Wildlife Gardening: For Everyone and Everything

By Kate Bradbury

An easy-to-follow gardening guide to help you encourage different types of wildlife into your garden.

If you want to attract more bees, birds, frogs and hedgehogs into your garden, look no further than Wildlife Gardening for Everyone and Everything. Kate Bradbury offers tips on feeding your neighbourhood wildlife and explains how you can create the perfect habitats for species you'd like to welcome into your garden.

With handy charts tailored to the needs of every size and style of garden, this easy-to-use book also includes practical projects such as making bee hotels or creating wildlife ponds, compost corners and wildflower meadows, as well as fact files for the UK's most common garden species.

Everyone can garden with wildlife in mind, and in this practical new guide, Kate has teamed up with the Wildlife Trusts and the RHS to help you discover how you can make your garden, balcony, doorstep or patio a haven for garden wildlife.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing
• Release date: Apr 18, 2019
• ISBN: 9781472956064

Kate Bradbury

KATE BRADBURY is an award-winning writer specialising in wildlife gardening and the author of The Bumblebee Flies Anyway. She's the Wildlife Editor of BBC Gardeners' World Magazine and has a regular Country Diary column in The Guardian. She writes regularly for the RHS The Garden magazine, The Wildlife Trusts members' magazine and BBC Wildlife. Her garden was featured as part of the BBC Springwatch Garden Watch campaign, and she and her garden have also appeared on Autumnwatch and Gardeners' World. Kate lives in Brighton with her partner, Emma, and their rescue dog, Tosca.

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Contents

Preface

Introduction

The principles of wildlife gardening

Wildlife gardening for... Pollinators

Bees

Butterflies and moths

Wasps

Beetles

True flies

True bugs

Other minibeasts

Birds

Amphibians and reptiles

Mammals

Glossary

Acknowledgements

Resources

Photograph credits

My friend Helen’s garden in Hove in Sussex. Sparrow nest boxes, pollinator-friendly borders and still space for her young family to play.

Preface

When I wrote my first book five years ago, its purpose was simple: to encourage readers to provide garden habitats for wildlife. At the time I had a tiny, shady garden in a very built-up area of east London. There was little wildlife there, but I made the garden home to a variety of bees, birds and butterflies as well as field mice and frogs.

Since then I have moved house twice, and at the time of writing, I have a small, north-facing garden in Hove, near Brighton, plus a wonderfully wild allotment. In the past five years, I have become a better gardener, and I’m more knowledgeable about wildlife and how we can use our gardens to mitigate habitat loss in the countryside.

During this period, conservation and science have moved on as well. We now know much more about solitary bees. We also know more about the flower choices of pollinators, and the food preferences and migration routes of certain garden birds – goldfinches, for example, have decided they prefer sunflower hearts to niger seed. I even conducted a bit of citizen science myself, by compiling a list of rose cultivars and other plants that are known to be used by leafcutter bees (see here). How did I achieve this? With help from a few friends on Twitter, I asked gardeners to tell me which roses the leafcutters were choosing in their gardens. I sent emails and put pleas in newsletters for people to get in touch. I even had well-known rose growers check their fields for the telltale elliptical markings on their rose leaves. Gardeners love growing roses, and now we can make more informed choices about which roses we can grow that we know leafcutters love. It’s a lovely thing to have been a part of.

These last five years have also seen two State of Nature reports, in which conservation groups have worked together to identify the continued decline of many of our best-loved wildlife. There have been other, more specific studies too, including the 75 per cent decline of flying insects from some protected areas in Germany over a 27 year period, the loss of butterflies and the drop in hedgehog numbers.

