Designing a garden for wildlife

A garden full of birds, bees and butterflies is more interesting to live with — and it’s easier to create than you might think. Wildlife needs three things: food, water and shelter. Give it all three and it will find you.

Plant for a long season

Pollinators need flowers from early spring to late autumn. Mix early bulbs and hellebores, summer perennials like salvia and lavender, and late asters and sedums. Single, open flowers are far more useful to bees than tightly double ones.

Add water, however small

A pond with a sloping beach is ideal, but even a sunken washing-up bowl with stones for access will bring in frogs, dragonflies and drinking birds within a season.

Leave a little untidiness

Log piles, a patch of longer grass and hollow stems left standing over winter give insects and small mammals somewhere to live. A native hedge instead of a fence adds nesting sites, berries and a wildlife corridor in one.