Claude the koala became Australia’s cutest thief and a viral sensation when he was filmed munching on seedlings at a nursery near Lismore last September.

But fame has only made him more brazen, with the hungry marsupial now helping himself to a weekday feed in front of staff at Eastern Forest Nursery.

New photos show Claude making a meal of eucalyptus seedlings in broad daylight as a nursery worker looks on. He reached the plants after climbing a shade cloth and down a pole.

Previously the koala would raid seedlings at night or on weekends when no one was around.

“We had no idea that a koala would actually come into the nursery and feed directly on our plants. I would never have believed it until I saw Claude sitting there on the pole,” nursery manager Humphrey Herington said.

“We all found it quite amusing, but at the same time, he has caused quite a lot of damage and continues to come back and visit the nursery.”

Adorable though Claude may be, conservationists say his behaviour highlights a serious problem – there isn’t enough food in the heavily cleared local environment in the NSW northern rivers for koalas to eat.

“Claude and his friends raiding the nursery to eat seedlings shows they’re desperate for food trees,” said Maria Borges from WWF Australia.

“This area in the northern rivers, especially around Lismore, is heavily cleared and it’s really missing good quality habitat for them.

“We need to plant more trees and urgently stop tree clearing especially around the northern rivers which is a stronghold for koala populations in New South Wales.”

Five hundred seedlings that Claude had munched on have just been planted in the local area to help provide food for him and his friends.

The seedlings were unsuitable for sale but still viable, so Herington donated them to WWF Australia, which is funding a larger community tree-planting project.

Community groups have planted 400,000 seedlings in the region and are aiming to reach 500,000 by the end of the year.

The property of NSW Greens MLC Sue Higginson is one of the locations for the new tree plantings.

She said it was wonderful Claude had brought so much attention to the area but said his story highlighted the need to take the plight of endangered koala populations in northern NSW seriously. In the Northern Rivers region, koala habitat has been cleared for activities including agriculture, predominantly for the creation of pasture.

A 2020 NSW parliamentary inquiry found koalas would be extinct in the state by 2050 without urgent action.

Governments continue to permit the clearing of koala habitat, including for native forest logging operations on the mid-north coast and in areas that have been promised for conservation in a proposed great koala national park.

“We’re in one of the most biodiverse, rich areas on this continent, but historical clearing has seriously degraded the area,” Higginson said.

“I’m privileged to be a custodian of this little patch of the northern rivers. My job, while I’m here, is to make this place better.

“We’re doing this because we have an incredible koala population hanging on for dear survival right here.”

Alessandra Sampaio fell to her knees and wept as she clambered on to the boat’s deck and came face to face with the remote riverside clearing where her husband’s life was extinguished and hers turned upside down.

The sound of Sampaio’s lament mixed with birdsong and the voice of an Indigenous shaman echoed through the jungle where the British journalist, Dom Phillips, and his Brazilian comrade Bruno Pereira were shot dead in June 2022.

“Dom and Bruno are here! Save them! Their spirits are lost here! We can’t see them but they are here!” the 85-year-old medicine man, César Marubo, cried out, imploring his people’s God and creator, Kana Voã, to guide their souls towards paradise.

“Take them by the hand and lift them up into heaven!” Marubo pleaded, his eyes also filling with tears.

On the riverbank before them, framed by Amazonian money trees laden with bright red fruit, two wooden crosses marked the spot where Phillips and Pereira were ambushed and murdered, allegedly by a trio of illegal fishers who are in prison awaiting trial.

“What I most want is to leave this pain behind,” Sampaio had said the previous evening, as she prepared to make her first journey to the place where Phillips’s final reporting mission came to a sudden end.

Sampaio’s visit, marking the two-year anniversary of a crime that shocked the world, was part of a deeply personal quest to come to terms with the loss of her husband, a longtime Guardian reporter who was writing a book about the Amazon when he was killed.

“I’m not angry. I’ve never felt anger, I just miss him so much,” said Sampaio, who wears the wedding ring recovered from her husband’s body around her neck.

