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Wildlife 2019: Image

A year's wildlife in my garden

I've thought a lot about gardening for wildlife over the years, and the best way to incorporate it into my design work. It's all very well planting flowers that pollinators will come to, but providing food for only one part of the life-cycle is pointless if you don't also provide habitat for hibernation and food plants for the larvae. While butterflies will just as happily drink from imports like Echinacea and Lantana, their larvae are fussier and will usually need a more or less restricted selection of native plants to eat. 


Of course the absolutely best way to support wildlife is just to leave your land to revert to its natural state (as the Charlie Burrell and Isabella Tree have done in their fabulous rewilding project on the Knepp Estate which I visited last year), but in a smaller space letting your garden go can become unsightly and depressing, and I believe that it's possible to have a beautiful space that contributes to supporting our vanishing ecosystem.


Over the last few years I have been experimenting with growing and planting native wildflowers in traditional-style borders in my own garden (I'll talk about which were successful in another post), and this year I tried to document as many insect visitors as possible. I was surprised by the variety and unprepared for the amount of pleasure it gave me knowing that the plants I had provided were being enjoyed by so many different species. Once you start noticing the comings and goings and flirting and competition it adds a new dimension to your experience of being outside that you will never again want to be without. In addition, the excitement of discovering that something you have photographed on one of your flowers is rare in the UK is like discovering treasure. 

So, some introductory information about my garden. It's tiny; only 12mx3m and much of that paved (although now I'm tempted to take up some of the flags to grow more insect food!), it's only a couple of years old, and it's north-facing, which means that I only get sunshine between April and October when the sun is high enough to look over the house. I'm in Lambeth in South London; London is a surprisingly green city thanks to the Victorian tree planting initiatives, commons and parkland, and I have a few green spaces close by. I realise that so far I am only attracting existing wildlife rather than generating my own, but I hope that all the egg-laying that went on means that I've increased populations, even if only in a small way.


I've taken pictures at intervals throughout the year to demonstrate that a garden can be pretty and support wildlife:

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April

1st June

17th June

4th July
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4th July

24th July

9th September

Wildlife 2019: Projects

Now the bit you've all been waiting for: the insects! There are a lot of pictures here, but they're soooo pretty. I think you can agree that it's an impressive haul for such a tiny garden! Please note that I don't pretend there's anything remotely scientific about this, it's just a first year's assessment of the life in my new garden. I hope you enjoy them.

Anthophora quadrimaculata 3

Bees first, I'm afraid that after an initial spurt of enthusiasm I became frustrated by the difficulty of identifying bee species without looking through a microscope and moved onto hoverflies which are a bit easier, but I'll do better next year. There are some duplicates, mainly Anthophora quadrimaculata and Megachile centuncularis because they are so fluffy!

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These were some of my most exciting insects, partly because the ichneumonids are so spectacular and partly because I had a couple of unusual ones. I have a feeling that the mint moth caterpillars which were in great abundance attracted the wasps, particularly Ancistrocerus - as you'll see! The photograph of Ancistrocerus shows it dragging a mint moth caterpillar across my shorts.

Red Admiral

Not as many species as I was hoping for, but quite a few individuals over the summer

Stag beetle

I was only really half looking out for these, and some categories like leaf-hopper I ignored completely. It's a steep learning curve! My first Rose Chafer was so exciting, but in the end I had visits from 11 separate adults (as far as I could tell from the markings on the wing cases).

Epistrophe grossulariae

This is the biggest category because I joined an identification group on social media.

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Lastly, other flies including sawflies. I really didn't try very hard with these, just snapped a few things that looked unusual.

Wildlife 2019: Projects
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