Finished wildlife garden

[boogieman84]

Hi all,

Not sure that this will be of any interest to anyone however i've been working on making a wildlife garden at my parents house for the past 2 years(on and off) and wanted to post some pictures of the finished product! Unfortunately I didnt think of taking pictures before I started to show how different it now is so I will try to give you a rough idea where I can!



This area is at the back of the garden, and it was basically full of slow growing conifers, other dull evergreen shrubs and not a lot else so it was pretty dull and boring(plus i can't stand conifers) so I dug these up and have now planted blackthorn, guelder rose, mahonia, tansy, fennel, wild strawberries,various grasses and lots of wild marjoram up behind a small wall as well as some bluebells,alliums,aconites,round headed leeks. We already had a clematis(Not sure which type) growing up the trelis.

I have also sectioned off an area in the corner(far right off the picture) for fruit bushes namely raspberries,blackberries and gooseberries and am going to allow this area to grow completely wild.

To the left of this I have made a small pond with a boggy area to the side of it, and although it doesnt look fantastic it I have seen some frogs about so hopefully it will serve a purpose. Within the pond I have planted a banded horsetail,bog bean, branched burr reed, flowering rush, marsh marigold, narrow reed mace and some horn wort to oxygenate it. For the boggy section I planted a few ragged robins, a hemp agrimony and some meadow sweet. To supply the frogs etc with a food source I have placed random logs around to The pond and the boggy area are a bit of a trial and I only put the plants in a few months ago so i've yet to see how well they will do but hopefully it will be full of life!

Just out of view is a shaded area where the composter is sited(I managed to encourage them to get one after promising it wouldn't smell) and where I have made a log/leaf pile. I regularly see slow worms around this area and we do have a hedgehog that comes through the garden so i've tried to tempt it to stay.





This area is the front section of the back garden and again was full of slow growing conifers and evergreen shrubs which were blocking out most of the sunlight. So I dug these up as well and it really opened up the garden allowing me to plant things in need of full sun, and within this area I have planted angelica, red and white clover, buddleia globosa(fantastic for bees!), crab apple, wild strawberries, marjoram,echinacea, milkweed, alliums, goat willow amongst many other things. I also put up some trellis which will have honeysuckle and dog roses climbing up them.

I will post more pictures online soon once everything starts flowering so that it looks much more interesting(I know it doesn't now!). Hopefully it will be full of colour

Basically my main principles when started were:

Eliminating plants/flowers with no wildlife benefit and low to no pollen/nectar content
Allowing areas to grow wild(even if they look 'unsightly')
Creating a pond
Planting as many natives as possible
Encouraging my parents to stop using sprays and slug pellets or anything along these lines
Allowing some weeds to grow
Not being too tidy

Will post more pics soon!

[boogieman84]

Fruiting plant area



Pond and 'bog'


Log pile



Front garden



And by the way before anyone points this out. I appreciate that digging up shrubs etc may seem anti to creating a wildlife garden however I feel that planting high pollen/nectar/berry producing plants will be more beneficial to widlife in the long run

[PMM123]

Looks excellent, well done. I'm in the process of buying a house with a similar sized garden so hopefully I'll be copying you soon!

[Kreacha]

Excellent!! Looks ace! I too have just installed a garden just for wildlife. I have a pond (no frogs or newts yet though ), bog garden and adjacent logpile. A fruit bar for wasps, flys and butterflies etc. and two areas of plants just for beetles, butterflies, moths, caterpillars etc. (verbana, teasel, birdsfoot trefoil, willowherb, marjoram, lavender, lady's bedstraw, dockleaves, thistles, nicotina to name a few.... and my pot of nettles (mates think I'm a right weirdo) ) Can't wait to see what I get in the garden this year

[dampflippers]

Well done- an excellent project.
When newts arrive, the raised wills will give good refuge places for them.
You are sooo lucky having slow worms!
At one end of the pond you could add some washed gravel or pebbles to make a beach and to cover some of the liner- sort of fill the gap behind one of the ponts.
Plants will soon grow over to cover the rest of the liner.
It's only a small pond, so beware of it getting too full of plants with no open water surface at all.