Yet in these five years, I have also witnessed hope. Thanks in no small part to TV programmes such as the BBC’s Springwatch and the efforts of charities like The Wildlife Trusts and the Royal Horticultural Society, I have seen a massive surge in the popularity of wildlife gardening. So disconnected are many of us from the natural world that more of us are wanting to bring wildlife to our back door. More of us have read about the plight of bees and hedgehogs, and want to help. More of us are taking matters into our own gardens. Wildlife gardening is here to stay; dare I say it’s now mainstream. We can’t replace the lost habitats in rural areas, but we can provide habitats for some species in our gardens and, crucially, we can link them together to create corridors from one significant habitat to another. Not just in our gardens at home but in our parks, communal and public spaces, schools and hospitals too. The more habitats there are, the more and greater opportunities wildlife has to expand territories, meet and breed, and adapt to climate change.

Introduction

There was an old woman who swallowed a fly.

I don’t know why she swallowed a fly.

Perhaps she’ll die.

There was an old woman who swallowed a spider

That wriggled and jiggled and tickled inside her.

She swallowed the spider to catch the fly.

I don’t know why she swallowed the fly.

Perhaps she’ll die.

There was an old woman who swallowed a bird.

How absurd to swallow a bird!

She swallowed the bird to catch the spider

That wriggled and jiggled and tickled inside her.

She swallowed the spider to catch the fly.

I don’t know why she swallowed the fly.

Perhaps she’ll die.

Even a paved garden can benefit wildlife if filled with plants.

The rest of this nursery rhyme takes the imagination a bit further than I would like here – the old woman ends up swallowing a cow to catch a goat to catch a dog to catch a cat to catch a bird. But the first three verses are perfect. The first three verses are a slightly ridiculous version of what we should all be doing in our gardens.

Wildlife gardening is all about the food chain. It’s about the soil and the plants. It’s about the tiny creatures beavering away in our compost bins and beneath piles of leaves, logs and stones. It’s about woodlice and centipedes and springtails and rove beetles. It’s about the plant munchers – aphids and caterpillars, leafhoppers and leaf miners.

And, of course, it’s about everything else that eats them.

I’m sure we’ve all tried to attract wildlife without creating a habitat first. I’ve hung many a bird feeder and wondered why the birds didn’t turn up. The birds didn’t come because the garden wasn’t ready. There was nowhere to take shelter or hide from predators, such as cats. But as soon as I’d planted a few climbers up the walls, plus a few choice caterpillar food plants, I had birds on the feeders and in the borders. I’d created space for them; a series of interconnected worlds.

Wildlife gardens comprise a variety of different habitats for a range of species.

In this book, you will find detailed advice on how to attract different types of wildlife, with an emphasis on habitat creation and the food chain. Split into two parts, the first section looks at general habitat creation, while the second gives more detail on attracting specific species found in the British Isles, together with species ID parades and extra nuggets of information to really help you get to know your garden wildlife. There’s also a special section on solitary bees. Our knowledge and awareness of bees is growing exponentially, not least for these wonderful creatures, which previously many of us would simply not have seen. It’s time to give them some special attention so we are all equipped with the know-how to help populations of solitary bees in our gardens.

Growing plants like Phacelia tanacetifolia for pollinators will bring bees to your garden.

Please don’t feel you have to do everything in this book to help wildlife. Remember that all gardens attract wildlife in some form and that, as wildlife gardeners, we simply improve our habitats for a number of species (hopefully as many as possible!). But don’t worry if you don’t have the time, space or inclination for everything I recommend. You might not want a pond, for instance, but if your neighbour has one, the local amphibians will be well catered for; and if your neighbour lets their grass grow long, you could keep yours short. Think of your garden as part of a wider mosaic of habitats, rather than a complete habitat in its own right. Do what you can, and don’t forget to stop to enjoy the results – after all, we garden for wildlife because we love it.

Propagating plants benefits the gardener and the wildlife.

