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Here for your Friday delectation I’d like to introduce you to the amazing new garden at our amazing new nature reserve near Middlesborough. I’ve been able to visit it twice during its creation, but best if I hand over to Dave Braithwaite to tell the story cos it's his garden (but they’re my pictures I'll have you know. Adrian ;-)

At Saltholme, we wanted to create a garden that offered our visitors quiet contemplation, a wildlife experience in its own right and that demonstrated the natural succession that plant communities go through.

If that wasn`t enough, we also wanted a garden that was rather more designerly than what immediately comes to mind when someone tells you they have a "wildlife garden". A garden that offered wildlife opportunities whilst still looking the part in the suburbs; something that had broader appeal to the average gardener.

Given these challenges we thought that it would be a good idea to call in an expert: no other than the celebrity gardener Chris Beardshaw.  
 
He designed a fabulous garden that is partially walled with planed and vertically installed railway sleepers. Gabions lead to a bleached larch pergola with seating (right) that gives a view back across the garden space. 

At the heart of the garden there is a large pond (left), which is the start of an ecological journey through time.
 
For me the greatest inspiration is the small stumpery: dead trees (a by-product of the local forestry industry) planted upside down with their roots pointing skyward. They provide drama and sculptural intrigue. But more than this, the inverted root boles fill up with rainwater, micro habitats that are home to specialist communities of microbes and invertebrates.
 
The garden really works and is a credit to Chris`s design skills. Equally it is credit to the tenacity of the staff who built the garden throughout last winter ... a wet and bleak experience it was too. But the team stuck to the task and we had the beginnings of a fabulous garden in place for the visit by Kate Humble who formally opened the reserve on 6th March.
 
The garden is still embryonic and we are lucky to have a team of volunteers who look after it and will give it the TLC it needs as it grows to maturity.
 
Dave Braithwaite
Saltholme Site Manager

Want to see the garden? Check out how to visit here.

The weather currently being so mild, there’s been lots of interest on the forums of late about what insects are on still the wing. While in a local garden at the weekend, I was intrigued to see anything from a dozen or so flies running around one area of the trunk of a sycamore all morning. The trunk was in full sunlight and they seemed quite intent on basking and searching all the tiny cracks and fissures of the bark. I can only guess they may have been looking for sugars. It just goes to show providing areas that can warm up quickly, especially in spring and autumn can be important to wildlife. In this case, it was the trunk of the tree, but areas of bare earth, dead wood or anything else that will rapidly absorb heat will be of benefit.

In the same garden Brimstone butterfly and Common darter were also seen.

Those following my recent blogs will know I’ve been busy preparing to run a training course for green space managers. The outcome is more landscape supervisors now have a better understanding about the importance of their urban green space for people and wildlife and why particular features such as long grass and dead wood are especially valuable. I’m now busy planning more courses for next year and spreading the word.

Back where I come from in the Midlands, there’s a place on the Malvern Hills with the delightful name of Happy Valley where each autumn Ring Ouzels turn up on their migration. They’re heading south to the Atlas Mountains in northern Africa, but they do like to stop off and feed up for a few days. The valley’s attraction is a number of Rowan trees, Sorbus aucuparia, where they can gobble the red berries to their hearts’ content.

Given that we’re coming into the best time of year for planting trees, Rowan is certainly a great option for the wildlife gardener to think about, although I can’t promise you Ring Ouzels if you do plant one!

But while I love the plain old native, I’m ever keen to suss out the more exotic trees that wildlife gardeners might like to try, so it was good to see Sorbus vilmorinii 'in action' last weekend (right). It’s a small tree from China, only growing to 6 metres (20 feet) max, so is ideal for smaller gardens. It has white heads of flowers in spring and nice autumn foliage as well, but the big attraction is again the berries, which are an unexpected and delicate pink. Taking advantage of them last Saturday were Chaffinches, but I suspect that the thrushes will happily take them too.

Or maybe you have a Sorbus you’d like to recommend?

