Wildlife gardening course at Walworth

Walworth Garden’s wildlife gardening course comes highly recommended by Wilder – it is our inspiration. 

The course taught us how simple measures can create some wonderful changes in the garden:

• Create a wildlife pond. This can be bucket-sized – just ensure that frogs can scale the pond by adding rocks to one side.

• Plant a mixed native hedge instead of using fencing (plant from Sept to March). Wooden fencing is treated with damaging chemicals and doesn’t allow access for hedgehogs and other critters.

• Make your own compost, with a bin, wormery or using the bokashi method.

• Lay soft wood chip paths rather than hard paving.

• Collect rain water in a butt – plants prefer it, and it saves mains water. 

• Leave a bird bath/saucer out for flying visitors.

• Include plants that flower late in the season to support foraging insects.

• Leave logs or twigs in a pile as a refuge and restaurant for insects. Insect hotels, bird and bat boxes and hedgehog shelters are great too. 

If you want to know how incorporating these practices will change your garden, visit Walworth Garden. Throughout our day of outdoor lessons in the garden, foraging bees danced around early autumn flowers, a tall bay tree vibrated with bird song and a mother fox – our own much persecuted predator – slept sweetly in a flower bed, unruffled by visitors.

Here is a list of creatures that wildlife gardening protects and nurtures, starting with the microscopic:

• Microbes

• Fungus

• Worms

• Insects

• Spiders

• Molluscs

• Small mammals

• Birds

• Larger mammals

• Amphibians

• Reptiles