But the pilgrimage was also designed to announce the creation of the Dom Phillips Institute, which will honour the journalist’s legacy through educational initiatives raising awareness of the complexities and magnificence of the Amazon and its original inhabitants.

“We don’t want to be frozen in pain and frustration. We want to forge ahead,” Sampaio said as she journeyed by boat along the Itaquaí river towards the shrine activists have built at the scene of the crime. “We must transform this pain into a positive movement – and give new meaning to everything that happened.”

Sampaio said the institute would be guided by the qualities for which her husband was known: tenderness, a burning desire to listen, and respect for diversity and life.

“I think that if Dom was here talking to me now he’d say: ‘Go Alê: move forwards, learn more, make contacts, help to echo this message about this incredible thing that is the Amazon and all of its beauties,’” Sampaio said before travelling to the memorial on the same vessel Indigenous searchers used in their dogged 10-day battle to find Phillips and Pereira after they disappeared while heading to the rivertown of Atalaia do Norte.

Members of those search teams accompanied Sampaio during last week’s visit to pay tributes of their own.

“It was such a tragedy and we are here to celebrate them,” said Binin Carlos Matis, an Indigenous activist who worked with Pereira trying to defend his ancestral home in the Javari valley Indigenous territory, a Portugal-sized sprawl of jungle that is home to the world’s largest concentration of isolated peoples.

Orlando Possuelo, an Indigenous expert who helped coordinate the search operation and continues to work in the region, hoped the memorial would also remind frontline activists of the dangers that their struggle to preserve the Amazon involved. “We don’t want the Javari valley to be filled with crosses,” he said.

The headquarters of Possuelo’s Indigenous monitoring group, Evu, in Atalaia do Norte was the first stop on Sampaio’s two-day tour of the isolated rainforest region near Brazil’s tri-border with Colombia and Peru.

There, she heard distressing reports about the ongoing assault on the Javari valley territory where illegal fishers, poachers, miners and drug traffickers continue to operate despite government pledges to crack down. “There are 300 points of invasion,” Possuelo told Sampaio, pointing to a map peppered with coloured dots denoting the different threats.

Days earlier Evu activists had chased off a gang of five poachers who had invaded the protected Indigenous territory, confiscating tapir and peccary meat and hundreds of tracajá river turtles they were trying to smuggle out and sell. On the eve of Sampaio’s arrival, an Evu member was assaulted at a local bar – an attack members suspect was motivated by their work.

But Sampaio also heard heartening accounts of how Evu had ramped up its activities in the two years since her husband was killed while reporting on the group’s fight to protect Indigenous lives. Evu’s membership has doubled to about 40 since Phillips and Pereira were murdered, with plans for a 116-strong force in the coming years patrolling each of the Javari valley’s six main waterways.

The next day Sampaio visited the base of the Indigenous association Univaja, which served as the nerve centre of the 2022 search effort, to discuss her plans for the institute and ask local leaders how it could help their cause. “They will not silence Dom’s voice,” she told them.

Representatives of the Matis, Marubo and Mayoruna peoples took turns to voice their hopes and fears over the region’s future.

Teacher Nilo Marubo spoke gloomily about how a lack of education and opportunities was driving an exodus of young people from Indigenous villages. “When they arrive in the cities they end up getting mixed up in alcoholism, drugs and even [criminal] factions,” he said.

Marina Mayuruna, a 27-year-old activist, denounced the violence affecting Indigenous women and girls. “Some men will tell you this doesn’t happen. But it does – and it’s the women who suffer,” she told Sampaio.

Clóvis Marubo, a 58-year-old leader, feared younger generations were becoming disconnected from traditional ways of life as western culture marched deeper into the region.

“There’s been such a big change in the past 40 years. We are losing our culture. Our culture is becoming folklore,” he said, ruing how many youngsters no longer knew how to hunt monkeys or peccary, use bows and arrows, or speak their native tongues.

