Turn your garden into a wildlife haven

Water, shelter and long grass are essential to help all sorts of garden creatures survive the winter, says Monty Don

Areally healthy garden depends upon a varied balance of wildlife. Not all of it will be welcome. You will always have aphids, slugs and snails in your garden. Birds will always nibble at your soft fruit. But the damage need not be anything other than the equivalent of a graze that will heal quickly.

Zapping randomly with insecticides or pesticides is like shooting a fly with a blunderbuss. Even if it does hit the intended target, the collateral damage will do far more harm than any good that is achieved. Healthy plants that resist and recover from attack and a balanced set of predators will create a robust, self-sustaining mini ecosystem in your garden without recourse to crude chemical intervention of any kind.

But first you have to create the environment for wildlife of all kinds to thrive. There are three main ways of doing this. The first is to include water in your garden. A pond of any size attracts dragonflies, frogs, toads, grass snakes, beetles, newts, bats and birds as well as providing water for small mammals such as hedgehogs – and those creatures together will eat large amounts of aphids, slugs and snails.

All garden ponds are beneficial but the one specific feature to include is a gently sloping beach. This provides both an easy entry and a vital exit for almost any creature, from a water boatman to a thirsty hedgehog. You can easily do this by grading the soil under the pond liner and using stones, cobbles and finally washed grit to make a very shallow area arriving at larger stones.

It’s also important to have at least one stone that rises above the water level for birds and amphibians to sit on, and an old log that will slowly rot down in the water is perfect for beetles – I often find frogs and birds balancing on the one in my pond. Final- ly, provide cover with plenty of planting around the edges, then sit back and enjoy the fascinating range of creatures that will inevitably arrive. The second important feature to attract wildlife is long grass, which creates a haven for a healthy and varied insect population. This is easy to incorporate into any style of garden, either tucked away at the edges or made into a feature. If you leave the grass to grow until sometime between late June and early autumn, it will allow flowers to seed and the foliage of spring bulbs to naturally die back and thus feed next year’s bulbs. You should remove all cut grass to reduce fertility, which in turn allows flowers to compete with the robustness of most grasses. It is also important to go into spring with the grass very short, which is achieved by mowing late in autumn. This means that crocuses, snowdrops and aconites can grow and be enjoyed before the grass begins to grow.

Finally, don’t be too tidy in the garden. What almost all creatures most urgently need at this time of year is cover, either to shelter from the weather or to hibernate in. Gather a wheelbarrow of leaves and tip it against a fence or in a quiet corner. This will make the perfect home for a hedgehog, toads, perhaps a frog or two and innumerable insects. Stack wood and bundles of prunings in a corner so small birds such as robins and wrens, voles, insects and hedgehogs can benefit from the cover. Leave seed heads for the birds and dried stems for insects.

While the trinity of water, long grass and plenty of cover may not replace the flowers of summer, it will provide the perfect home for a wonderful range of wildlife that will enrich your winter days and keep your garden healthy all year round.

Monty with his dog Nellie and (inset) a hedgehog and a frog