Here are a few small changes you could make to the way you manage your garden that can bring major benefits for the creatures that call it home.
Choosing the right flowers
Flowers provide pollen and nectar for bees, butterflies and other insects that
Here are a few small changes you could make to the way you manage your garden that can bring major benefits for the creatures that call it home.
Choosing the right flowers
Flowers provide pollen and nectar for bees, butterflies and other insects that perform the vital task of fertilisation – seed and fruit production would drop dramatically without them. Avoid too many highly-bred cultivars with big and blowsy or double flowers, most of which contain little or no pollen or nectar.
Choose plants that provide pollen and nectar for as long a season as possible, from spring (Crocus and Mahonia for example) through to autumn (Michaelmas daisy, Sedum spectabile and ivy, which is particularly late to bloom and may provide food into early winter). Studies such as the RHS Plants for Bugs project are helping us understand how both native and non-native plants support garden wildlife.
See a list of suitable plants for wildlife gardens (1MB pdf)
Grow a mix of trees and shrubs
Grow a range of trees, shrubs and climbers, or a mixed hedge to provide food and shelter. The biodiversity found in our Urban Gardens project showed, perhaps unsurprisingly, that larger plants, particularly trees, support more wildlife. As well as providing food in the form of flowers, fruits and seeds, they provide cover and nesting sites for garden animals, from insects to larger species such as birds.
Small trees and shrubs that are good for blossom and berries include rowan, crab apple, elder, blackthorn and hawthorn – and not just our native species. Fruit trees support a range of specialist native wildlife and can provide for them while also supplying you with a useful crop.
Look after mature trees
If your garden is too small for big trees, get some planted in the neighbourhood, and protect those that are already there – large street trees provide a vital habitat for a range of wildlife that may visit nearby gardens while foraging. Wildlife rarely respects garden boundaries: try to see your own plot as part of a wider web of interlinked gardens and green space.
Ideally dig a pond, but a container of water will suffice. The single easiest way to add wildlife value to a garden is to install a pond, however tiny - a large pot or even an inverted dustbin lid in an out-of-the-way spot will do.
Ideally, do not introduce fish to a pond primarily there for wildlife (they will eat anything that moves), and if you can resist temptation, allow water plants to colonise naturally. Make sure ponds have at least one sloping side to allow creatures an easy way out. Most wildlife, including amphibians such as newts and frogs, like shallower water than is generally thought.
Leave a pile of dead wood in a shady spot
Decaying wood provides an ever-rarer habitat to a range of specialist wildlife that is growing increasingly uncommon in the countryside, such as stag and bark beetles and their grubs, and many species of fungi. It also provides cover and hibernation sites. Any unstained or unpainted wood is suitable, although big, natural logs are best, ideally partly buried. Log piles can look quite architectural and rustic, though many people prefer to tuck them out o