Silvana Marubo lamented the unabating threats to Indigenous activists and their non-Indigenous allies. “I worry who the next Doms and Brunos will be,” she said, telling Sampaio: “Your pain is our pain … your tears are our tears. Your struggle is our struggle.”

Sampaio listened intently as her Indigenous hosts spoke, engrossed by their oration just as her journalist husband had been. At times tears rolled down her cheeks. At others she smiled and laughed, radiating hope and admiration as she heard their petitions.

Outside, Phillips’s 53-year-old widow caught constant glimpses of the Amazonian treasures and peculiarities that had so captivated her partner. The boisterous yellow-rumped cacique birds feasting on mangoes in trees lining the rivertown’s streets. Dolphins cavorting in the waters below. The phantasmagoric statues of snakes, jaguars and saints adorning Atalaia do Norte’s squares.

One afternoon Sampaio took part in a Matis whipping ritual called mariwin, where men wearing ceramic masks and covered in fern leaves thrash participants with palm stalks to frighten off evil spirits. Sampaio winced as the lash struck her back but vowed to return to the Javari valley to ensure the Dom Phillips institute’s first project benefited a place he had loved and where he was lost.

“I don’t want to be stuck with this [negative] image of the Javari. For me the Javari is a world waiting to be discovered,” she said, staring out across the bronze-coloured waters where her spouse once roved. “This is a special place for me.”

The last time Igor De Santis ran for mayor in Ingria, a tiny village surrounded by forests and mountains near Turin, he won an easy landslide victory. But he faces a tough challenge in his bid for a fourth mandate, after his mother joined a rival camp.

Ingria, one of the smallest villages in Italy, is home to 46 inhabitants. A further 26 people, registered to vote from abroad, make up the electorate.

De Santis, 42, has led the administration since 2009 and had expected competition in the mayoral race from an opposition councillor, 70-year-old Renato Poletto. The situation became more complicated when Stefano Venuti, a Milan resident who has a second home in Ingria, threw his hat into the ring. “We weren’t expecting that,” said De Santis.

And then the micro-race was fully upended by Poletto announcing that he had secured the support of De Santis’s mother, Milena Crosasso, and had put her forward for a councillor position in the ballot to elect a new council on 8-9 June, as part of a list comprising nine women and one man. In all, 30 people – about two-thirds of the village’s inhabitants – are now competing for positions.

“I did ask [my mother] to join me but after she saw that Poletto’s list was mostly women she decided to go with them,” said De Santis. “They are all volunteers who have worked really hard for the village.”

Crosasso said that the rivalry would not impact family harmony. “Both my son and I want the best for the community and this is an opportunity to give voice to women’s points of view without weakening family bonds,” she said.

Ingria is in Italy’s Soana Valley and experiences similar issues to other mountain villages, such as depopulation, scant services and challenges with snow during winter. Since 2022, when it was named as being among Italy’s “most beautiful” villages, it has also had to deal with an increase in tourism.

“There has been an incredible spike and we have to manage this,” said De Santis. “There are few residents, but a lot of second homes. Our main aim is to preserve Ingria’s beauty.”

Venuti told Corriere della Sera newspaper that he decided to run for mayor after being urged to do so by locals. “I’ve integrated very well,” he said.

Despite the competition, De Santis, whose grandfather was mayor of Ingria for 30 years, said he was “optimistic” that he could win.

College students celebrating Memorial Day weekend by California’s Shasta Lake left behind hoard of trash, according to US Forest Service officials.

Last weekend, approximately 3,000 students from the University of California, Davis and the University of Oregon partied at Shasta Lake, a 30,000-acre reservoir in the golden state, and left piles of debris cluttered around the lake.

According to forest service officials, despite being asked to clean up after themselves, the students left behind trash including cups, cans, plastic wrappers and pool floats.

Speaking to CBS, Shasta-Trinity National Forest recreation staff officer Deborah Carlisi said that staff members handed out trash bags to students for them to pack up their items.

“Some students used them, some students didn’t,” Carlisi said. A three-person cleanup crew ultimately spent six hours picking up the trash around the lake. Nevertheless, not all the trash was removed.

