NATURE PARADISE
Want to do your bit for the planet by transforming your garden into a beautiful wildlife haven? Then fill it with the right flowers through the seasons, says
It’s my favourite time of year: high summer, when the days are long and warm, and the wildlife in my garden is at its annual peak of activity. The lavender and catmint are in full bloom and busy with slender brown honeybees, clumsy, furry and colourful bumblebees, yellow-and-black metallic hoverflies and, every now and then, the blur of a hummingbird hawkmoth, long tongue extended, dashing from flower to flower.
My garden may not be the tidiest; the lawn is a little shaggier than some might like, but it’s full of flowers. In the borders, wildflowers coexist with cottage garden flowers, herbs, chickens, fruit trees and vegetables in a slightly chaotic tangle, but it’s full of life, and produces almost enough food to feed my family.
If we manage them gently, our gardens can be hugely rich ecosystems, teeming with life of all sorts. In an obsessive 30-year study of her very small urban garden in Leicester, Jenny Owen recorded more than 2,500 species of plants and animals, most of them different types of insects.
Insects make the world go round. They pollinate crops and wildflowers, recycle dead leaves, dung and animal corpses, control pests, help keep the soil healthy, and are food for many birds, lizards, amphibians, bats and other small mammals. All of this happens in gardens.
Insects are also wonderful and beautiful, with fascinating and sometimes peculiar lifecycles that play out right under our noses, usually unnoticed: earwigs tenderly care for their young; bumblebee queens battle to rear their offspring against the threat of cuckoo bees and parasitic wasps; ants indulge in tribal warfare.
It is worrying that insects are in decline (see box opposite), but unlike many other big global
“If we manage them gently, our gardens can be hugely rich ecosystems, teeming with life”
environmental issues about which we might feel helpless, we can get directly involved in helping them, and see the benefits. We can provide food and a home for innumerable insects in our gardens.
SELECTING INSECT-FRIENDLY PLANTS
The first step in turning your garden into a haven for insects is to choose the right plants. Flowers evolved to attract insects some 300 million years ago, so you might think that all flowers would be good for insects, but sadly this is not so.
Plant breeders have tinkered with flowers over many years, selecting double varieties, larger blooms, unusual colours and so on, and in doing so have often created flowers that have lost their original purpose – they no longer attract insects. Most annual bedding plants, such as busy lizzies, begonias, pansies, petunias and pelargoniums are hopeless for insects, as are most ‘double’ varieties, which have extra petals instead of the pollen-producing
anthers. Beware also that many plants on sale in garden centres will contain pesticide residues.
Some of my favourite plants for pollinators are listed on the next three pages. They include wildflowers, which are usually great for native insects, and also many traditional cottage garden plants. Most are very easy to grow, and most are perennials so they don’t need replacing every year.
Different plants tend to attract different insects, depending on the shape of the flower. Foxgloves, for example, attract only species of bumblebee that have long tongues, since without these the bees cannot reach the nectar. Shallow flowers, such as helenium and single roses, attract short-tongued bees and hoverflies, and marjoram is very attractive to butterflies. It is great to have a mix, to cater for as many insects as possible. Try also to have flowers through the year, from when the first hungry bumblebee queens emerge in early March through to October when the last few insects are feeding up for hibernation.
Gardens cover nearly half a million hectares of the UK, an area greater than all of our nature reserves. Imagine if most of them were pesticide-free, with a mini-wildflower meadow, pollinator-friendly flowers, a bee hotel, a small pond and compost heap. Our gardens could become a vast network of tiny nature reserves, supporting biodiversity, storing carbon in the soil and trees, and providing home-grown food. We could invite nature to come and live with us in our gardens, so that our children grow up with the sight and sound of buzzing bees, the flashing colours of butterfly’s wings, birdsong, and the croak of toads in the garden pond.