The merits of messy
Want to encourage more wildlife into your garden? Depending on how naturally neat you are, you may be happy to hear that being a little less tidy can make your garden a more attractive place for the creatures you hope will call it home.
Dead wood
There are lots of animals and fungi that rely on dead wood as a habitat, and you can incorporate it into your garden in a few different ways.
Create a log pile Best in a shady spot that will keep fairly cool and damp. Use wood that still has bark on, include a mix of sizes (nothing too small and twiggy) and leave the bottom logs in direct contact with the soil, ideally slightly buried. Your log pile will attract insects which are then food for animals further up the food chain. Use wood from trees cut down in your or a neighbours garden, or speak to a tree surgeon to see if they can supply any – don’t take fallen wood from wild woods or forests as this will just be removing a habitat needed by wildlife in these areas.
Build a dead hedge Use the cuttings from pruning your shrubs and trees to create a dead hedge. Drive upright poles into the ground at regular staggered intervals so that you can slot the cuttings between them – the bottom branches will rot down into the ground and you can add new prunings to the top as you cut them.
Leave a stump or dead tree in place As long as they aren’t posing any danger, leaving a dead tree or shrub in place to decompose naturally can provide a home for a range of wildlife, including potential nesting sites for birds or bats in exposed cavities in the trunk.
Winter shelter
Instead of cutting back herbaceous perennials once they finish flowering in the autumn, leave them and cut them back in the spring when new growth starts to appear. This provides winter shelter and food for various wildlife – hollow stems can be used by overwintering insects and birds will eat seeds from plants like phlomis, teasels and asters. Use your own judgement – if you have a rampant self-seeder that you don’t want to spread, then that will need to be cut down after flowering, and if something has collapsed all over the border and you think it looks terrible, then you can cut it back and put it on the compost.
No mow
The rise of the garden meadow is a great alternative to large expanses of short lawn. The simplest way to create a long grass area is to stop mowing and allow the grass, and any other plants which may have been hidden by mowing, to grow tall. You can also introduce appropriate wildflowers as plugs to help increase the biodiversity and attract more wildlife. Your long grass area could be a small patch of garden or the whole lawn, with a border mown round the edges and mown paths weaving through. These mown areas help to make the meadow look like a purposeful design decision, rather than an uncared for space.
All of this doesn’t mean your garden needs to be ‘a mess’
Following these suggestions doesn’t mean that you need to aim for an out of control wilderness. Your garden needs to be attractive and useful to you, as well as the other creatures sharing it. If you prefer a more formal and neat look, then assign an area of you garden further away from the house to be the site of a log pile and some longer grass, and then design in screening so that you aren’t looking at it all the time. Screening can be taller planting or something man made like hazel or willow hurdles. You may already have a naturally hidden area, like behind the shed, that would be ideal.