Due to rocky beaches, high water levels and dangerous water conditions, cleanup crews will not be able to pick up the trash at the bottom of the lake “until late next month or early July”, said Carlisi.

“What was left behind in the lake could be damaging to our fish and wildlife, which is a big problem. If a deer goes down to the water and eats a plastic wrapper, that would make them sick,” she added.

In response to the litter, the University of Oregon issued a statement in which it apologized for its students’ actions.

“The garbage left behind does not represent the values of our institution. We are sorry for the impact to the island and extra work for the forest service,” the statement said, KGW 8 reports.

“We are investigating this event and working with the US Forest Service and our students to remediate the damage and hopefully prevent similar actions in the future. This is not a university sanctioned or sponsored event but is attended by university students, many of whom are members of university-recognized fraternities and sororities,” the university added.

Similarly, the University of California, Davis announced that it was investigating the incident, saying, “The university was disappointed to learn of this conduct, and is exploring ways of working with students to help restore the site or otherwise address the situation. We are still assessing information from the forest service.

“Students are expected to comply with all laws, and failure to do so may result in discipline under the university policy on student conduct. Student visits to Shasta Lake over Memorial Day weekend are not sanctioned or sponsored by the university,” it continued.

The Guardian has reached out to the forest service for comment.

A New York City couple who were “magnet fishing” in a lake caught more than they had bargained for when they pulled out a safe that had $100,000 cash inside.

James Kane and Barbie Agostini tossed a line with a strong magnet attached to the end into a lake in Flushing Meadows Corona Park in Queens on 31 May, Friday afternoon.

The couple managed to open the safe and found the cash, bundles of $100 bills, with an estimated value of $100,000, though the money was damaged by the water.

In an interview with NY1, James Kane explained they began magnet fishing during the Covid-19 pandemic due to the allure of treasure-hunting without having to spend a lot of money on equipment. Magnet fishing simply involves putting a rope with a strong magnet on it into water with the hopes of retrieving metal objects.

No one expected a safe to be on the end of the line though. Let alone one stuffed with cash.

“We pulled out and it was two stacks of freaking hundreds,” said Kane.

The couple said they contacted the New York police department about the find and said they were told there was no crime attached to the cash and there was no way to identify the original owner of the safe, meaning they were allowed to keep it.

“I couldn’t believe it,” said Agostini. “I lost it.”

The couple said they’ve never found anything like this, citing some of their previous finds, including old guns, World War II grenades, a full-sized motorcycle, foreign coins, and jewellery.

The billionaire rightwing media mogul Rupert Murdoch has married for the fifth time, this time to retired molecular biologist Elena Zhukova.

The 93-year-old married 67-year-old Zhukova on Sunday at his Moraga vineyard in California. Pictures released by the Sun, a Murdoch-owned British tabloid newspaper, showed the couple smiling next to each other as Murdoch wore a yellow tie while Zhukova wore a long-sleeve white dress.

Murdoch’s fifth wedding comes a little over a year after reports emerged last April of him dating Zhukova four months after he ended his two-week long engagement to Ann Lesley Smith, a 67-year-old conservative radio host.

Murdoch met Zhukova through a large family gathering hosted by his third ex-wife, Wendi Deng, to whom he was married for 14 years before their divorce in 2013.

Her 42-year-old daughter, Dasha Zhukova, is a Russian-American art collector and philanthropist who was previously married to Roman Abramovich, a Russian oligarch and former owner of the Premier League football club Chelsea.

Murdoch divorced his fourth wife, 67-year old actress and model Jerry Hall, in 2022. Hall was apparently waiting to meet Murdoch at their Oxfordshire home when she received an email from him which allegedly said, “Jerry, sadly I’ve decided to call an end to our marriage … We have certainly had some good times, but I have much to do. My New York lawyer will be contacting yours immediately.”

Last September, following a seven-decade career of helming a media empire, Murdoch stepped down as chair of Fox and News Corp.

