Wildlife Gardens
A peaceful haven in which to relax and enjoy a private audience with the birds and animals who visit. This is the wildlife garden and it is one of the most rewarding hobbies to partake in.
No matter where you may live – in the northern hemisphere or the southern hemisphere, in an apartment building or on a mountain. There is always something one can do to encourage insects, birds or animals to your view. The ideal is to have a garden where one can dedicate a quiet corner to become an ‘exclusion zone’ – an area that is specifically established to allow being left untouched except for an occasional pruning or to plant a new nectar rich plant where an old one may have died.
Creating your very own wildlife garden is no more different than regular gardening. I would say the only difference is in the planning. Because with a wildlife garden one needs to know what plants will be beneficial to insects, birds and mammals. Once this is known, it is then a matter of arranging them in an organic fashion to suit your preferences. This is really where the fun lies, because you are essentially creating your very own mini-wildlife reserve.
For any books on this topic you can search for them here:
This is also a great opportunity to get the kids involved, so they can learn to understand the interconnectedness of things, the web of life or the food chain. They will see the benefit of building a pond, and how it will attract animals to come drink. They will realise the result of planting a nectar rich protea or buddleja, by seeing the birds and butterflies dancing around them in the summer. And slowly they will grow to find consideration and responsibility towards other life forms.
The Wildlife Trusts Handbook Of Garden Wildlife
Attracting Wildlife To Your Garden
A good way to begin attracting wildlife to your garden would be to identify the plants you see in your neighbourhood which always have insects and birds busily moving about them. Then go to your local Garden Centre and buy them in and plant up! You could also place a water source in your garden for insects, birds and animals to drink from. I recently acquired a small garden attached to my ground floor apartment. After assessing what the garden patch had, all I did was introduce some ericas, grasses and a few evergreen shrubs. Then I placed a small pond with a flat rock inside it in the middle of the garden (this ensures no insects drown and allows small birds access to drink). Not long thereafter the insect life increased, and by late summer when the sedums and asters were in flower the bees were there everyday. My ultimate though was witnessing a hedgehog emerge from the garden one evening, after having drunk some water.
All this in an area 1 metre by 3 metres long!
When I look out my window, I can see spiders’ webs strung out like clothes lines, hover flies and ladybirds moving about the foliage in their search for nectar and aphids, and the occasional butterfly swooping down in the hunt for good nectar plants. My own mini-wildlife reserve! And that’s the satisfaction it can give you. Pleasure in seeing other life forms benefiting from your efforts on a continual basis. In essence it is the same principle which underlies the ethos behind the larger game reserves we have at some point visited or worked at.
You will have noticed I have recommended some useful publications on wildlife gardens. They will serve as guidelines on implementing what I have touched on with greater clarity – I myself have three books on wildlife gardens. They really do help in understanding the process.
