Letting Nature In: Loosening Your Grip On The Garden

Gardeners get a bit hung up on tending their land and in the process overly tidying their garden space. This feature is making a case for managed scruffiness, for holding onto prunings, logs and rubble and letting plants grow that bit more and in the process letting nature take it course.

Relax Your Pruning

You can trim and prune it if you must, just do the right thing by your garden waste! Trimming can actually help create more compact growth – which can in turn create nesting habitats – just avoid going to far and cutting back to excess. Evergreens such as conifers and holly can provide a great protective habitat for nesting birds, as can many climbing plants such as ivy and Hydrangea paniculata, just as long as there is enough depth of growth to allow for support and cover.

Overly trimmed ‘tidy’ plants provide less cover and the very act of attention from gardeners (especially during the spring and summer months) will only put of nesting birds. Why not keep pruning and trimming to the dormant winter months and keep plants healthy by going for less pruned natural looking?

Rubble And Rocks

Gardeners spend too much time tidying up, making things look all neat and tidy – but the garden isn’t a living room and sometimes you need to let your hair down when it comes to garden tidying. Rubble and brick waste is very unpopular with most gardeners but can be used within the garden and in the process can provide a great habitat for nesting wildlife. Brick rubble and rocks can be piled up loose to make retaining walls to hold back soil, providing insects and invertebrates a fine micro-habitat to live in and a dry sheltered spot for over-wintering. Rocks can also be stacked in out of the way spots or around the back of ponds and planting to provide shelter for amphibians such as frogs and toads, creatures which will in turn help control slugs and snails.

All gardens have less tended areas, you know, that little area behind the shed where you might find a few broken paving slabs, some roof tiles and an abandoned lawn mower. These forgotten corners are more often than not the preferred habitat for many small mammals and amphibians, they just love the cover and the fact that humans seem to leave them alone!

Best Wood Where?

Dead wood is an integral part in the ecological cycle providing homes for much of the wildlife we know and love – wood peckers, small mammals, beetles etc. – all will make homes amongst piles of dead branches, standing deadwood or rotting logs. But that’s only half the story as dead wood provides an ideal food source for many of our more glamorous wildlife. Insects both in adult form and as grubs provide a welcome dinner for birds, amphib ians as well as small mammals.

Seeing The Wood On The Trees

Obviously there are safety implications of leaving dead wood hanging around in amongst your trees, but by far the best place for dead wood is up there precariously balanced in the canopy. However hanging dead wood contains 40% more wildlife.

Dead Wood At Ground Level

Next time you take that woodland walk just take a look at the forest floor. This is what you need to be emulating, and possibly improving on. That said you don’t need to re-creating that bramble stinging nettle look that you see in many a woodlands, but a few piles of logs and trimmings can add greatly to the conservation value of plantings.

What Lives On Dead Wood?

Macroflora and fungi and all manner of mini beasts such as insects and spiders require dead wood as a habitat. These creatures in turn provide a food source for many of our more recognisable (and preferred) wildlife. In short leaving dead wood helps to maintain the natural food chain that should exist within the garden.

Dead wood also provides a nesting habitat for many beneficial ground dwelling creatures such as frogs, toads, mice and hedge hogs.

The Habitat Pile: How To Make The Most Of Dead Wood

Use longer logs to create habitat piles of logs stacked tightly against each other side by side. Larger logs are good for fungi and insects and can be laid out away from site in shady spots under trees and shrubs where they can rot down slowly and provide a long term habitat and food source.

Finer trimmings can be packed tightly side by side to create a sort of ‘thatched’ habitat pile that can provide shelter for mammals such as hedgehogs or mice. A protective covering of felt roof sheeting on planks loose planks will make the habitat that much dryer and safer for mammals and amphibians.

Avoid the urge to burn everything as burning prunings releases nutrients and damaging carbon dioxide into the atmosphere and destroys a valuable link in your gardens natural nutrient cycle. You might also be inadvertently be burning some of your own indigenous wildlife. Ideally you should take the bulk of you green waste to your local dump for composting or compost it on your on own compost heap.