Murdoch’s publicly traded and New York-based company News Corp owns hundreds of local, national and international digital news outlets including the Wall Street Journal, Fox News and Sky News Australia, as well as the book publisher HarperCollins.

According to Forbes, Murdoch’s net worth is approximately $19.5bn.

Donald Trump risks being a “loser president” if he wins November’s election and imposes a bad peace deal on Ukraine, Volodymyr Zelenskiy has said, saying it would mean the end of the US as a global “player”.

In an interview with the Guardian in Kyiv, Zelenskiy said he had “no strategy yet” for what to do if Trump returned to the White House, and that the former British prime minister Boris Johnson had approached him on his behalf.

If Trump beats Joe Biden, he is widely expected to cut off US military support to Ukraine. Last year Trump boasted he could end the war in “24 hours”.

Trump’s aides have previously sketched out a possible plan that would involve giving Ukraine’s eastern regions to Russia, as well as Crimea. But Zelenskiy made clear that “Ukrainians would not put up with that”. Nor would they accept a Russian “ultimatum” that forced Ukraine to abandon integration with Europe and future membership of Nato, he said.

Zelenskiy acknowledged that a re-elected Trump could, if he really wanted to, impose a crushing military defeat on Ukraine. He could cut off “support, weapons and money”, and even “make deals” with Kyiv’s partners so they stop deliveries of vital arms.

“Ukraine, barehanded, without weapons, will not be able to fight a multimillion [Russian] army,” Zelenskiy told the Guardian.

Speaking inside his presidential headquarters, he said he thought this scenario was unlikely. But he said if it happened there would be grave consequences for the US’s standing in the world – as well as for Trump personally. “Does he want to become a loser president? Do you understand what can happen?” Zelenskiy said.

He predicted that Vladimir Putin would violate any Trump-brokered deal. “A ceasefire is a trap,” he said. After a pause Putin would “go further”, humiliating Trump and making him look “very weak” in the eyes of the world, he said.

Zelenskiy continued: “This is not about him [Trump], as a person but about the institutions of the United States. They will become very weak. The US will not be the leader of the world any more. Yes, it will be powerful, first of all, in the domestic economy because it has a powerful economy without a doubt. But in terms of international influence it will be equal to zero.”

Realising that Washington was no longer “a player”, other mostly authoritarian countries and leaders would “come into the arena” and emulate Putin’s aggressive “approach”, Zelenskiy suggested.

And this would ultimately end in global disaster: “The beginning of what everyone is so afraid to talk about. This is reality. And this is the real third world war.”

Asked whether Johnson had spoken to Trump on Ukraine’s behalf, Zelenskiy said: “I think he tried, and I think he spoke to him. I think so, yes, as far as I know.”

He added: “I am sorry that I am using Boris as an instrument.”

The initiative came as Kyiv lobbied pro-Trump Republicans in Congress and tried to persuade them to drop their opposition to Ukraine aid. The $61bn military aid package passed in April after a six-month delay.

Zelenskiy made his comments a day before a New York jury on Thursday convicted Trump of all 34 counts of falsifying business records. The verdict in the hush-money trial made him the first former president to be found guilty of felony crimes in the US’s near 250-year history.

In 2019, as president, Trump rang Zelenskiy and asked him to investigate his election rival Biden and Biden’s son Hunter. If Zelenskiy failed to find dirt on Hunter Biden, US security assistance to Ukraine would be withheld, Trump suggested, according to a leak of the call. The scandal led to Trump’s first impeachment.

Zelenskiy said he had invited Trump to visit Ukraine. “I want to talk to him openly. I want him to come and see the war for himself. And then to talk to him. I think he would need it to understand the situation better,” he said.

Zelenskiy said he understood that Trump “knows” Putin, based on the former president’s own “statements”. The pair have met at diplomatic summits. Trump has previously called Russia’s leader “a genius” and described his 2022 full-scale invasion of Ukraine as “pretty savvy”.

