There are some big misconceptions about attracting wildlife into gardens and the best ways to combat the biodiversity loss crisis. The reality may seem surprising and counterintuitive. For example, shopping trollies that are dumped in water actually boost biodiversity. Brownfield sites and allotments are really great places for wildlife. And 20 per cent of our most important sites for nature are linked to mineral extraction.
You may also like
- John Little on green roofs and reusing waste material
- The whole idea of wildlife gardens is outdated
- Plants with bad reputations are actually good for your garden
When you go to your local garden centre over the weekend and look at the products promoted as being for wildlife, you’ll probably find a table of pollinator-friendly plants, which is fine. But in my dream garden centre’s wildlife corner, the next thing down the line on your table of wildlife materials would be a pile of sand. Take it home, tip it out and immediately, just by doing that single act, you’ve created a new substrate and a bit of topography that will pull in ground-nesting bees and solitary wasps and all sorts of other wonderful wildlife.
Let’s ‘plant’ more dead trees and build more dead hedges
Structure in a garden is totally undervalued. I use local sand and construction waste to vary the nutrient levels and drainage in my garden, and adding piles of various materials adds to the mix of microclimates. This is so important with the climate crisis upon us. If you are a bee in a flat field with no topography or structure and the temperature gets too high, you have nowhere to go.
Next along the line at the garden centre would be a pile of logs; essentially, dead stuff. Dead logs and rotten timber are great – as are corpses, but you hopefully won’t find any of those at your garden centre – and are a massive part of a functioning ecosystem, but are hardly ever designed into a landscape. Let’s ‘plant’ more dead trees and build more dead hedges. You can stack a pile of logs on the surface of the soil, but you will also want to dig a hole and stack logs upright in it to create damp wood and dry wood and standing dead wood.
Take a pipe home, block the end off and fill with vegetation and water, and it becomes a lagoon
Further along the row in our garden centre, there are some old pipes. Take a pipe home, block the end off and fill with vegetation and water, and it becomes a lagoon – which is a rather glamorous phrase in the conservation world for a stagnant piece of water – and you will then attract a lot of hoverfly larvae species. You can’t get those beautiful hoverflies without getting the mildly sad-looking, rat-tailed maggot larvae first. Strap the lagoons to a tree, if you’re lucky enough to have one, or a fence, or bury it slightly in the ground, and then you are mimicking the hollows in trees and temporary stagnant pools that would have been all over the place naturally.
Don't make everything flat. Flat things are the enemy of biodiversity.
Right at the end of the wildlife table, there’s a spade. Take it home, dig a hole and make a mound. By doing this, you’ve changed the topography, moved the topsoil and concentrated it in one place, and made a very damp area at the bottom of the hole and a nice dry area at the top of your mound.
From a garden point of view, by doing this you are giving yourself more plant choice, but from a biodiversity point of view, it drives everything, because you’ve immediately created a more complicated, niche space with more microclimates. Don’t make everything flat. Flat things are the enemy of biodiversity. As soon as you change the topography of a landscape, you improve the biodiversity potential of that landscape. As soon as you dig that hole and make that mound, you add to the opportunities and niches for wildlife in your garden. So move topsoil, expose subsoil, disturb things, leave some areas bare.
We need to think about how we can make gardens more complicated
For biodiversity, these things such as soil and structure are as important if not more important than plant choice. It turns out that when we’re designing a garden and thinking about how we can make it better for wildlife, we need to think about how we can make it more complicated.
So when you next visit your garden centre looking for wildlife products to buy, and find no bags of sand or rubble, no stacks of dead wood or corpses, and you’re not allowed to take the shopping trolley home with you to litter your own pond, maybe ask them to rethink their wildlife-friendly merchandise.
• Follow John Little on Instagram @grassroofco for updates on open days at his experimental brownfield garden Hilldrop in Essex.