A-Z of Services

Biodiversity and Gardening

Introduction

Gardens are important for wildlife. They provide a haven for many species under threat in the countryside including amphibians, bats, and birds especially songthrushes.

How you can help wildlife in your garden

Create a garden pond.
Use peat-free compost.
Install bat and bird boxes.
Make log piles for beetles in the darker, damper corners of your garden.
Stop using slug pellets and other harmful substances by switching to more environmentally acceptable methods.
Recycle household vegetable waste by composting, thereby creating habitat for reptiles and amphibians, and also providing valuable garden compost.
Leave some long grass in your lawn for species such as grasshoppers.
Maintain bushy hedges with a high diversity of native shrub and tree species (such as hawthorn, hazel, beech, holly, wild rose, blackthorn and rose).
Plant native fruiting shrubs (such as crab apple, hawthorn, blackthorn and rose).

Garden Habitat Action Plan

In the UK our gardens cover over 2 million acres of land, that is 15 million gardens each of which are a potential nature reserve if managed appropriately. Recent research has shown that an average sized garden, managed with nature conservation in mind, can support up to 3000 different plants and animals. A number of declining species such as song thrush, great crested newt, pipistrelle bat and hedgehog are known to occur in gardens. Large gardens can potentially offer a wide variety of habitats for a wide variety of wildlife but even containers and window boxes can provide a valuable source of nectar for butterflies.

Gardening organically, without chemicals, is one of the simplest ways to encourage wildlife. It is important to remember that there may be a couple of thousand insects species in a garden and all but a few such as greenfly and slugs, are either harmless or beneficial.

In Wrexham as part of the Biodiversity Action Plan a Garden Habitat Action Plan was produced to promote the value of gardens for wildlife. As part of this a local questionnaire about garden wildlife was distributed during summer 2002. As expected birds in general were widely recorded, but an additional impression was that garden wildlife was highly valued.