European garden spider

The European garden spider is a gentle, clever web-builder you might spot between two plants on a misty morning. It has a round body with a pretty pale cross made of little white spots on its back. That cross is how it earned another of its names, the cross orbweaver.

This spider is a true artist. Using silk it makes inside its own body, it spins a beautiful round web shaped like a wheel, with spokes reaching out to a spiral of sticky threads. Building a whole web can take less than an hour, and the spider often does it again and again as the days go by.

The web is the spider’s clever way of catching food without chasing it. When a fly or a moth bumps into the sticky threads, the spider feels the web tremble and hurries over for its meal. When the web grows old and tatty, the tidy spider rolls it up, eats the silk to use again, and spins a brand-new one.

Garden spiders are shy and completely harmless to people. If something big comes near, the spider would much rather hide or drop down on a silk line than come close. In autumn a mother spider wraps her eggs in a soft, golden silk blanket to keep them safe through the cold.

These small spiders are part of garden food webs. They catch flying insects, and their dewy webs are one of the loveliest sights of a cool morning.