Discover nature’s paintbox Welcome colourful creatures into your garden. They’ll bring dazzling hues and the buzz of biodiversity
Welcome these colourful creatures into your garden, says Adrian Thomas. They’ll bring dazzling hues and the buzz of biodiversity
Bringing colour into the garden is, for many of us, a prime objective. There’s little that gladdens the heart and pleases the eye more, whether our aim is an ‘explosion in a paint factory’ or something more tonally restrained. Although we might focus on achieving our colour goals with flowers and foliage, there’s another way to boost your palette, by welcoming some of wildlife’s more
colourful characters. They may not be quite as bright as your prize dahlias or petunias, but their colours move in a kaleidoscope of plumage and pattern.
Red, orange and blue
Think of colourful creatures and your thoughts might turn first to butterflies. While we don’t have species that quite match the dramatic iridescence of tropical butterflies, we nevertheless have some absolute beauties. Perhaps the most arresting are the nymphalid butterflies, a group of our larger species. Fortunately, several of them are quite widespread in gardens. One of the commonest is the peacock (pictured): richest red on its upperside and almost-black below, with prominent staring-eye markings towards its wing tips that, if you look closely, have touches of almost every colour.
Its garden cousins are the orange-andblack small tortoiseshell with its pure blue dots around the wing margin, the goldencoloured comma with is raggedy wing edges, and the elegant summer visitor called the painted lady. On another part of the spectrum, the male brimstone brings to the garden a burst of acid yellow in spring and late summer. Right now is also a great time to see the orange-tip (above), the males of which live up to their name – the wings look like they’re dipped in pure orange paint, set off wonderfully against white upperwings. Two much smaller garden butterflies are real jewels – common blue and holly blue (top). About the size of a pound coin, males of the former (and both sexes of the latter) have the most incredible blue upperwings. Just to confuse the issue, the holly blue is more common than the common blue. The holly blue can be seen on the wing between late April and September. It tends to whizz through the garden, rarely stopping, dashing around and over hedges. It’s here that the females lay their eggs, almost exclusively using holly and ivy where their caterpillars will then feed. Helping them is quite easy – allow native ivy Hedera helix to clamber up a wall or tree, and plant a native holly Ilex aquifolium, allowing it to grow into a small tree or hedge rather than pruning it hard. The common blue is much more an ankle-height flyer, found in areas of grass allowed to grow long. (See panel, right, for how to grow your own butterfly lawn.)
Sunshine yellow and warlike red
Nature’s other colourful catwalk collection belongs to the birds. We do have our fair share of ‘brown and drab’ birds, but if blue tits and great tits weren’t so common, we’d be stopped in our tracks by their vivid hues. Blue is such an Great tit unusual colour in the garden, but the blue tit has it in abundance, and both have bright yellow bellies (right). Two finches are named after the colour of their plumage. The gold in the goldfinch is in its wing feathers, a paintbox sunshineyellow; it also has a bright red face. Its chunkier relative, the greenfinch, is a soft, mossy green; it’s brightest in the male but both sexes have yellow flashes in the wing. Meanwhile, the robin’s redbreast is not just adornment – it’s a war-flag. Watch when two rival robins meet, for they swell their breasts like prize fighters, a sign for the weaker of the two to back off rather than engage in actual combat.
Metallic green and pink faux fur
While the brightest birds and butterflies might command most attention in the garden, look closer and there are plenty of smaller and less obvious creatures that have their own dandy little spot on nature’s colour wheel. The beetle world might not seem the obvious starting place, but think how colourful ladybirds are. Look out not only for those with black spots on a red background, but also it’s possible to find this colour mix reversed, and some are black on lemon-yellow. However, for metallic greens, if you look into many a flower head in summer, you may find the exquisite thick-kneed f lowerbeetle, the male with the knobbliest of knees. Another group of insects that might surprise you with its colour combinations are the moths. Many of them come in shades of grey and brown, but a number are astonishingly bright given that they only fly at night. The colours are reflected in some of their names such as ruby tiger, scarlet tiger and common emerald. One that seems almost too extravagant to be true, and yet is very widespread and common, is the elephant hawkmoth, whose chunky body is clad in what looks like pink faux fur. With even the russet of the fox or the bright yellow of the male blackbird’s bill adding its own little highlights, embrace nature in the garden and it will bring a welcome extra splash to proceedings.