What do you consider to be a ‘wildlife garden‘?
Do you think it means weeds and untidiness? Or a great deal of hard work?
In fact, a wildlife garden can be smart or pretty. It can be easy to garden or high maintenance. It can be any kind of garden you like.
With a few small changes, your garden could make a big difference to wildlife. Without really looking any different.
This post has 5 easy tips to start your wildlife gardening off.
But for the full look at what a wildlife garden really needs, here is advice from Kent Wildlife Trust and Simon Pollard of Simple Life Ltd, a wildlife garden design and maintenance company.
‘Much of what we do to improve our own homes makes life more difficult for wildlife,’ says Simon. ‘Insulating our houses means that bats can’t roost in the roof.’
‘New fences with concrete gravel board at the base means that small creatures, such as hedgehogs and toads, can’t roam across enough territory.’
Four major issues: access, shelter, food and water.
Firstly, access. This isn’t a problem for birds and pollinating insects because they can fly. But hedgehogs, toads and other small animals are really suffering from the way our gardens are becoming more closed off at ground level, due to modern fencing.
If you are putting in a new fence with a gravel board base, Simon suggests you cut a hole or holes for hedgehog/toad access – 13 x 13 cm or 5” squared will make all the difference.
Access is also an issue when thinking about water. We recently made a mini wildlife pond out of an oak barrel – find out how here. We ensured that there are lots of ways for frogs, toads and even hedgehogs to get in, and more importantly, out of the pond. Small creatures can drown unless there is some kind of step or gradient – even in the tiniest pond.
Shelter
Insulated roofs mean fewer places for bats to nest, but you can put up bat boxes to compensate. If you’re building a new extension, you can even find bricks built for bats or swallows.
You can find out more about gardening for bats from the Bat Conservation Trust. Download their Bat Information Pack before buying or putting up a bat box.
Wildlife World also do a best-selling hedgehog home, too, with the most 5* star reviews of any of the hedgehog houses.
Bug hotels have become the new fashionable must-have for gardens, and they are very pretty. You can either get mixed bug hotels or specific ones for individual species, such as solitary bees or ladybirds.
You can also just leave hollow stems, pine cones, leaves and twigs at the backs of borders, as a low-cost, low-effort ‘bug hotel’. I thought that if there were high winds then leaves stowed at the backs of borders might blow around the garden. However, Storm Angus didn’t dislodge any of the leaves at the backs of our borders, so don’t worry about that.
Simon says that Simple Life Ltd always site nest boxes around 8ft high and facing in a South East facing direction, because it won’t get too hot or too draughty. ‘All our nest boxes have been used.’
There’s more advice from the RSPB on choosing, siting or even making nestboxes here.
Food for a wildlife garden
Food in a wildlife garden starts with what you plant. In the excellent RHS Companion to Wildlife Gardening by Chris Baines, he says that layers of trees, hedges and shrubs provide wildlife with both food and shelter.
Hedges are more wildlife-friendly than fences. Mixed hedges are more wildlife-friendly than single species hedges. Best4Hedging have an RSPB-approved hedging pack for example, with 10 different species from hawthorn to guelder rose.
Flowers and their seeds provide food for birds and insects. Try to have something in flower for as much of the year as possible. Choose flowers that have easy access to nectar, such as single-flowered flowers rather than double-flowered.
Pollinating insects often like to feed on blocks of the same kind of flower, too, so try to plant several flowers not just single specimens. This ties in with general garden design advice to plant in drifts, blocks or group.
And then there’s your veg patch. I try to distract butterflies and caterpillars from the kale and chard by companion planting nasturtiums. It more or less works. And there’s netting, which is essential in high summer. But it’s nice to allow the birds and insects to share a bit of the bounty, and I don’t mind nibbled leaves.
Finally there is the food you buy, which helps wildlife especially in winter. Each species (bird, hedgehog, etc) has different requirements. So don’t give white bread to birds or hedgehogs. But do give whole grains to birds or meaty food, such as cat food to hedgehogs.
There are lots of options for bird food. We have discovered, through trial and error, that the better-quality bird foods are more popular with the birds and attract a wider range of species. We’ve particularly liked the Peckish range.
Water in a wildlife garden
There are really two main things to know about water. One is that water is essential for all wildlife.
The other is that small creatures, babies and toddlers can drown in even very shallow water. Ponds, however tiny, must have stepped access in and out. And they must be guarded or positioned so that a small child cannot fall in.
We made a mini wildlife pond out of an oak barrel and things that are easy to buy or adapt.
You can buy a bird bath made of resin or stone . Or you can do what we did, which was to use an upturned dustbin lid on top of an old chimney stack.
And even if you have a small garden, you can think bigger.
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