Garden for wildlife: effective ways to help all creatures prosper
Forget chemicals and focus on encouraging more wildlife into the garden to take care of pests for you. Val Bourne reveals how to take a more natural approach
ASUCCESSFUL garden relies on attracting lots of insects and mini beasts, and learning to appreciate how they interact. But as gardeners we’ve been taught to separate these creatures into ‘saints’ and ‘sinners’. In practice, this doesn’t really work. For example, you might loves thrushes and hate snails, yet snails form a major part of a thrush’s diet in early summer. Similarly, you cannot have hedgehogs without at least some slugs on which they can feed.
It’s all a question of balance: we need just enough sinners to keep the saints healthy and happy; not so many that we are overrun with them.
In spring, you may find your broad beans are covered with blackfly – a type of aphid. Leave them alone and in a well-balanced garden the seven spot ladybird will soon find them. She’ll lay clusters of 30 oval eggs near the colonies and the larvae will devour the black fly. Small parasitic wasps, hoverflies and birds – who gather aphids to feed their fledglings – they are all allies against this pest and, with their help, a colony of black fly can appear and disappear again within a few days.
Natural balancing act
It might go against the grain, but leaving these pests alone is often the best approach – and by doing so you will be giving the natural world a big boost. Bear in mind that a single nest of blue tits will need 10,000 small insects in the three weeks before they fledge. And while spraying pests may seem the answer, it often just makes the problem worse.
The trouble is, chemical controls can be quite indiscriminate. As masters of reproduction, aphids can produce 40 generations a year without even having to mate. However, the insects that feed on them – ladybirds, hoverfly larvae and lacewing larvae, for instance – often produce only one or two generations per year. Unlike aphids, they don’t have the ability to spring back quickly, so by removing them you are allowing your pests to multiply for the rest of the year.
Occasionally, I’ll get an infestation of one particular creature in my garden; when this happens, I let it ride. One year, we had masses of beech aphid and everyone was spraying. But I resisted, and as a result I had a huge number of small birds feasting in my beech hedge – it was a wonderful sight.
Call of the wild
In my garden I have neatly manicured areas, mostly closer to the house, but there are wilder parts, too. I have two areas of long grass that only get mowed once a year. One is a spring bulb lawn containing crocus and narcissi, which is cut in late June. The other contains some wildflowers and is small enough to cut by hand in late September. It’s more laborious but worth it as, by then, lots of ground beetles have tucked themselves up into the grassy sward. Toads often shelter in the grass, too, and brown butterflies, such as ringlets and meadow browns, roost and breed there. Any area of long grass that can be left mostly undisturbed is useful.
On the southern edge there’s a wild area that, most years, provides a day
nesting site for at least one hedgehog – they like to use moss, grass and leaves for their nests so I always scatter some garden debris around. Bees also nest here and it’s planted with honeysuckle and roses. Wonderful in summer, it gets a once-a-year tidy up during winter. I also have an old tree trunk to attract more beetles because rotting wood is eaten by some larvae.
The old ways
Like many people, I was encouraged to garden by a grandparent, in my case my grandmother. Born in 1881, she gardened naturally, having learnt from her father before her, and she instilled in me a love of plants and the natural world. Organic gardening is nothing new – it’s the way our ancestors did it. They appreciated the birds and bees as much as the flowers, and when I go outside and see the living layer above my garden it gives me great pleasure. I never use pesticides, insecticides, fungicides or slug pellets – and yet I have a lovely garden.
It’s an approach that works equally well whether your plot is in a rural location, the suburbs or even the city centre. In fact, as a general rule urban gardens are far richer in wildlife than those in the countryside.
With headlines about how the unprecedented events of this year have benefitted wildlife, it’s easy to forget that native species still need our help. And gardening more naturally is one of the best ways to do your bit. So take a more
laissez-faire attitude to pests and allow parts of the garden to be a bit less ‘managed’. You’ll be giving nature a helping hand while still maintaining a plot bursting with beautiful plants.