I’ve already revealed the first of the plants that I’m hoping to try next year, Echium 'Blue bedder'*, but promptd by John's photo in the last blog entry, I thought I’d now look back at one of the plants I grew for the first time this year – Tansy.

I was attracted by the name, by the feathery foliage, and by the heads of little yellow button flowers. But more than anything, having seen it growing wild at places like RSPB Pulborough Brooks, I had seen how popular it seemed with butterflies and other insects, so I thought I’d give it a whirl.

There was the added incentive that it is a native species. Although I don’t stick religiously to growing plants from the homeland, the fact that it is found naturally almost everywhere in the British Isles was a nice bonus.

It was very easy to grow from seed, and it flowered perfectly happily in Year One in a pot on my back steps. It didn’t need oodles of care, and the results as far as wildlife goes were really good. Hoverflies in particular seemed to enjoy it (right), and then I noticed that every flower had its own tiny little caterpillar buried in it (left), presumably a moth and presumably nibbling but without ever destroying the beauty of the flower.

Being a perennial, that’s me set up for an even better show next year. And with it  having been used historically to ‘cure’ intestinal worms and flatulence, well, it seems like something well worth having around, just in case (although not for myself, you understand!).

* Although I had seen Echium vulgare 'Blue Bedder' advertised as such, having written my blog entry I was curious as to why it was so different to the native Echium vulgare I know quite well. A little research seems to suggest that it may actually be derived from Echium plantagineum, a southern European species. Live and learn!

With everyone doing their bit to encourage wildlife into gardens, it’s only to be expected those managing green space to make the same commitment. The better the links between gardens, green space and the wider countryside the more chance our wildlife has of flourishing.

There’s many doing some great things in our parks and green spaces across the country. Testament of this for example being in the number of partners involved with the London House Sparrow Parks Project I told you about in my last blog. To help green space managers provide the best for wildlife, I’ve just produced some advice sheets specifically for them – a Homes for Wildlife for the industry!

Here’s hoping they help make a difference and we start to see more of those insects from hoverflies to grasshoppers and birds from thrushes to sparrows, all making the most of our parks and gardens. Does anyone have a favourite area of park or green space near them with great areas for wildlife? 

As you may have gathered by now, I like to base my gardening for wildlife on observation: there’s nothing I like more than a good old nosey around a garden seeking out which creature is using which plant. And so on Saturday I pootled along to a National Trust garden in Sussex called Nymans to indulge my curiosity.

The sun was shining, the wind was light, so it was a pleasure to see several butterflies still on the wing (Painted Ladies, Red Admirals and a Peacock). Their nectar source of choice was several types of winter heather, cultivars of both Erica carnea and Erica x darleyensis. The great thing about both is that they can grow on neutral and limey soils as well as acid.

Also doing well was a Mahonia, its flowers in full flame attracting bumblebees, Honey Bees, hoverflies, flies and a Red Admiral.

But the plant that fascinated me most was a straggly, unimposing Magnolia tree about 20 foot high. It was in fruit, its rather exotic ‘seed heads’ bursting with the red, bead-like ‘berries’. Birds couldn’t keep away – there were several Starlings plus a Blackbird, Song Thrush, 4 Blue Tits (right), Coal Tit and Great Tit, more birds than I saw in the rest of the garden combined. It reminded me of the David Attenborough documentaries from the rainforest, where monkeys and toucans seek out favoured trees as their fruits come into season, an ever-changing menu for them to learn and seek out. Here at Nymans, this Magnolia was clearly the café of choice this weekend!

One of my favourite things at this time of year is beginning to plan what I’m going to grow next year.

Usually it is a case of having been tempted by something I have seen growing this year, and here is one that has got me all excited and is right up there on my wish list.

It is a cultivar of Viper’s Bugloss (Echium vulgare) called 'Blue Bedder''. I've grown the native biennial previously, but this a hardy annual that has long been grown in cultivation.

There are three big things that are tickling my fancy about it. First, it produces nice, compact plants covered in these exquisite open blue flowers. Second the seed merchants say it’s easy to grow. And third the Honeybees LOVE it.