[SheffieldLass]

Excellent. I'm sure the wildlife are already packing their bags to take up residence

A fair few years ago when I lived in Sheffield, me and my neighbours all started to garden in a every similar way ... organic, with a good range of wildlife friendly plants. Despite being urban and the individual gardens small, it was amazing just what came into the garden. First the insects, then the rest followed.

There is one thing you might come to regret, though ... the blackthorn .... it can sucker really badly, and it's thorns are vicious and pricks tend to go septic, and worse still lead to blood poisoning. I've just removed all of it from a wildlife hedge (planted by my predecessor) in my new garden as it was turning into a thicket, and it was not endearing me to my neighbours either as it didn't respect boundaries .... Hawthorn is a much better behaved alternative, and the berries get eaten much faster than the sloes ....

[boogieman84]

Thanks for the comments In regards to the putting pebbles/shingle inbetween the pond and bog I may do this. I had to make a gap between pond and bog and I was told that dragonflies etc need a place to bask but I guess they will do this with pebbles as well. The bog needs deepening I think as it dries out easily but the hemp agrminony does have new shoots so I will leave this job until next year. Also I read online that a pond needs to be 80% full to encourage wildlife hence putting in quite a lot of plants but I will take into account your point and try to keep it under control! I previously made a tiny pond in a small area that received no sunlight but this limited what I could plant hence moving it, however amazingly after a few weeks we did have newts! My dad has a large pond with koi though so maybe it had more to do with this.

In the current pond i've managed to get some tadpoles from a friend so hopefully the garden will be full of frogs but I'm not sure if there is anything for them to eat yet. What does their diet consist of? I've seen some small wriggly creatures within the pond and various tiny worms, will these be enough?


In regards to the blackthorn, thanks for the advice and suggestion, I may now pull it up and replace with a hawthorn as suggested as I don't want it to spoil the garden. The reason I chose it originally was the flowers which look amazing and also because it has berries however the hawthorn looks similiar so I might go for this instead. One question, if I pull up the blackthorn now whilst it's still really small should it be quite a simple procedure or not i need to make sure I get all of the roots out? And can I grow the hawthorn as a kind of shrub?


Yes we are quite lucky to have slow worms, they are very cool and probably keep the slug numbers down. I'm 99% sure they actually bred in our garden as I saw 2-3 small slow worms last year and then when I was emptying the composter I encoutered them again so maybe they bred within it?


Just to add we also put out food for the birds and regularly get sparrows,starlings,wood pigeons,doves, various tits and robins. I also put up a few bird houses and we had some doves nesting in the garden once and also blue tits, however 4 blue tit chicks were found dead in the nest box and a couple of the dove young fell out of the nest and were probably killed/eaten. Maybe there were some that survived but i'm not sure. Great fun to watch the dove pick up various twigs only to drop them minutes after, they seem to be incredibly fussy when choosing suitable materials for their nest! And we also have seagulls nesting on our roof, what a joy!


And one last question, by putting out various logs and pieces of wood around the garden, will this encourage diseases which could be contracted by plants/trees or should it be quite safe?

Thanks for all the comments!

[boogieman84]

And although I don't want to plant them out I have two big pots of nettles, to use to make fertilisers and also to attract ladybirds due to the aphids and maybe have some butterflies lay their eggs on them which will provide food for the birds! so it's not that strange, they are supposed to be one of the no1 wildlife friendly plants!

[sunnydale]

I think the garden looks great already, so I'm sure it will look fab when it's more established.

Fantastic use of a relatively small area too! I bet your parents are thrilled to bits with their new garden. I know I would be!

Tracey

[paddy]

Might be an idea to keep an eye on the hemp agrimony too - i've just sadly had to get rid of mine, as it grew to such an extent over a couple of years that it starved the light from much of the smaller plants - cuckoo flower, ragged robin etc.. beautiful plant if you've got the space though.