Call the cavalry! Horses ride to rescue of an inner city garden

Mounted City of London police receive a surprise order: to help trample in wildflower seeds at the Barbican

• Nature survives in the tiniest corners': the City of London's wild heart
• Read more in our series Biodiversity: what happened next?

It's not often that the City of London's police horses are asked to trample on someone's garden. But when the request came, it wasn't made by a spiteful neighbour but a group of community wildlife gardeners who wanted divots in their grass.

Normally, we get terribly told off for going anywhere near grass," says PC Ben Ballard, who rode Clyde around Barbican Wildlife Garden at the beginning of December, with his colleague Jo Brown riding Iris. This assignment today is a particularly unusual one - unfortunately we did some offloading of manure on the way because they might actually have appreciated that."