It will be interesting to see too whether some of the insects that like the full native version come to this too, such as this 6-spot Burnet Moth that flocks to it on the downs near me.

So what’s on your planting wish list for next year?

Hi all,
I’ve loved reading all your comments from Adrian’s blog – its produced some great dialogue and exchange of ideas. I hope you’re learning from it as much as I am.

With all this conversation, I’ve been digging around in some cyber leaf mould! It’s amazing what you can find, the most useful so far has been on the BBC website. If you are limited for space, it seems bin liners are the way to go with a little water added from the water butt before tying the top and leaving in a corner. But, the site does give information on a quick and easy leaf basket. Knowing what a super keen DIY lot you all are, then here’s the link.



Where possible I prefer to leaf them alone! and let the worms do their job. I’m never that fastidious on lawns, so long as they are not completely smothered by big leaves. Where possible I always scatter them into shrub beds as mulch and something that the birds can forage about in.

Not having been about too much of late, I was conscious the mild weather has encouraged a flush of the arable weeds I share my vegetables with. Last weekend I found time to play the game, has anyone seen my onions? It was great fun, but a shame to remove the weeds. I saw some amazing spiders and millipedes while turning over the soil and hand weeding. I also had a tatty robin (obviously been in one fight too many) come to take advantage of the food I was turning up.

When I launched my blog, I said I would mention some of the other things I get involved with in my efforts to help the wildlife we share our green space with. I am helping our London Team with some of the research on house sparrows in the capital. We are currently a third of the way through our latest project ‘The London House Sparrow Parks Project’.



Through this SITA funded project, we are working closely with eight partners and have set up a whole series of trial and control plots across London in public green spaces. I have been advising and liaising with the project officer and green space managers on the landscape management prescriptions for the three different types of plot.

As a spin off to this, I've been working with one of the partners (Southwark) to facilitate a training course for green space managers, which I’m due to run next week. This will be the forth and final one of the year for me, the others having been held in Sheffield, Glasgow and Milton Keynes. I spent last Friday afternoon with the Borough ecologist, checking the park at the venue to ensure delegates are given enough to discuss in the afternoon and use the knowledge I give them in the morning about making green space valuable for wildlife and people.

Welcome to anyone who is here having seen the blog in the RSPB Homes for Wildlife e-newsletter – good to have you! It’s early days, but we’re already beginning to develop a lovely crowd of visitors. What I really want is to get your feedback, questions and suggestions – don’t hold back on me now :-)

I thought today I’d do a little update on some of the blogs so far. Remember the question of what berries are being eaten by what birds out there? Here is a photo (right) I took of a House Sparrows in mid-October, gorging itself on blackberries, its bill stained with the tell-tale evidence.

And on the left a Starling on Cordyline australis berries this weekend, and a pile of its mates getting over-excited. Any more observations of birds and berries yet, folks?

Returning to the subject of leaves in ponds, I’m sure many of you use netting to stop the leaves ever reaching the water, whereas I choose to go fishing them out daily. What I find I have to do is to check each leaf for pond snails – clearly they are grazing on something rather tasty there.

And as for my sink pond, my latest delight is watching the dozens of Gammarus freshwater shrimps, gliding on their sides along the white ceramic walls – they’re far more visible and watchable here than I’ve ever found them to be in a dark-linered pond. So it’s still a wildlife thumbs up for the sink pond.  

Coming up on the blog in the next few weeks, plans for the flower garden for 2010, and some real gardens from real people! Hope you'll drop in to have a look.

I don't know about you, but it's all about leaves in my garden at the moment. Every day there's another load to scrape out off paths, rake of lawns and fish out of the pond (I choose not to net the pond as I don't mind being forced to peer into it each day). (Look, a photo of me in action!)

Most of my leaf burden comes from a line of Tree Preservation Ordered Sycamores. I find this is one of the worst trees for creating leaf mould in a compost bin - use whole leaves and you come back a year later and find them unchanged, all stuck together in airtight, slimy pads. My answer is to get out there with the mower. It's great fun, the mower basket removed, great spumes of leaf fragments shooting out the back, much to the mystification of neighbours.