And remember: everything at the bottom of the food chain is food for species further up. If you want birds in your garden, then, yes, hang a peanut feeder. If you want them to nest, you could erect a bird box too. But if you want them to nest successfully – that is, you don’t want those baby chicks to die in their nest box – you need to grow plants that attract insects. And by ‘insects’ I mean aphids, caterpillars, froghoppers, leaf miners and other ‘pests’ – the things we gardeners have historically been taught to hate. It’s time for a rethink. It’s time for these insects to take centre stage. It’s time for you to relax, and reap the rewards in your garden.

Wildlife gardening can bring you closer to so many species, including this hoverfly larva.

The principles of wildlife gardening

If you think a ‘wildlife garden’ is something different from or ‘other’ than a standard garden, you’re mistaken. Wildlife gardening is essentially gardening, and all gardens attract wildlife, be they in the trees, shrubs and herbaceous plants growing in the borders, the neatly manicured lawn or the compost bin.

However, some gardens are better for wildlife than others. And simply by growing more wildlife-friendly plants, mowing our lawns less often and creating corridors through which wildlife can enter and exit our gardens more easily, we can make our gardens better for the animals they’re already home to, and more attractive to animals that otherwise might not have come in.

Wildlife gardens can be messy, but they don’t have to be. They can be full of native trees and shrubs, but they don’t have to be. In fact they can be anything you want – there’s no need to compromise. Wildlife gardening is sometimes referred to as ‘habitat gardening’, as in doing it we are creating habitats. Use this book to help you create as many or as few habitats as you want for the wildlife you’d like to attract. But do bear in mind that to have a successful wildlife garden, you should provide three essential things:

• Food

• Water

• Shelter (including space to breed)

I look at these in the next few pages, along with other things to consider when creating a wildlife garden.

Food

Virtually everything in your garden represents food to one species or another, starting with the bacteria and fungi in the soil, all the way up to small mammals and birds. However, plants form the foundation of our gardens by providing the basis of food chains.

As a general rule, the greater variety of plants we can grow in our gardens, the more wildlife species we will attract. But more details follow here.

Grow food plants

We know that flowers provide nectar and pollen for bees and other pollinators, but less is written about the needs of foliage feeders – the caterpillars and other species that graze on the leaves and stems of herbaceous plants, trees and shrubs. Most of these do such very little damage to plants, you wouldn’t even notice. The majority of the known caterpillar food plants are native to the British Isles and these are the ones I list in this book. They can include:

• A native wildlife hedge

• A single shrub, such as hawthorn, planted at the back of a border

• A wildflower meadow, using traditional wildflower plantings and native grasses

• A lawn allowed to grow long where clover, dandelions and vetches can thrive

• A container planted with primrose, foxgloves and dandelions

See Resources here for caterpillar food plant lists compiled by the wildlife charity Butterfly Conservation (BC).

Provide nectar and pollen

Flowering plants provide nectar and pollen for bees and other pollinators. Aim to grow a diverse range of flowering plants for as long as you can manage – in your borders, on the roof of your shed, in pots, in cracks in the walls … anywhere you have space! Here are a few suggestions:

• Spring-flowering bulbs for emerging bumblebee queens

• Simple, open flowers, where you can see the centre of the flower (avoid double flowers like this dahlia)

• Late-flowering blooms such as sedums and Verbena bonariensis , which help insects feed up before entering overwintering or migrating to the south

• Leguminous plants, such as beans, peas and vetches, which typically have better quality pollen than other plants

• Flowering trees, which provide a huge amount of nectar and pollen in a small area

See Resources here for the RHS Plants for Pollinators lists.

Berries, seeds and nuts

Growing as many fruiting shrubs and trees as possible will provide birds with the food they need to sustain them in winter, while invertebrates (animals without a backbone) are overwintering. Doing this will also save you a fortune on bird food and offer a more sustainable, reliable source of food over a long period. Many berries are loaded with fat and antioxidants, which are thought to help migrating species deal with the physical stresses of migration – many species will feast on berries before embarking on their long journey. Plants include rowan, hawthorn, ivy, holly and guelder rose.

