Our garden is a jungle. We’ve had loads of rain this year and what was a sapling in the morning has grown to the size of Jack’s beanstalk by the afternoon. It’s a bit embarrassing. But on the plus side we have a garden full of wild flowers and a son who is obsessed with an app called iNaturalist. A perfect combo to fill time in the Easter holidays.

I like gardening. But gardening in Cyprus is a different affair to gardening in the UK. Let me illustrate.

Gardening strategy in the UK

1. Buy a good lawnmower that creates stripes on the lawn.
2. Pay Green Thumb to treat the lawn every few months to keep it green and lawnlike.
3. Mow lawn every week, making sure lawn stripes are exactly parallel.
4. Keep on top of the weeds, particularly oak saplings before their roots start to undermine the foundations of the house.
5. Paint all garden furniture in sludgy pastels from Farrow & Ball.
6. Never sit in garden because it’s either too wet, too cold or too stressful spotting weeds you missed.

Gardening strategy in Cyprus

1. Do nothing.
2. From January to May, use the side gate in order to get to the car without needing a machete.
3. Pay €130 every May for a gardener to strim the weeds and prune the hedges.
4. From June to November, sit back and enjoy how the scorching heat prevents the weeds from growing.

I loved my pretty garden in the UK but it broke me. Out here it is too hot most of the time to be fussed about perfectly manicured hedges. Grass doesn’t stand much of a chance and the land in my area is too rocky for lawnmowers. Green Thumb would have to be renamed Brown Thumb, which would sound rude.

This year we altered our well-worn Cyprus gardening strategy, for two reasons:

1. A baby blunt nosed viper in the front garden.
2. Herc’s obsessive need to be outside exploring. Preferably the front garden.

Vipers and babies don’t go well together and snakes are hard to spot in jungles. So we booked the gardener a whole THREE MONTHS early. He came and obliterated the weeds so that we were left with brown dirt for Herc to run over.

And then Cyprus forgot it was a Mediterranean island and started behaving like the UK. Rain, rain and more rain. Clouds. Even drizzle – in Cyprus! The island needed a watering, but my garden didn’t. Within weeks the jungle was back. And I wasn’t going to keep paying €130 to have it cut down.

Then one day I woke up with some Surplus Energy. A rare event brought on by an actual entire night’s sleep. I used my Surplus Energy to buy a strimmer and cut the weeds myself. Ha! The garden looked like a toddler after they’ve taken a pair of scissors to their hair. It was a tad demoralizing and, within a second, the weeds grew back.

Enter iNaturalist. The perfect excuse for a no-gardening gardening strategy. iNaturalist is an app that you can download to your phone or tablet. You take photos of wild things and iNaturalist will tell you what they are. I wish I’d known about it a few weeks earlier when Goobie and I spent forever trying to identify a Woodchat Shrike.

Goobie loves bird-spotting, insect-spotting and generally Finding Things Out. How lucky for him that his parents were thoughtful enough to provide the perfect garden to spot loads of things in. He might not spot a child-eating baby viper in our jungle but there are plenty of beautiful flowers, bugs and birds to keep him entertained if he survives.

He took the iPad into both gardens and started looking for things to photograph and identify with iNaturalist. Herc joined in for a bit until he kept sitting on all the flowers and scaring away the bugs.

We already knew the name of the gorgeous white, pink and purple anemones that fill the garden every spring, but Goobie photographed them anyway.

We both guessed how many types of flowers we would find in the garden. I was closest with 11. We actually found 21. And a mushroom. Not bad for no gardening.

Our favourite was this flower. Apparently it is a wild orchid.

Next Goobie moved on to insect-spotting. There was this interesting beetle with frilly antennae.

We lifted up rocks and found ant colonies and bug colonies. You have to take a clear photo in order for iNaturalist to identify it properly. If it doesn’t know, it comes up with a hilarious list of possible suggestions. A hornbill was suggested as a possibility for a blurry photo of a sparrow.

I was hoping to find a scorpion. I’ve never seen one in Cyprus but I know they are here because the guy at the Reptile Jungle told me.

Then we lifted up a rock and a black insect shot out, its back-end curled up menacingly.

‘A scorpion! I’ve found a scorpion!!’ I announced to the entire neighbourhood.

Then I noticed that despite the pointy end, it was nothing like a scorpion. Zero tarantulas and zero snakes were spotted either, more’s the pity.

Next were the birds. Birds are almost impossible to take photos of with iPads. But I later realised that you can use iNaturalist with photos taken on proper cameras. You just have to upload them to your phone or tablet.

As Goobie discovered last year, birds disappear when you try to take photos of them. They laugh at you from the trees. Still, we already knew the names of the regulars in our garden. There are the hooded crows, the thugs of the neighbourhood. The gobby Cyprus wheatear. The chattering sparrows. And the special visits from the hoopoes. I’ve been told there are bee-eaters around here too, but we’ve never spotted them.

On our exploration of our jungle garden, I also found a Nerf gun pellet, a rusty razor blade, a ball that doesn’t belong to us and a pair of sun-bleached pants. iNaturalist wasn’t interested in those.

I haven’t been paid to endorse iNaturalist. It is a great app for those who love nature and wildlife like we do. And it saves so much time trying to identify things on Google. Plus you can share what you’ve spotted with an online community. We haven’t tried that yet.

Goobie has had some good fun with iNaturalist so far. Which is just as well because his grandparents arrive for a visit next week and I’m going to once again take on the jungle with the stimmer. I think the jungle will win.