Why a Lively Garden Rewards You Twice Over

There is a particular sort of quiet that settles over a garden at dusk in late June — and then there is the version of it that hums. A few bees still working the lavender, a blackbird turning over leaf litter, and somewhere in the hedge a rustle you cannot quite identify. That is the garden worth having.

The happy truth is that welcoming wildlife is rarely extra work. More often it is a matter of doing a little less: leaving a patch alone, resisting the strimmer, allowing a few plants to go to seed. You do not need acres in the countryside either. A modest patch behind a semi-detached house, a courtyard, even a balcony with a few pots can between them make a genuine difference to the birds, bees, butterflies and hedgehogs passing through.

What follows are the simplest, highest-value things you can do, in roughly the order they repay the effort.

Plant Native Flowers and Let Some Go to Seed

Native plants are the ones our insects evolved alongside, which means they recognise them as food. A double-flowered bedding plant may look handsome, but it often offers nothing in the way of nectar, and its petals are arranged so tightly that a bee cannot get in at all.

Favour single, open flowers and British natives where you can:

• Foxgloves and honeysuckle for bees and long-tongued moths.
• Oxeye daisy, field scabious and knapweed — excellent for butterflies and hoverflies.
• Birdsfoot trefoil, a modest little yellow flower that is the food plant of the common blue butterfly.
• Lavender, rosemary, thyme and marjoram, especially useful in a hot, dry border.
• Teasel and globe thistle, which hold their shape through winter and feed goldfinches.

Then, crucially, hold back on the autumn tidy. Seed heads left standing over winter feed birds and shelter overwintering insects, and the hollow stems of a spent perennial make a fine place for a solitary bee to sleep. Cut back in late spring instead, once the worst of the frost has passed.

Leave a Wild Corner

Choose one corner — the awkward one behind the shed will do nicely — and declare it out of bounds. Let the grass grow long, allow a patch of nettles to establish, and pile your prunings there rather than taking them to the tip. Nettles are the caterpillar nursery for peacock, small tortoiseshell and red admiral butterflies, so a square metre is genuinely valuable.

Add to that corner as the mood takes you:

• A log pile, part buried and part in shade, for beetles, fungi and frogs.
• A leaf heap left undisturbed, which hedgehogs will happily use for hibernation.
• A bundle of hollow canes, tied and hung in a sheltered spot, for solitary bees.
• Some dead wood standing, if you have a tree you can safely leave as a stump.

If you have fencing all round, cut a 13cm square gap at the base of one panel — a hedgehog highway. Hedgehogs roam a mile or more a night and simply cannot get through a solid fence, which is one of the quieter reasons their numbers have fallen so sharply.

Fresh Water, All Year Round

Water is the single most underrated thing in a wildlife garden, and the cheapest to provide. Birds need to drink and bathe daily, bees need it for the hive, hedgehogs and frogs need it to survive a hot spell.

A shallow dish on the ground, filled with a few pebbles so that insects and small mammals can climb out, does most of the job. Keep it topped up and scrub it out with a stiff brush every week or so — stagnant, algae-filled water spreads disease. Never add any kind of cleaning product.

If you have room for something bigger, a small pond with one gently sloping edge is the finest thing you can build. Line it with native oxygenators, avoid goldfish (they eat everything), and give it a ramp of stones at one end so that a hedgehog which tumbles in can climb out again. Rainwater from a butt is ideal for topping up, and a shallow saucer of it set among the pots will keep the bees going through August.

Think in Layers, Not in Borders

Wildlife moves vertically as well as horizontally. A garden with a canopy, a shrub layer and some ground cover will support far more life than a flat expanse of lawn with a border round the edge.

Hedges earn their keep twice over: hawthorn, blackthorn, beech and holly give nesting cover, berries for winter, and a sheltered corridor for small mammals. Ivy is superb and much maligned — its late flowers are a lifeline for bees in October, and its dense matting is prime roosting cover. Climbers such as honeysuckle and jasmine soften walls and give bats a route along a flight line.

Hang a bat box high on a south-facing wall, away from security lights. Site a bee hotel in full sun, at least a metre off the ground. And if you keep a compost heap, do not be alarmed if a slow worm takes up residence in the warm middle — that is a compliment, and they eat slugs.

A Gentle Calendar to Work To

Little and often beats a grand plan every time. A rough rhythm for the year:

• Spring: plant out natives, set up the water dish, put up nest boxes, stop mowing the wild corner.
• Early summer: leave deadheading until later so seed sets, keep water topped up, resist all spraying.
• Late summer: let the seed heads stand, cut long grass once and remove the cuttings, plant autumn-flowering ivy if you can.
• Winter: feed the birds, keep the water ice-free, leave the leaf litter and the log pile entirely alone.

Do that for a season and the change is startling. The hum arrives before you notice it, and one evening you will find yourself standing at the kitchen window, mug in hand, watching the whole small enterprise get on with its business.