This summer, as part of the RSPB's new Nature on Your Doorstep project, we put a call out for homeowners who were up for the challenge of helping wildlife in their gardens. Over four blogs, I’ll be sharing the ‘behind-the-scenes’ story of the garden mini-makeovers videos we made.
What the homeowners didn’t have were massive budgets, a dozen burly workers and oodles of time, like you see on the telly. Instead, they were asked to spend around £250, and had just one day to make some improvements, with just a little bit of help from me. We wanted to show the reality of what almost anyone can do on a limited budget and with only a bit of time to spare.
First up, we’re building momentum down a sloping front garden in Devon. Watch the video here. Photos by WildSide Productions.
Becca and Will moved into their house on a Plympton estate about a year ago. They have a small, steep back garden where they intend to do a full makeover to make it a more sociable space, so our target instead was their rather unusual front garden.
It is just a long a strip of grass dipping down north from the house towards the road with a concrete path right down the middle. It’s like an invitation to pass through it as quickly as possiblewithout stopping! There’s a bare low fence down one side, and on the other it just merges into the neighbour’s strip of grass. (Photo: Becca Smith)
Now a mown grass lawn isn’t devoid of life – it’s fine for earthworms, and a few moth caterpillars and cranefly larvae will happily chomp on grass roots, so it can be good for probing Blackbirds and Starlings.
But a garden of nothing but lawn is almost a blank canvas; it is easy to make it more diverse for wildlife. At our online consultation, Becca and Will had set out their simple ask – cottage garden style planting, great for bees and butterflies, plus water of some kind but not a pond.
I suggested a range of different designs of flower beds, ranging from simple long linear beds to more organic sweeping curves. Becca opted for a river of beds snaking left and right of the path. It will turn the grass from being a runway into a ‘journey’, so that they can wander along the curving river of grass down one side and back up the other, admiring the plants and wildlife as they go. We worked off a simple sketch - it doesn't have to be anything complicated:
So, our job for the one-day mini-makeover was (relatively) simple: to lay out the beds, dig them, plant and mulch. We planned on just digging half the beds – you can’t complete a full 16 metres (40 foot) of garden in a day, not without a hernia, and Becca and Will can complete the rest in their own time. Wildlife-friendly gardening doesn’t have to be a sprint!
Becca and Will weren’t quite sure what their soil was like, but it turned out to be rather poor and free-draining. That’s music to my ears because it’s perfect for Mediterranean herbs, like lavenders, which tend to be great for wildlife.
We marked out the beds with string, sliced off the turf (which will make fine compost when rotted down, stacked upside down on top of each other) and dug over the beds, before planting with our choice herbaceous plants from a peat-free nursery, all chosen to be bee-friendly, all in recycled plastic pots. Becca had sent me a ‘swatch’ – a ‘mood board’ – of the kinds of plants she likes, so I knew she was after lashings of colour.
Top tip: Herbaceous perennials are much easier to maintain than bedding schemes made up of annual plants. All the plants wwe used were perennial, and so will come up year after year, filling out over time. Many of them are easy to take cuttings from to boost your stock and provide plants for free. Alternatively, once the plants have clumped up, they can be divided in spring or autumn, lifting the whole rootball, slicing it into three or four smaller parts, and replanting separately.
For our non-pond water feature for wildlife, we made a ground-level shallow bathing pool for birds, which is nothing more than a wide, shallow depression lined with pond liner. That was you can make it rather wide indeed; my hope is that a whole rugby squad of Starlings can get in there and bathe together. We covered that with a sheet of gravel-coated pond overlay to make it more attractive, and edged it with cobbles to hold it in place.
Becca had also sourced a few logs from the local log seller. Will drilled some logs with holes between 2mm and 8mm in diameter for solitary bees (remember to face them south to southeast), Becca added a bird table, and our day was done.
And before we had even sat down, bees had found the new flowers. That’s how quick the impact can be. Wildlife is constantly roving around looking for a home; in a bare garden, they pass through in an instant and you probably don’t even notice then go by. However, give them what they want and they have reason to stay. It’s that simple. And when they are enticed to dwell, we are too.
Top tip: When planting a load of new plants, I always say to expect some winners and losers. Some will sulk or even expire; some will prosper. Don’t worry about the former – it happens to even the best gardeners. Just learn from the experience and celebrate those that thrive.
I’m delighted to say that Becca and Will went on to dig and plant the rest of their river flower beds, they have been advocating the joys of wildlife friendly gardens to anyone who will listen, and the bees and butterflies have been piling in! We hope to share some photos next spring as the garden really begins to fill out and work its magic.
Plant choices
Budget
If you've been inspired to transform your own outdoor space, why not check out our new handy step by step guide which will give you loads of tips, tricks and ideas of how to welcome nature on your doorstep.