Make your garden a wild haven
Fearful of the decline of wildlife in the wider countryside, Colin Stafford-Johnson did everything he could to make his plot a home for nature. At the start of the gardening year, he reveals simple steps to make a difference – and how these will bring you lasting joy
Mowing, raking, spraying and clipping were the order of the day in the traditional gardening background that I come from. In the past, there was little problem in having a garden full of exotic plants in a highly managed and tamed area around our homes. In those days, the countryside was full of wildflower meadows and unkempt hedges and wetlands and the world was alive with insects.
But the wild world is nowadays in full retreat and falling silent. With changing farming practices, pollution and development, much of our countryside is ecologically a shadow of what it once was.
Once-common wild plants and the insects that depend on them are rare. Surely the time has come to reconsider how we manage our gardens and consider surrounding ourselves with a little wildness. Killing our native plants in order to establish exotic ones makes no sense to me.
WILD ABANDON
The philosophy for my garden was thus a simple one. Above all else, I wanted to attract as many creatures as possible to come and live there with me. The first decision was to go native. When one cultures native flora alone, there is no need for herbicides, pesticides or artificial fertilisers, for they are adapted to our soil types and climatic conditions. I knew that the more species of native plants I could establish on my patch, the greater diversity of insect life I would have there too – and that these could become the building blocks for a future web of life.
I remember standing in my garden-acre-to-be at the very start of my project. I watched a peacock butterfly flying overhead. It landed on a bramble flower and began to feed. Soon it fluttered on.
How could I tempt it to not just stop for a little nectar but to actually set up home here and raise a family? Adult butterflies feed on the flowers of all sorts of plants, both native and exotic, but their young are very fussy eaters. Peacock, tortoiseshell and comma caterpillars feed on nettles. I realised that they will grow faster the warmer they are and so that’s where the adults will lay their eggs. In order to tempt the butterflies to settle, I needed a nice patch of nettles in the sunshine.
So the challenge was to look at my garden from the perspective of creatures like these – to walk in their shoes. I set my traditional gardening background to one side. In place of a lawn, I established a wildflower meadow. Instead of one species of grass, a whole variety of native grasses were allowed to flower and set seed. I sowed bird’s-foot trefoil, knapweed, devil’s-bit scabious, spear thistles, yarrow, clovers, vetches, buttercups, cowslips and as many meadow plants as I could find.
Instead of an exotic hedge, I planted a hedgerow of hawthorn, blackthorn, guelder rose, hazel, holly, buckthorn, spindle, wild rose, crab apple and any other natives I could think of. I found places for rowan, alder, willow, oak, Scot’s pine, bird cherry, wild cherry, silver birch, downy birch, aspen and arbutus. I dug ponds of different shapes, sizes and depths. These I filled with yellow iris, marsh marigolds, flowering rush, crowfoot, water mint, sedges and yellow and white lilies.
Don’t miss Follow Colin Stafford-Johnson’s nature-friendly gardening on BBC Two’s TheWildGardener, available on iPlayer.
NATURAL TRANSFORMATION
The stage was set. What was to happen in a few short months and over the following couple of seasons was nothing short of miraculous. My land quite simply came to life. It literally began to hum.
Hoverflies, sawflies, solitary bees, butterflies, beetles and bumblebees swarmed over the meadow. Dragonflies and damselflies chased away rivals and hunted around the water. Soon they paired up and started laying their eggs among the pondweeds. Male newts wafted their tails to attract mates. Frog tadpoles sunbathed in the warmest bits of water, ready to dive to the depths when water beetles came hunting. Insect-eating birds gathered to feast.
When people visit my garden now, some are a little concerned by the sheer number of insects, which we rarely encounter in our daily lives. For a few visitors, it can take a bit of getting used to.
It’s the way the world is supposed to be, though. We have become used to an increasingly sterile landscape. However, something deep within my heart’s core tells me that we are supposed to be surrounded by lots of other living things. It’s certainly when I feel at my most content.
Walking in my garden on a fine summer’s day is like taking a walk in the countryside of yesteryear. The closer I look, the more I notice how many leaves have been munched, gnawed and nibbled. This is what I want to happen. All sorts of larvae and caterpillars are chomping on my plants but the wasps are busy collecting them to feed to their young, thus controlling populations and ensuring the plants survive. Parasitic wasps are hunting such creatures, too. This is natural predator control. It can be tough to see but it’s the way it is supposed to be. This is how the natural world works.
Every few days in summer, I discover another plant that has arrived and colonised my garden all by itself. Perhaps its seed arrived on the wind or was carried by a bird and deposited in the right spot. Finding plants that have arrived on their own like this is a complete joy. Even the humble dock, the scourge of my gardening youth, is welcome.
I notice its leaves are taking a bit of a hammering by larvae of some kind. I check around the plant until I find the adults – dock beetles. Not as well known as their ladybird cousins but to me just as beautiful, just as precious, important and deserving of life. Without docks, there would be no dock beetles. So I am delighted they are here.
Colin Stafford-Johnson is an Irish wildlife cameraman, filmmaker and presenter of The Wild Gardener.
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
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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 o er 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 di erent 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.