Communicating with Putin was not the same as knowing him, Zelenskiy said, adding that to understand him better Trump should “see the results of what he brought to Ukraine” – a reference to the destruction of towns and cities, murders of civilians and the daily bombardment from Russian missiles.

Volodomyr Zelenskiy has accused China of discouraging other countries from attending a peace summit in Switzerland later this month that is aimed at bringing peace to war-ravaged Ukraine.

Speaking at Asia’s biggest security conference, the Shangri-La Dialogue, in Singapore, the Ukrainian president sought to rally support among Asia-Pacific nations, urging them to attend the Swiss meeting.

“The world has to be resilient, it needs to be strong, it has to pressure Russia,” Zelenskiy said. “There is no other way to stop Putin – only diplomatic isolation, a strong Ukrainian military and for all the countries of the world to not balance between Ukraine and Russia but to defend international justice and law.”

Zelenskiy said he was “disappointed” some world leaders had not yet confirmed attendance.

Russia was seeking to undermine the summit by warning countries not to attend and threatening a blockade of agricultural goods and food products, he said.

He later told media that China had supported such efforts to deter leaders from participating. “Regrettably, Russia, using Chinese influence on the region, using Chinese diplomats also, does everything to disrupt the peace summit. It is unfortunate that such a big, independent, powerful country as China is an instrument in the hands of Putin,” he said.

Since a phone call between Zelenskiy and the Chinese president, Xi Jinping, one year ago, Ukraine had sought meetings with Chinese officials at all levels, he said, but this had not been granted. He had not met Chinese officials despite their presence in Singapore.

Earlier on Sunday, the Chinese defence minister, Dong Jun, told attendees of the Shangri-La Dialogue his country had “been promoting peace talks with a responsible attitude”. “We have never provided weapons to either party of the conflict. We have put stricter control on the export of dual use items and have never done anything to fan the flames. We stand firmly on the side of peace and dialogue,” Dong said.

But Zelenskiy said: “With China’s support to Russia, the war will last longer and that is bad for the whole world. You cannot say that we accept sovereignty and territorial integrity of Ukraine and at the same time be on the side of the country that violates the principles of the UN charter and the principles of sovereignty and territorial integrity of Ukraine.”

Zelenskiy said on X he had met the US defence secretary, Lloyd Austin, on the sidelines of the Shangri-La Dialogue on Sunday morning. “We discussed the key issues: the defence needs of our country, bolstering Ukraine’s air defence system, the F-16 coalition, and drafting of a bilateral security agreement,” he said.

He said he was grateful to Joe Biden for his decision to allow Ukraine to use US-supplied weapons against targets in Russia. However, in comments to media he said that this was not enough as Ukraine still did not have the systems or permissions to target airfields from which Russia was “permanently firing”.

Weeds are undergoing a cultural makeover. Historically vilified as a threat in a nation of impeccable lawns, they are finally being embraced by gardeners, from front gardens to the Chelsea flower show.

The conservation charity Plantlife, which runs the annual No Mow May campaign encouraging gardeners to leave their lawns to grow for a month, said 46% of more than 2,000 people it surveyed would not mow more than once in May, with 40 local councils also pledging to leave wild spaces untended .

A summer-long exhibition at the Royal Horticultural Society’s Wisley garden in Surrey opened last month, celebrating William Robinson, a pioneering advocate of wild gardens.

After last year’s Chelsea flower show, in which weeds were declared “hero plants”, this year saw cow parsley and forget-me-nots, flowers that typically grow wild, win best in show in Ula Maria’s forest bathing garden.

Now a new book focuses on the beauty of these previously unwelcome plants.

Artist and writer Anna Chapman Parker spent a year studying the weeds that grew near her house in Berwick-upon-Tweed, Northumberland, writing and illustrating Understorey: A Year Among Weeds, which is published this week.

Chapman Parker said her year observing weeds everywhere she went – on the school run, walking her dog or out shopping – had allowed her to look at nature in a new light.

