Wild Garden

You can visit the garden centre's and nurseries for your plants and seeds, or you can go and see all your friends who have gardens. Plants men are always only too happy to give away plants; you will almost certainly find some in this way that are suitable for your needs. Bring and buy sales,Women's Institute markets and the like are other fruitful source sand, in some areas, conservation agencies such as the County Naturalist Trusts and the World Wildlife Fund hold annual plant sales. But, wherever you get your plants do buy a tree or two if you have room, and lots of shrubs. Any type of tree will do, as long as it has dense cover for nesting and roosting. If you are choosing a tree it is worth bearing in mind that some provide berries in the winter which will attract birds, while others are the food plants of certain insects - the Lime is the food plant of the Lime Hawk Moth for example. The same sort of thinking has to go into selecting shrubs for your nature reserve.

Buddleia is well-known for the attraction that the flowers possess for insects, and in fact it is frequently referred to as the Butterfly Bush. Roses are good provided that you choose one of the old fashioned varieties that are richly perfumed and have a good supply of nectar to attract insects. The other advantage of the rose is that you might be lucky and find that it becomes covered in aphids which in turn attract ants, that you can watch as they milk the aphids for their honeydew, and predators such as ladybirds and small insectivorous birds. Honeysuckle is great plant to have in the garden and mine, which covers most of the front of the house is rich in wildlife particularly throughout the flowering period in early summer. Blackbirds regularly nest in it and last year one of the nests was just below the bedroom windowsill so that each time you opened the window and peered down between the leaves you could see eight little black eyes peering up at me and as soon as they realized someone was there the yellow beaks would open wide and the fledglings would screech frantically in the hope that you would drop caterpillars in to them.This honeysuckle is packed full of insects and on a warm summer evening just as it is getting dark the whole thing is alive with moths of all sizes buzzing and whirring before it while they hunt through the richly scented blooms for nectar. At dawn the day shift takes over and it is not at all uncommon to find dozens of bees and other nectar feeders hard at work and completely oblivious to human being only a few centimeters from them.

Fruit trees and bushes are always good for attracting animals. Currants and gooseberries attract Magpie Moths; apples and pears attract birds as well as insects right through till the autumn, when the fallen fruit might be visited by hedgehogs who love fermenting fruit. If you plant Broad Beans and some of the basics, you are bound to find plenty of black fly which in turn attract small birds,and white butterflies.
A good variety of native plants in your garden will soon become the homes of all sorts of things. Distort flowers are much loved by bees, and wild thyme when it is in flower is covered in insects busily working the deep purple flowers; and these insects attract other animals to the garden to feed on them, from small invertebrate predators like the fast moving, undulating centipedes to hosts of spiders whose webs you will soon find everywhere. Thistles pantalets are marvelous plants to have in a garden; they attract Goldfinches.

Wild Foxgloves and Primroses and Lavender all have a place Gina wildlife garden and, if you have room, leave part of it actually wild and watch how Fat Hen and Rosebay Willow Herb androids grow first on a patch of bare soil, later to be overtaken by grasses, brambles and nettles, which are vital to some insects,such as Red Admiral Butterflies. And did you know that cloth used to be made from the fibrous stems of nettles?

You should also try to find space somewhere for a compost heap, not only so that you can recycle all your unwanted vegetation and turn it into excellent compost, but to attract animals as well. The decaying vegetation is home to a wide range of little
creatures and the heat generated by the decomposition enables the life cycle of some of them to continue when it might otherwise be arrested. Slugs, snails, woodlice, centipedes and spiders all love compost heaps and, if you are very lucky, you might even end up with Grass Snakes laying their eggs in your compost heap.

Grow some Sunflowers; each huge seed head will contain dozens of different insects which in turn will be eaten by several species of birds, and later in the year as the seeds ripen, other birds will come to feed from them and perhaps the odd squirrel as well. Someone else who will be after your sunflower seeds will beamy neighborhood pet keeper, who will try and beg them from you for his collection.

Once your garden is established introduce some frog and toad spawn into your pond - but not if you have fish in the pond, as they will eat the eggs and the tadpoles. Don't try introducing the adult amphibians because they will try and return to their original spawning pond and you will lose them, but those that grow up in your pond ought to regard your garden as home and you will occasionally come across them in other parts of your garden.In order to encourage the greatest number of variety of animals as possible one should fry to grow plants that will provide flowers,fruit and seeds from very early spring until winter; so the season might start with Primroses in February or even earlier if the weather is not too cold until the flowers of Pink Sedum in the autumn, and the hips and Holly berries and the nuts last you through until nearly Christmas. Like all the best wildlife reserves yours will need a certain amount of management or you may find that one particular plant is so successful that all the other prize specimens in its neighborhood start disappearing as the first takes over. Some naturalists maintain that everything should be left strictly alone.

A good wildlife garden is a great place for taking photographs of animals and, if you have suitable equipment, it is full of insect sand other small creatures which tend to be overlooked by the photographer in favor of the more obvious birds and mammals. Wildlife gardening is a rewarding operation and, unlike conventional pet keeping, once you are over the initial outlay, costs are minimal - which is not a bad plus point these days.