a good time to work out where you can encourage more wildlife into your garden by adding a useful tree or shrub. Bark, branches and leaves all provide homes for a host of insects which in turn are food for birds.

Plant a rowan or hawthorn and insects will feed on the flowers, while birds enjoy the berries later. Early flowering scented garden shrubs offer hibernating bees and butterflies essential nectar sources on sunny winter days. It’s wonderful to see and hear bumblebees on creamy flowers of wintersweet or clusters of yellow bell-like mahonia flowers. Plant early-flowering crocuses and snowdrops now and bumblebees waking up in January and February will make a beeline for their pollen.

I look forward to the pink and blue ‘soldier and sailor’ flowers of the lungwort, another feeding station for bees and a welcome sign that spring is on its way.