“Once you tune into what’s going on with these plants, the most unprepossessing walk becomes something really interesting and fresh,” she said. “One of the reasons I found this project so great was finding newness and freshness in that very routine, everyday rhythm.”

Chapman Parker’s work on Understorey began about five years ago, when, with two young children, she found she was missing time in her studio. She would take a sketchbook outside with her, drawing whenever she had a chance while her children were playing. “I wasn’t really thinking about what I was drawing,” she said. But often it was weeds.

While visiting the National Gallery in London, she had a lightbulb moment looking at Piero della Francesca’s The Baptism of Christ. Weeds were everywhere, “dotted all over the dry ochre earth, emerging from cracks in every rock,” she writes in the book. “No longer accidental green stuff that didn’t matter: they were a living constancy, a kind of wild connective tissue across time and place. I wanted to know them better.”

Armed with plant-identification apps and a copy of Wild Flowers of Britain by the photographer and botanist Roger Phillips, Chapman Parker learned about as many weeds as she could, making line drawings of them for the book, which spans a full year, showing the natural cycle of plants.

Zoe Claymore, an award-winning garden designer, said that the rehabilitation of weeds in our gardens had come as awareness grew of the climate crisis. “As our society becomes increasingly aware of the climate and biodiversity challenges we face, we are placing greater value on the ‘wild’,” she said. “This awareness drives us to take action in the spaces we can control, such as our gardens … We are reframing what a weed is in response to the climate challenges and biodiversity loss we are facing.”

As gardeners face increasingly volatile and unusual weather, weeds can also be useful, Claymore said. “As gardening requires more resilient plants – and we know the old set of ‘weeds’ are resilient by nature – they become more attractive. I think there is a push to recognise these robust plants and the role they can play.”

Take the groundsel, for example. One of the most widely distributed plants in the world, each specimen bears more than 1,000 seeds, which are resistant to frost, can self-pollinate and produce three generations in a year. “It’s an incredibly impressive plant,” said Chapman Parker.

Weeds are ecologically vital too. Since the second world war, the UK has lost 97% of its wildflower meadows. While most weeds would not be described as wildflowers, they would have grown in the meadows we have lost. Full wildflower meadows are harder to establish, but spaces given over to weeds can benefit pollinators and other insects, providing habitats and shelter for all kinds of animals, as well as capturing carbon.

Weeds, Chapman Parker said, have fantastic names. Groundsel is known as old-man-in-the-spring and there is also shepherd’s purse and ivy-leaved toadflax. Their names highlight a previous, closer relationship we once had with wild plants: we fed sow thistles to lactating pigs and chickweed to hens. Feverfew was a treatment for fevers and those with the “wort” suffix had medicinal uses.

Some weeds – notably the invasive Japanese knotweed – cause havoc or reduce biodiversity by overshadowing other species. But a few pots by the front door could harbour seeds blown on the wind or secreted by a bird.

“That happenstance element, or behaviour, of weeds, it’s so much more interesting than going along to the garden centre and chucking in a few bedding plants,” said Chapman Parker. “It’s really lovely.”

She described her garden as having “lapsed” since she took a keen interest in weeds, although she said she is “not a total rewilding romantic”. “Sometimes people say: ‘Don’t use the word “weed”, it’s negative.’ I think it’s more interesting to reclaim the word as neutral or potentially positive.

“The international conversation around ecology is pretty dark, and most of us feel incredibly powerless and despondent about it. I think these plants are a real signal of hope.”

It is a land of mire, mist and midges that could soon be awarded a special status among the planet’s wild habitats. In a few weeks, Unesco is set to announce its decision on an application to allow the Flow Country in north Scotland to become a world heritage site.

Such a designation is only given to places of special cultural, historical or scientific significance and would put this remote region of perpetual dampness on the same standing as the Great Barrier Reef, the Grand Canyon and the Pyramids.

The Flow Country straddles Caithness and Sutherland in the most northerly part of the British Isles and is the largest area of blanket bog in the world. Covering 4,000 sq km, it is also home to a remarkable range of wildlife that includes the black-throated diver, golden plover, greenshank, golden eagle, merlin and short-eared owl, as well as otters and water voles.

