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Planting for wildlife
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Planning your planting

Berries at the RSPB Lodge nature reserve gardens

Planning and creating a wildlife garden from scratch can be daunting, but you can spread the work over several months, or a few years.

Consider the different plants available, the space you have and the resources at your disposal. Nurseries, garden centres, gardening books, magazines and mail order specialists are good sources of information.

Sketch your ideas on paper, marking in where shrubs and larger flowers might go. Experiment with wavy, curved or oval boundaries to provide a more natural habitat. Make your borders as large as possible and retain existing features and plants where you can. For example, an old apple tree can be used as a support for climbers.

Diversify

The more varied the habitat in your garden, the more wildlife you will attract.

Shrubs, trees and climbers can disguise bare walls or sheds and create an attractive backdrop for lower level species planted in front. Climbers can be trained over existing structures or trellis, and shrubs and trees can be managed to provide dense growth at low levels.

Borders with large structural trees, shrubs or climbers at the rear can be complimented with a variety of lower growing shrubs such as lavender, hebe and senecio towards the front. Leave them room to spread. Fill spaces with herbaceous perennials (flowering plants which die back each winter and re-grow in the following spring), bulbs, bi-annuals and annuals. These provide ground cover for birds and attract a variety of insects.

Annuals such as poppies or forget-me-nots will seed themselves. You could allow some discrete patches of wild annual plants such as groundsel or annual meadow grass to remain, or sow or plant wild arable flowers such as corn cockle and corn marigold.

Choosing your plants

Find out as much as you can about the soil, and whether your garden is sunny or shady. Many plants need specific soil conditions. Look around and find out what grows well in your local area, or find plants that require similar conditions to those already thriving.

Think about foliage as well as flowers, try to include leaves of different colour, shapes and textures, and mix evergreens with deciduous plants. Check in a gardening book or on the label to find out how large the plants will grow and what maintenance they need and when.

Not all ornamental will produce fruit, but may be valuable in other ways. Varieties susceptible to insect attack are valuable to birds and other insects which feed on the offending insect.

Many plants often take several years to mature. For example, you are not likely to see a song thrush feeding on ivy berries for at least five years.

Careful consideration should be given in mature gardens before removing an established plant to replace with a new one - think of the impact on the value for wildlife.

Purchasing plants

  • Trees and shrubs are available as bare-rooted plants (trees as ‘standards’ or ‘feathers’ and shrubs as ‘whips’), root-balled with a small amount of soil around the roots and wrapped in hessian sack or planted in a plastic pot with compost (usually peat).
  • Hedging plants are available as bare-rooted ‘whips’ or container-grown plants.
  • Flowering plants can be purchased as root corms or tubers that are either bare-rooted or, most often, pre-planted in a plastic pot with a peat-based compost.
  • Biennials and annuals can be purchased as seeds for self sowing or already pre-grown in a small pot or container.

The most economic way to purchase plants is as bare-rooted or as seeds. This avoids buying plants that have been potted using peat.

Check the roots of potted plants are not tightly wound round inside the pot. This indicates that the plant is potbound and has been in the nursery for some time.

Consider the environmental implications of bedding plants. They may have been raised on an industrialised scale in huge heated glasshouses and shipped here from the continent. The containers they are grown in do not usually recycle or biodegrade well and the plants are usually grown in peat.

Go native

Native species such as holly and hawthorn are important to wildlife. Many non-natives can be equally beneficial though. If you select native species, source plants of local provenance that compliment local habitats and make sure they come from native stock.

Many plants believed to be native and brought in good faith may be of continental origin. Their leafing and flowering times can vary greatly from our own and may not coincide with times when our insects emerge to feed on their host species of plant. This can upset the balance of timing for insects reliant on them to complete their life cycles and the birds that time breeding to be able to feed their young on these insects.

Last modified: 07 October 2007

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