There are many reasons to plant a garden or to improve your existing one. You may wish to improve the sensory experience of being in your outdoors space, you may wish to grow your own food and make your garden more productive. Another reason to create the perfect garden is to help out the local wildlife – after all, many of them help us too and we could not survive in an organic garden without them.
There are a wide range of beneficial wildlife interactions that take place in a garden – birds can eat slugs and snails and keep down their numbers, as will hedgehogs. Frogs and other pond life can also keep insect pest numbers down. Some beneficial insects predate others – ladybirds, for example, eat aphids – while other insects are pollinators without whom many of our plants and crops could not grow.
Here are just a few of the things you can do to encourage wildlife in your garden:
Considered Planting:
Of course your planting scheme is one of the main things that can encourage wildlife to consider your garden a wonderful home. Be sure to use layers to increase the number of habitats in your space – creatures live everywhere from the highest tree canopy to the lowest root. Planting flowers that attract bees and berries for birds, for example, will enhance the natural biodiversity in your garden.
Blissful Birds:
You can help the birds in your garden by putting out food for them either in a tree or on a bird table. You can also help them by creating nest boxes for them to use. Ensure that they can nest undisturbed.
Happy Hedgehogs:
Hedgehogs are just one of the creatures that will benefit from areas of wood and other garden debris left in a corner. Pile up fallen branches and create a small area of habitat that can remain undisturbed throughout the year.
Busy Bees:
Bees will benefit not just from bee friendly planting but also from the creation of bee habitats, or 'bee hotels' as they are sometimes called. Lots of sheltered holes in a sunny spot will not just encourage bees to enter your garden, it will encourage them to stay.
Perfect Ponds:
When you are considering the creation of habitats within your garden, do not forget that a garden pond is a great idea. Making a garden pond with variation of depth, that steeply shelves on one side, perhaps, and is gently sloped on the other, and filling it with suitable aquatic plants, will be a boon to aquatic creatures near you. Frogs and toads and other pond-dwellers are fantastic additions to your garden and can help balance the eco-system. Built it and they will come.
If you have sure that at least some of your garden is at least a little wild, the wildlife diversity will be fantastic. You will soon see the benefits of working with nature rather than trying to hold it at bay.