However, I do just leave whole leaves in situ in my 'Woodland Garden' (it's not quite as grand as it sounds!) where the actions of winter and worms on loose leaves work wonders, and there's always a moth caterpillar or two among it should I go rummaging through them.

What's your experience with creating leaf mould? Got any tips or favourite leaves for creating leaf mould, or little wild discoveries you've made amongst them.

Having been involved in putting together the Homes for Wildlife project, I thought I’d update you with what I’ve been doing to turn my own home into a Home for Wildlife. Now if you've already read my Forum post from yesterday and are wanting to know just how many Actions and Gold stars I have then here's the moment you've all been waiting for!

Those of you that have signed up, you may remember downloading a whole load of PDF’s with lots of advice and various actions. You may even have noticed that for some actions you get a gold star! Wow!! 

I never got many of them at school, they were usually black marks, and so I thought it’d be a good idea to see if I’ve improved with age.

When I signed myself up to HfW - I had to get the acronym in somewhere! I found I had set myself a total of 112 actions. Included in that are a possible 50 gold stars – I like round figures. It’s been two years since I signed up and earlier this year I decided to have a bit of a garden binge and create my long awaited pond.

I realised just recently I’d not updated my Actions on ‘My garden’ page. What a revelation that was, given I had also done a few other things that I forgot to tick off, I suddenly found I’d completed 79 of my 112 possible actions and earned myself 38 of my 50 gold stars. Now then, how would that look in my school report? ‘Promising but could do better’?

 Looking to the future, I reckon when I get my hedge planted this winter I’ll be able to add a few more ticks. I think its probably impossible for anyone to complete all their actions – I know I certainly can’t, mainly because I live in rented accommodation and there’s only so much you can do in that situation.

 Here’s a challenge for all of you signed up to HfW – can you beat that? If you’ve not downloaded any of the advice then log into HfW and return to your home pages to get the advice sheets and get ticking! If you’ve not signed up, then use the link above and see where it takes you.

Saturday was grim and grizzly, all misty drizzle and grey, but as the rain eased I couldn’t resist getting out to do some gardening. I’m so glad I did because I saw something I had NEVER seen before.

I was doing a spot of weeding, after having raked up some of the trillion fallen leaves, when I was joined by a small stripy cranefly. At first I thought it must be injured because it was flailing all over the damp soil I had just turned, but then I realised it was doing something quite deliberate. Yes, it looked as uncoordinated as I do on a dancefloor, but I sensed a purpose there, a motive, as it bounced along on the end of its long abdomen as if it was pogo-ing. It – she – was determinedly egg laying. I was transfixed.

Now normally I post photos I’ve taken that day, but unfortunately it was way too dark and the cranefly way too quick for my photography ‘skills’, so instead you get one of my photos from last year of one of the larger cranefly species.

But I hope you can still share my amazement. Effectively my weeding had unintentionally opened up a Home for Wildlife, Mrs Cranefly had found it within minutes, and in my tiny back garden I had ‘discovered’ (yet again) something wholly new to me.

Fridays on this blog are going to be when I showcase RSPB nature reserve gardens around the country, have guest entries from RSPB staff gardeners such as Mark, and I’m very eager to start showcasing some of your gardens too.

But every now and then there’s a date in the RSPB calendar that demands attention, and Feed the Birds Day this weekend is jumping up and down and saying ‘cover me, cover me’.

John's last blog dealt with No.1 on the RSPB’s Feed the Birds Day 5-point Plan, so I thought I’d be perverse and do No.5, Create a Water Feature.

And this is where you get a little sneak preview of an experiment I’m doing: a sink pond. Yes, I know it’s been done before, but I haven’t. I’ve got this bit of a scientist in me that likes to try things first hand, so here it is, newly made, on top of a hollow hibernaculum made of bricks and logs. I got the sink for £50 from a scrapyard (if only I had haggling skills – I’m sure I could have got him down to £30!). And in it is the immaculate Hornwort (I love it as an oxygenator), pebbles, and a pot with Water Mint and Rough Horsetail (Equisetum hyemale) - I thought I'd try the minimalist approach first!