Leaving seed-bearing plants such as sunflower, lavender, teasel and hyssop may attract a wide range of birds and small mammals, while growing hazel and other nut-bearing plants will ensure the local mice and voles (and therefore the species that eat them) are well catered for.

For more on plants for birds, see here 116.

Supplementary food

Bird-seed mixes, hedgehog biscuits and even fish flakes for tadpoles may all be used to offer supplementary food for a wide range of species. But, as with the artificial habitats you can buy or make, avoid leaving out supplementary food at the expense of creating habitats packed with natural food and the animals these support.

Water

Water is essential to garden wildlife, from the birds and mammals that need to drink and bathe, to the incredible world of amphibians and invertebrates that use water for breeding. If your garden is large enough, you may even encourage species, such as grass snakes and herons, to use your pond to hunt for prey. Whatever size your garden, patio or allotment, it’s easy to provide water, for example:

• A birdbath. Leave a stone in it, as honeybees may also use it for drinking and will need a prop to rest on.

• A container pond. Build a pile of stones outside the pond to make a ‘frog ladder’ if you need to.

• A small, shallow pond. Shallows are where all the life is – the tadpoles and other aquatic larvae. If you have room for only a small pond, then make it no deeper than 30cm with a marginal depth of just 5–10cm. This will also enable birds to bathe and hedgehogs to get in and out easily.

• A large pond with depths of around 60cm, graduating to a large, shallow shelf for all the above reasons. A large pond may attract toads, larger species of dragonfly or even ducks.

• A bog garden, which can be built around a pond, on its own in a border or even created in a large container.

A blackbird takes a dip in the shallows of a garden pond.

Garden ponds provide the perfect habitat for baby frogs, like this one hiding among the pond weed.

Shelter

In a nutshell, shelter is simply space where wildlife can safely breed, sleep, overwinter or just take five minutes during a particularly heavy burst of rain. It can be anything from a little gap between two fence panels or a collection of plant pots piled up next to your shed, to a huge overgrown hedge or a large tree. Almost every part of your garden can provide shelter for some creature or other; the key to wildlife gardening is to provide more shelter for as many different species as possible, and to respect the wildlife that’s taking shelter at any one time. So choosing not to empty your compost bin when slow-worms might be breeding, trim hedges in bird-nesting season or strim grass when hedgehogs might be sleeping is all part and parcel of the choices we make as wildlife gardeners. We create habitats (shelter), and we maintain them in the interests of the wildlife we want to attract.

Virtually every garden can be improved on in this area – all of us can create more shelter. If you have a bare wall or fence, grow a climber or two up it, so birds might nest or insects might bask or feed. Let areas of your lawn grow a bit longer to provide shelter for beetles, pile leaves into a corner, or throw sticks and prunings behind a shrub – see over the page for more ideas. Look at your garden through the eyes of a frog or bird or bee – where would you take shelter if you were them? Could you make changes to bring more of them in? Of course you could!

An old terracotta pot can provide the perfect shelter for a toad.

A hedge is an excellent place to take shelter.

Hedge

A mixed hedge will attract anything from voles, mice and hedgehogs to birds and insects. It will act as a ‘shelter belt’, providing a wind-free spot where insects can congregate (and where bats can come and eat them). Birds will dive into a hedge for safety; hedgehogs will breed or hibernate in the leaf litter that builds up beneath a hedge; caterpillars will eat the leaves – and birds will eat the caterpillars; bees will visit the flowers, fertilising them to help them become fruit or nuts; and then birds and small mammals will come to eat the fruit and nuts. A hedge is an ecosystem in its own right; it’s a habitat for many and varied creatures, for a number of different reasons. A hedge makes the perfect shelter.

Where space allows, plant a native hedge including plants such as hawthorn, beech, spindle, blackthorn, hazel, holly, field maple and buckthorn. Thread climbers such as honeysuckle, dog rose and clematis through the hedge and you add interest and wildlife value. Allowing leaf litter to pile up beneath it will