Difficult decisions in the wildlife garden

Sometimes in gardening you have to make tough decisions. For me in my new garden, the difficult choices are in having to lose some of the overcrowded trees, and right now I've got an excellent team of tree surgeons in, making dramatic changes.

Losing the 60-foot high leylandii trees was perhaps the easiest of the decisions, given that some toppled in last year's gales narrowly missing the neighbour's property. The others have just got to go before they do real damage, although the Goldcrests who wander along them and the Wood Pigeons that roost and presumably nest there won't be too happy.

A couple of deciduous trees are having to go too, as they were planted much too close to the cottage and are threatening the foundations and smacking against the brickwork despite being only about a third of their eventual height.

Losing trees means that some wildlife will lose out, but the exciting thing is that much wildlife will gain too. The extra light will be a boon to ground flora and that will then mean much more habitat for bees and butterflies.

And there's something else I'm doing which I've never had the chance to do before - leave tall stumps rather than cutting the trees to the ground.

My hope is that, eventually, these will become nesting sites for woodpeckers as well as skyscrapers for hole-boring beetles.

I'm also refusing to let any waste tree material off-site. The tree surgeons are chopping the fallen trunks into logs for me to create log piles, and the branches are being shredded to create mulch. Mountains of it!

So the grand transformation has begun, and with a year's worth of wildlife data already in the bag before the work began, I'll be able to measure if I am really giving more nature a home in future. It won't be for lack of trying!