Wildlife friendly gardening.
Gardens are our personnel outside space, a place to enjoy the fresh air and sunshine in the summer. Somewhere to grow your own food or flowers for the table. A place to exercise and keep active. Our gardens allow us to get back to nature, they are our doorway into the natural world. There is plenty of wildlife right there in our gardens for us to enjoy and we can enhance our gardens to encourage more wildlife into them. Our gardens also play a vital role in the network of green spaces connecting urban green spaces to the countryside, providing green corridors for our local wildlife.
There are some simple things you can do to make your garden wildlife friendly that won’t detract from its beauty or how you use your garden.
Don’t be too tidy, leave a pile of dead wood in a shady spot and this will provide shelter for beetles & other insects. Leave stems of perennials over winter, their hollow stems provide a perfect hibernation spot for beneficial insects such as ladybirds. Leave a few weeds in your garden, nettles, rosebay willow herb & brambles provide important food for some of our native butterflies, moths & other insects. Put aside an area of your garden to go wild, let the grass grow longer here, 20-30cm tall will provide shelter for grasshoppers & many other creatures as well as producing seed as food for birds.
Plant pollen rich flowers for our pollinating insects.
When you are planning your summer pots of beautiful flowering plants remember to mix in some ‘single flowering’ varieties. These simple flowers make it easy for bees, butterflies and other pollinators to access the pollen and the nectar.
Bees can be active from early spring to late November, so to give them the best possible chance to survive try growing flowers from late winter to autumn. Spring bulbs provide important early supplies for the bees when there is limited choice. Autumn flowering plants such as Asters, Sedums and Verbenna bonariensis will stretch out the autumn supplies for them.
Grow plants with night scented flowers such as evening primrose, night scented stock (M. longipetala) and honeysuckle, their beautiful scent will be a magnet for moths.
Hedgehogs are on the decline, but there are plenty of things you can do to encourage them into your garden. Hedgehogs like to roam freely in search for food, shelter and for a mate. They need open gardens to travel round and through, if yours is enclosed you can create a gap (15cm/6″ will do) in a fence or dig a channel under it, this will help them on their nightly rambles. They like undisturbed compost heaps, overgrown areas, log piles and fallen leaves to make their winter nests from. Hedgehogs are a great benefit to gardeners they eat a wide range of invertebrates, slugs and caterpillars.
Put up nesting bird boxes to encourage our feathered friends into your garden, it really is a treat to watch a courting couple set up home and raise their brood in your garden. Birds baths not only provide water for the birds but bees and other insects too. Bird feeders are an important source of food for many birds in the depth of winter.
Our gardens take up more space than all of our nature reserves put together. With an estimated 24 million gardens in the UK, the more food and habitats we all create, the more wildlife there will be. To be able to share our outside space with wildlife is a pleasure and a wonderful opportunity to learn more about them.
Enjoy your garden and the wildlife in it. Emily Mitchell, Cramden Nursery.
