Gardening for Wildlife

Think wildlife-friendly garden and you might well think overgrown wilderness. Unmown lawns and borders abandoned to nettles and brambles.

But a garden can be both beautiful and beneficial to wildlife at the same time. In many ways it can even be easier to look after.

It’s all down to making conscious decisions about the plants you put in and the ways you garden.

Circle-of-life gardening

​If all goes well, a nature-friendly garden should be self-policing. Songbirds will eat pesky snails, hedgehogs and frogs will take care of larger slugs, beetles the smaller ones.

Draw in the ladybirds, the lacewings and hoverflies and they will eat those troublesome aphids for you - no chemicals needed. Many birds will also eat bugs, as well as caterpillars.

So how do you harness nature’s pest control army?

Number one is water.

​Even a saucer will provide an essential drink for anything visiting your garden; if you can stretch to a small pond you can provide habitat too.
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Trees give birds a place to perch, to nest and can provide food to eat, depending on what you plant.​

Heroic hedges

​The benefits of hedges cannot be over-emphasised.

Vital to hedgehogs, they give a home to birds, pollinators and other wildlife.

Most have flowers followed by berries, providing food one way or another for months on end.

They slow the wind, which helps the butterflies and of course makes your garden more pleasant for you and your plants.

And in winter storms hedges are much less likely to get blown over than fences.

Just as thorny hedges can keep out unwelcome intruders from your garden, they can similarly protect nesting birds from predators.
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Options include holly, hawthorn and blackthorn - aka sloe, as in the gin!

Perfect for pollinators

​Bee-friendly flowers are a must for wildlife-friendly gardens and it is all about smart choices, particularly if you don’t have a lot of room.

Modern varieties of many perennials have been bred to have lengthy flowering periods, far longer than native plants do. You get to enjoy months of flowers from the same plant, and the pollinators get a longer period of nectar and pollen to feed from.
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Salvias are a prime example of this, many flowering virtually non-stop from May to December.

Help all year long

Planting for 12 months of interest is a win-win for you and for the likes of bumblebees, which are active almost year-round, so don’t just have summer flowers in your garden.

Bulbs can give you a succession of pollen-rich blooms for the first half of the year, from Snowdrops now, through Crocus, Scilla, Chionodoxa, Muscari, Hyacinths and Alliums.
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Low-cost plants like Cyclamen, Violas, Heathers and Wallflowers will also help to cheer up those gloomy days.