Attracting wildlife to your garden

When I moved into my 3 bedroomed terraced house in December 2003 the, smallish, garden was half covered with sterile decking and we were visited by very little wildlife, even though we put plenty of bird food out. It had a small fish pond, which I knew was inhabited by frogs but, if they bred, nothing ever came of it. I met my husband in 2004 and sometime later I persuaded him that we had to get rid of the decking. We eventually took the plunge two years ago. We kept the top half of the garden, near the house, as fairly formal, with a small lawn, small fruit trees and some raised beds to grow vegetables. The bottom half of the garden was separated from the top half by a small picket fence, to keep our dogs out. We keep this part of the garden quite wild; we don't remove weeds and the grass is kept quite long. We have planted some native tree species and we leave bits of wood lying around. We put in a small plastic pond and begged some frog spawn from a friend. The tadpoles developed and we did get some froglets, but that was the sum of the progress.

Our success stories are:

1. The first season that we removed the decking we had blue tits successfully raising a brood in one of the many nest boxes we have put up. They came back again last year and raised another brood. We have put up more nest boxes; not in the hope that all of them will be occupied but to give any birds around a greater choice.
2. We moved the little plastic pond to another part of the garden which got a little more sun last year. We found a few frogs in the pond which we replaced once we had refilled the pond. we noticed that lots of small birds were visiting the pond to drink, including a charm of goldfinches.
3.  Unfortunately we woke up one morning to find a dead baby hedgehog in the pond. It had clearly drowned because it cold not climb out. That very weekend we emptied the plastic pond and replaced it with a butyl liner; at the same time digging the pond deeper so that it was at least 1 metre deep, so that any animals in it were protected from the cold. During the harsh winter I purchased one of the TetraPond Winter Island heaters and connected it up; I noticed our (now resident) frog seemed to like being near it. Today was the first time we really got into the garden to do some work and, to our delight found it half full of fresh frog spawn, all looking very healthy.
4. The garden was also full of insects, ladybirds and lacewings, tucked away in little crevices and we found a beautiful bumble bee basking on our washing.

In summary, we have managed to attract  a whole host of wildlife in a very short space of time by doing little more than removing some decking, and letting the garden take care of itself. Anyone can do the same.