The land is carpeted with sphagnum moss that covers layers of peat that can reach down to depths of 10 metres, enough to bury a double decker bus, while the local plant life includes sundews, which use their sticky tentacles to feed on insects.

It is a remarkable habitat which was the subject of a formal request made last year by a partnership including the RSPB, NatureScot and the Highland Council to have the bogs, pools, lochs and hills of the Flow Country designated a world heritage site, a place of outstanding international importance that deserves ­special protection. Unesco has said that, after more than a year’s deliberation, it is ready to give its formal decision on the application in the next few weeks.

“There are many other, larger areas of peatland in the world – in Siberia, for example – but blanket bog is special,” said Roxane Anderson, professor of peatland science at the University of the Highlands and Islands, which is also involved in the Unesco bid. “Blanket bog can cover very steep slopes, unlike other types of peatland, and can envelop the landscape in a very complex mosaic. It is also very thick, not so much a blanket as a quilt that coats the entire terrain.”

As to the factors that sustain ­blanket bog, Anderson is clear. “It’s the rain and the fog. If you have peat and the weather gets warm and dry, it will dry, crack and fall away in steep areas. But in the Flow Country it never gets dry or hot, so the bog here remains intact, even on sharp inclines.”

The blanket bogs of Caithness and Sutherland have been growing for an astonishingly long time, since the last glaciers retreated from the north of Scotland more than 10,000 years ago. Over this time, they have played a critical role in storing carbon. The Flow Country covers a total of almost one million acres of land and stores more than 400m tonnes of carbon in its blanket bog, scientists have calculated. However, there is a downside to this mix of peatland and peace: midges. The Flow Country is rated as one of the worst places in Scotland for that eternal curse of Caledonia, Culicoides impunctatus. Midges appear as maddening clouds of biting bugs that will attack humans, livestock and pets and they thrive in the region’s boggy, acidic ground which provides a perfect environment for breeding.

The region is also remarkable because it provides an extensive area of wild land and solitude on the other­wise highly developed and densely populated British islands. This desolation was enhanced during the clearances of the 18th and 19th centuries, when many Highlanders were forcibly evicted from their homes in the wake of the failed uprising by the Jacobites. Vast tracts of the north of Scotland were depopulated as a result.

Just what the Flow Country will gain if it is made a world heritage site remains to be seen, however. “At present, tourists take the North Coast 500 route, a 500-mile circuit of roads that loop round the north of Scotland completely skirting the Flow Country,” said Frances Gunn, chair of the Flow Country World Heritage Project steering group. “We hope that, in future, if they see signs telling them they are passing a world heritage site, they might take a detour and visit us.”

A key site to appreciate the ­wonders of the Flow Country is the RSPB reserve at Forsinard which covers more than 21,000 hectares and provides sights of golden plover, dunlin, greenshank, hen harrier, skylark and meadow pipit. “It provides a perfect view of the glories of the Flow Country,” said the RSPB’s Milly Revill Hayward.

Gunn, who has lived in the area all her life, recalls the onset of summer when she was young. Families would set off to cut peat from land at the edge of the main part of the Flow Country. “It was a great social occasion that could last a long time, depending on the weather. For us, peat was a key source of energy. Today, we now realise that peat helps provide us with protection against ­climate change.”

From her house, Gunn has a clear view of the peatlands of the Flow Country, while from the other side of her home, in Tongue, she can ­witness the creation of another remarkable local project: the Sutherland Space Port which is being constructed on the nearby A’ Mhòine peninsula. In the near future, rockets fired northwards from the port, over the open seas, will carry satellites into orbits that will sweep over the poles and allow them to monitor the Earth below.

“It’s a neat juxtaposition,” said Gunn. “On one side, we will be working to protect the past in our neighbourhood and preserve the Flow Country. On the other, we will be launching space probes that will allow us to survey the state of the environment in every other part of the globe.”