How to Create a Wildlife-Friendly Garden

We all like to see wildlife around us. Especially if we live in the city, it’s a real highlight to see a colourful bird, a butterfly, a squirrel or a hedgehog cross our way. If you have a garden, there’s a lot you can do to attract wildlife and help it thrive. In this article, you’ll learn how to create a wildlife-friendly garden in a few simple steps. But even if you don’t have a garden, you can create wildlife-friendly places around you!

Love your neighbour as yourself

When we are creating a wildlife-friendly garden, we are not only helping our non-human felllow creatures, but also our human neighbours. Just one example: pollinators are crucial for pollinating food crops. When we help pollinators, we are contributing to food security even in the remotest, poorest areas of our planet.

That’s why I like to extend the biblical principle to ‘Love your neighbour as yourself‘ to all our fellow non-human creatures as well. It’s becoming increasingly visible that helping wildlife benefits our human neighbours (and us), too!

Therefore, caring for the needs of wildlife, as well, is an essential part of organic gardening. This includes insects, birds, worms, small mammals, soil organisms and so on.

Creating a wildlife-friendly garden

Here are a few ways to create a wildlife-friendly garden.

Soil organisms

The best way to care for soil organisms is to maintain the soil healthy and enhance soil fertility.

Small mammals

You can attract small mammals, like squirrels, by establishing calm, wild areas in your garden where they are undisturbed. Depending on the species, these could be areas with shrubs, trees, ivy…

Birds

Birds, too, will thrive in such wild, undisturbed shelters in your garden. You can make a huge difference for birds by planting appropriate plants and by providing them with water through a birdbath. Birds love to bathe or drink from baths in summer. Often, it’s enough to fill a small container with water and put it in your garden.

During harsh winters, put up bird feeders. Hang up bird boxes for nesting – but make sure they are safe from cats wherever you hang them! You can indirectly help the birds by attracting insects to your garden…

Insects

Insects are crucial for our ecosystems, but they are disappearing at an alarming rate. Again, your choice of plants can help insects find food and shelter in your garden. Use plants that attract insects! Many of the nice and decorative plants you can buy in garden centres are of no use for insects because they don’t produce nectar! Again, local plants will most benefit native insects. So, watch out for local, insect-friendly plants and flowers.

You don’t have to solely use insect- or bird-friendly plants in your organic garden. Maybe you want to dedicate an area in your garden to wildlife only? A superb way to help wildlife thrive is to set up a small pond. And how about an insect hotel for your garden? There are so many possibilities to explore here!

What If I don’t have a garden of my own?!

If you don’t have your own garden, but still want to create wildlife-friendly spaces, you can literally sow flowers wherever you go. Sow pollinator-friendly plants in abandoned spaces or on lawns in front of your house, workplace etc.

I do recommend that you ask for permission to plant something, though. Not only will it save you from potential conflicts with your boss or landowner but it will also make sure that your efforts aren’t destroyed by the next mowing.

Find some inspiration on how to do this in my personal “garden-story”!

Helping wildlife, helping people

And creating wild, undisturbed spaces is actually another ancient principle from the Jewish Torah:

“When you reap the harvest of your land, do not reap to the very edges of your field or gather the gleanings of your harvest. Do not go over your vineyard a second time or pick up the grapes that have fallen. Leave them for the poor and the foreigner. I am the Lord your God.” (1)

If it is not the poor people who will benefit from this principle today, the wildlife certainly will thank us if we apply this command. They will thrive on leftover fruits or abound in the “wild” egdes of our organic gardens.

We cannot thrive if we just look at our needs.

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Sources: (1) The Bible: Leviticus 19, 9-10

Photos from Unsplash.com