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Adrian Thomas
Once in a while, I like to bring you an update of various stories relevant to gardening for wildlife that have been in the media recently.

And none is more current than the story that broke today from Butterfly Conservation about the calamitous decline in British moths.

The headline conclusion of a study at 525 sites across the country, which captured nine million moths between 1968 and 2007, was that two-thirds of common and widespread larger moths have declined over this 40-year period. Given that moths, their caterpillars and eggs are such vital links in many foodchains – usually far more so than butterflies – this is a sobering story.

It comes in a week when the People's Trust for Endangered Species (PTES) released a story suggesting Hedgehog numbers have crashed by over a third between 2003 and 2012. The charity has been encouraging counts of hedgehogs for over a decade and they estimate that there are now less than a million in the UK, down from maybe 36 million in the 1950s.

These for me are yet more 'canaries in the coalmine', clear signals about the health of our nation's wildlife. It just makes what we're all trying to do in our gardens to help wildlife all the more important.

So it's time for the good news, and I was glad to hear that five non-native pond plants have been banned from sale this week because of the havoc they cause in the countryside having escaped from people's gardens - about time too!

The problem species are Water Primrose, Floating Pennywort, Parrot's Feather, Water Fern, and Australian Swamp Stonecrop. Here is what Floating Pennywort is doing to the wildlife-rich ditches of  Pevensey Levels near where I live, choking the waterway and cutting out the light, disaster for most of the wildlife there:

And my final snippet of the week is the revelation that some garden birds are now thought to go grey, just like us. And apparently female birds find it rather attractive in their mates - I presume it hints at maturity and wisdom.

Well, I don't have any grey yet myself (I'm presumably still a bit flighty and unreliable), but we'll see if doing an RSPB feature garden at Gardeners World Live this year starts it off.

  • We really try to encourage all forms of wildlife into our garden,when we moved here 7 years ago it was barren, all lawn and conifers, no birds,flowers or insects.

    With hard work and determination we have transformed it into an oasis, out of around 20 houses in the close ours is the only one with garden at the back and the front.

    We have planted fruit trees,wild flowers,ground cover,herbs and my husband has dug out a pond, it was only going to be small but kept on growing, we have frogs,a newt dragonflies and damselflies, a sloping pepple beach helps all the wildlife to drink and bathe safely.

    We planted some Mullein and every year since we have Poplar moths laying eggs ,Six spot Burnet,also we have elephant-Hawk moths every year, our garden backs onto a railway line and the wild flowers there are alive with bugs,butterflies,and bees.

    I have a lot to do with the Hedgehog preservation society and every autumn I take in young juveniles to feed up and winter ready for release the following spring, So far I have managed to release around 43 over 4 years, some locally and some in surrounding hedgehog friendly rural areas, hedgehogs need all the help they can get, but please don't put out bread and milk, chicken cat food or cat biscuits and mealworms are a firm favourite, also they are a brilliant organic way of getting rid slugs and snails,we have a sacrificial vegetable area to encourage them.