Encouraging garden wildlife with Hurst ReThink

By Laurie Jackson

In May 2021, Hurstpierpoint fell silent, as gardeners took on the No Mow May challenge. Shunning the mower, we instead swapped for sightings of wildflowers and insects. Lots of you have since been in touch, to ask how else to help wildlife in your gardens, so we are sharing some ideas of simple actions that can have a big impact.

Flowers are your foundation, providing food for hoverflies, bees and butterflies. You can help by ensuring there are plants flowering from early spring into autumn. The rose, pea, mint, daisy and carrot families, with their varied flower shapes and sizes, are a great place to start, with double headed varieties and annual bedding plants best avoided, as they have little pollen and nectar.

A varied structure, where short areas flow into long grass, tall herbs and shrubs, provides layers of habitat including undisturbed areas, needed by everything from bumblebees to voles. Uncut seed heads fuel up hungry autumn birds, and hollow stems are a safe haven for insects to while away the winter.

Leaf litter and compost piles also offer refuge, as well as keeping organic material out of landfill, and recycling nutrients. ‘No-dig’ vegetable patches help repair soil structure and lock in carbon.

Chemicals disrupt the balance of a garden: giving an edge to competitive plants and indiscriminately stripping a space of insects, including pollinators. By giving up chemicals, our gardens can detoxify, and minimising light spill at night is another disturbance to try and limit.

Ponds are a valuable addition, quickly colonised by aquatic-life, and you may also want to provide further refuges for wildlife, such as hoverfly lagoons or bat boxes. Your patch is part of a network of gardens that can be linked together, and you could join forces with neighbours to provide a cluster of ponds for toads, or a hedgehog highway.

Whatever you do, we hope you enjoy spending time getting to know the species that visit. We want to find ways we can work as a community to tackle the biodiversity crisis: perhaps you would like Hurst to make a pesticide free pledge, you need advice on bee hotels, or you want to know more about identifying wildflowers. Tell us what action you would like to see and the questions you have at hurstrethink@gmail.com.

Hurst Garden ReThink - Improving biodiversity in our village

The temptation for many of us in spring is to get on with jobs in the garden - including getting that lawn into the classic British stripe. But have you considered that what might look wonderful to your eyes is in fact a desert for our struggling native wildlife?

In the UK, we have lost nearly 7.5 million acres of flower-rich meadow and pasture since the 1930s, and now only 1% of our countryside provides flowers for pollinators. However, there are 15 million gardens in the UK and our lawns have the potential to be a major wildflower nectar source - a staggering 200 species are known to grow on lawns. In fact, incredibly simple changes in mowing can result in enough nectar from common flowers such as daisies, dandelions, buttercups and clover for ten times more bees and other pollinators. More bees and other insects also means more food for creatures further up the food chain - so by encouraging those at the bottom, we benefit many more.

In collaboration with the charity Plantlife, we’ve created a campaign called Hurst Garden Rethink where we urge people in Hurstpierpoint & Sayers Common to reduce their mowing this year to allow wildflowers to flourish.

Our campaign will culminate in ‘NoMowMay’ where we simply ask that you leave your mower in the shed for the month of May, then record what flowers you have on a sample of your lawn at the end of the month. If you record your results on the Plantlife website, you can also get your personal nectar score which shows how many bees your garden can nourish. It’s a great thing to get the whole family involved in.

As we gear up to ‘NoMowMay’ we’d also like you to think about other ways you can benefit wildlife in your garden - from simple things such as not using chemicals (including slug pellets) to more fun activities such as building a small pond, constructing bug hotels and creating hedgehog corridors.

We hope to work with schools and community groups to encourage take up of our campaign - if you’d like to get involved, please contact us at hurstrethink@gmail.com. You can find more details on our website, hurstrethink.org.