Create a real buzz in your back yard
The wilder your garden grows, the more birds, mammals and insects it will attract, says Monty Don. The trick is to make it both natural AND beautiful…
One of the great improvements in gardening in my lifetime has been the hugely increased interest and respect for the wildlife that are an essential part of our gardens. This has progressed greatly in the past ten years and been utterly transformed over the past 30. Before then, the whole culture of gardens was about controlling an outdoor space and destroying anything and everything that was not part of a wholly man-made, sterile environment.
But this was doomed to failure on two accounts. The first was – and remains – that it is impossible. Nature will always win. The good gardener always works with nature and shapes it as well as themselves to create something. In that respect, all gardening is a compromise.
The second reason is that increasingly we know that the more inclusive we are of wildlife in our gardens, the healthier they will be. In other words, a garden filled with birds, mammals and insects such as bees and butterflies will be self-controlling and have a balanced, healthy ecology. As a result our plants will be all the healthier. Everybody wins with this.
But there is also the simple fact that having the living world outside our back door is a privilege and pleasure that is endlessly fascinating. We rightly give plaudits to the wonderful TV programmes about the natural world, but in fact it is literally there on our doorstep. This is our world and we can share and care for it with a multitude of other creatures in our gardens.
Over the next three weeks, I will be showing you how to create a beautiful garden that will also be a haven for birds, bees, butterflies, bats, hedgehogs and a host of other animals. I’ll be explaining how to make your own wild- life pond, which are the best plants to grow and how even the tiniest garden – or just a windowbox – can be wildlife-friend- ly. We can all do our bit to help save our wildlife.
Paradoxically, the best thing you can do to encourage wildlife to thrive in your garden is to stop gardening. Let the lawn become a tussocky meadow and the borders strangle with weeds. Let brambles romp and nettles flourish. Hedges should go uncut and fight it out with elder, self-sown ash and birch. If it looks like an abandoned railway siding, then well done. Obviously this approach is too extreme for most of us. But it does illustrate the point that one of the most important ways to encourage a healthy wildlife population in your garden is by not doing certain things. You should never use pesticides, fungicides or herbicides, for example. These are crude instruments that are likely to do as much long-term harm as any perceived short-term good.
Successful gardening depends upon the interrelation of plant and animal life. It is a completely holistic system and, if managed properly, will attain its own balance. This cannot possibly happen if man blitzes certain pests as and when they arise. Each predator must have enough to feed on to maintain their controlling presence. You need some aphids if you are to have ladybirds or lacewings, and you need slugs if hedgehogs and toads are to remain in or visit your garden. Then, if and when there is an explosion of one particular ‘pest’, the predatory population will respond and expand accordingly and then contract as they eat themselves out of house and home. It is a self-regulating system and the job of the gardener is to try not to hinder it.
But at the same time, a garden is a man-made, maintained outdoor space. Hence the contradiction that lies at the heart of all aspects of encouraging wildlife to be at home in our gardens. We want our gardens to be as welcome a home for as varied a range of wildlife as possible but at the same time to be beautiful for us. Achieving this is the art of a good wildlife garden, which is both natural and beautiful, and over the next three weeks I shall be helping you to explore all the possibilities of making your garden a rich habitat for wildlife as well as a beautiful retreat for you and your loved ones.
STRIKE A BALANCE
To really enjoy the richness and fullness of our gardens, we have to allow for the fact that plants – and humans – are only part of it. Yes, gardens are artificial, tightly controlled little corners of the world, but there is a balance to be struck which celebrates every range of living thing in our gardens.
Having a wide variety of plants is crucial. Growing large areas of one type of flower can look very striking, but it’s a disaster for wildlife as it will only provide food for a limited number of species (if any) at a particular time of year. A lawn patched with daisies, plantains, creeping buttercup, moss and a range of grasses is not going to win you horticultural prizes but is far more valuable to wildlife than an award-winning bowling green.
You certainly don’t need to live in the countryside to enjoy wildlife in your garden. A typical suburban street is an ideal environment for songbirds and bees – if it is not drenched in chemicals and it has a reasonable selection of indigenous plants. And a well-stocked urban garden with a couple of mature trees and plenty of shrubs can support a far higher density of songbirds than a wood. In fact, most gardens are more wildlife-friendly than the average field. Even the smallest garden can be a haven.
But to get thrushes and blackbirds, you must have food for them in the shape of worms (for which you need healthy, organically rich soil – see left), invertebrates and insects of all kinds, and to preserve and encourage our wildlife it
makes sense to start at the bottom of the food chain and work up.
Any water in the garden will immediately bring in dragonflies, frogs, toads and even grass snakes, as well as increased bird and bat activity. I will be covering all the aspects of making and maintaining wildlife ponds.
GRASS ROOTS
Long grass, be it a sweep of wildflower meadow or a straggly uncut corner, is essential. This will provide cover for insects and also small mammals, invertebrates and reptiles. Ideally you’ll have grass of varying lengths to provide a wide range of habitats, but just a metre square of long grass will make all the difference.
After the indiscriminate use of pesticides, nothing is more detrimental to wildlife than officious tidiness. Leave long grass, fallen leaves, windfall fruit, rotting wood, patches of weeds, grass growing in the cracks, moss on the stone. These are all important habitats for wildlife and there is no reason why they cannot be gently tweaked to look more beautiful as well as be very useful.
The lessons we are all learning are clear. We either nurture our wildlife or lose it forever. But in that nurturing, we not only increase the range of interest and reward that we receive from our gardens, we also make them more beautiful.