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.