So far so good. The Great Pond Snails are doing fine and it has had a fine flush of Daphnia, but let’s see how it fares over its first winter and whether we get a flush of algae in the spring.

Have a good time Feeding the Birds, and we'll compare notes on Monday :-)

This weekend celebrates the seventh annual Feed the Birds Day. There will be over 100 events held across the country and there’s bound to be one somewhere near you. For those of you living near the Lodge, I’ll look forward to seeing you there this Saturday.

So, what is it all this about? Don’t we feed the bird’s everyday? Well yes, we do, but this reminds us of all the different things we can do, even beyond just putting up feeders and providing supplementary food.

We all get great pleasure and entertainment watching the variety of birds, attracted to our gardens by food we provide. Through this, the birds gain confidence and allow us to watch them at close quarters. But, have you ever stopped to wonder what we give in return for this great live show?

Like humans, birds and other wildlife need a variety of foods year-round in order to maintain a healthy diet and survive. Like us, they too also need somewhere safe to shelter and breed. We can help contribute to this by proving them with a well-managed wildlife friendly garden. This years Feed the Birds Day is asking people to  help do just that and to undertake a long term 5 point plan to boost the natural food supply for birds visiting their gardens and to create homes for other wildlife too. At number one of our Top 5 things is plant any one or all of five different native plants. We recommend: hawthorn, grey willow, ivy, honeysuckle and birch, all are pictured below. If you don't have a garden you can plant them in large patio tubs, they may just need a little more management to contain them as they grow!

Like Adrian in his great blog on Monday (I’d put Ivy in my ‘top three’), I’ve been out in the countryside looking at the bountiful supply of fruits and leaf colours in the hedges. How great this would look in a shrub bed or hedge in the garden? They may mature slowly but the wait is worthwhile. What great a pleasure it must be that in 5 or 6 years time, that hawthorn you planted has a redwing, tired and hungry after crossing the North Sea, feeding on the berries. Or, that little twiggy Grey willow shrub you planted 18 months prior, has a bumblebee, just emerged after winter and desperate for some nectar, feeding from the catkins.

Of course, fruits in hedges have uses for us too, if you’re prepared to spend time picking them. What a pleasant way to spend a morning or afternoon. You can get some amazing close encounters with wildlife in the process, plus it gives you time to really appreciate the beauty of the plants and fruits as well as the tiny creatures living amongst them. I had a fantastic view of a bullfinch just recently whilst out picking sloes and some amazing views of common darters basking on the outer branches of bushes.

And here's some more fruits to delight , but not necessarily eat! Although rose hip syrup contains more vitamin C than oranges, you have to be very carefull as the fine hairs from the seed inside are a strong irritant. This has deterred me from having a go at making some.

I look for some of my wildlife gardening inspiration from gardens, and some from the countryside – and today was a countryside day. And even if I had been blindfolded, I could have spotted the ‘Wildlife Plant of the Day’ with my ears, it was humming so loudly!

It was of course Ivy, and the humming was a full-on choir of ever-so-eager Honeybees, wasps and hoverflies. Several clumps of Ivy flowers were also aflame with Red Admiral and Comma butterflies. It was the same last week in Cornwall, where I took this photo of a Painted Lady getting her fill of the nectar. It may not be a showy flower, but you get the impression that without it many autumn insects would be doomed. 

Ivy has its other wildlife uses too: it is a wonderful evergreen hiding place for all sorts of insects, including being a known hibernation site for Brimstone butterflies; birds such as Wrens love it for spider-hunting and nest-sites; and its berries are eaten by birds such as Wood Pigeons.

In the wildlife garden, it will serve many of its wildlife functions climbing up into a tree or against a shady wall (if you can bear its rootlets clinging to your brickwork) but it is only in sunny positions that it will bloom profusely and come alive.

And when that happens, I think Ivy has to be in my Top 10 Wildlife Plants. But would it make it into your Top 10….?!