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:

April