WAYS TO WILD YOUR GARDEN
I was lucky to have a large garden but you can make a difference even on a tiny plot. Here are my key wild-gardening tips
1 REDUCE MOWING AND ENCOURAGE WILDFLOWERS
I spent my childhood mowing the grass almost on a weekly basis. I now cut and remove the meadow once a year when the wildflowers have flowered and set seed. It’s important to remove the grass as this keeps the soil fertility low, thereby allowing wildflowers to establish themselves. If you add fertilisers, the grasses will quickly dominate and outcompete everything else. Sometimes wildflowers will simply arrive on their own. It really depends where you live and how far you are from a natural seed source. I always keep a look out for new wildflowers while wandering in my local area. I take very careful note of where they are, because I want to gather their seeds later in the season and, for an amateur botanist like me, they are much tougher to locate when they are no longer in flower.
2 NO HERBICIDES, PESTICIDES, ARTIFICIAL FERTILISERS The sooner we rid our gardens of such things, the better. Surely poisons have no place around our homes. Let’s give our struggling insect populations, such as green dock beetles, a chance.
3 KEEP ANY DEAD WOOD YOUR GARDEN PRODUCES Log piles are great hiding places for all sorts of creatures. They also attract a great variety of insects that feed on the rotting wood. Birds, in turn, will forage here. A compost heap can deal with your vegetable food waste and turn it into something useful.
4 INSTALL SOLITARY BEE HOMES
Once there is plenty of pollen and nectar in your garden, all that mason bees and leafcutter bees need to complete their life cycles is a home. It is a joy to watch them coming and going during their short, frenetic lives. These solitary bees are the ones that are really in need of our help. Hoverflies are also stunning creatures; perhaps make a hoverfly lagoon. It’s essentially a container of water with lots of rotting and decaying vegetation inside. Quite a few hoverflies in my area find such places irresistible and deposit eggs here. They hatch and become what are known as rat-tailed maggots, not things of beauty in themselves but stunning when they take on adult form.
5 PLANT A HEDGEROW
Many of us have evergreen, single-species exotic hedges around our gardens. They grow quickly and do offer some cover for birds perhaps but have very little wildlife value. I would encourage anyone establishing a new garden to avoid these and to plant a hedgerow with as many different native plants as you possibly can. They are infinitely more interesting and valuable and give a wonderful sense of season. Buy them as whips. Small plants are cheaper and will ultimately grow better.
6 DIG A POND
You won’t regret it. People often ask me how big it should be. It really doesn’t matter.