Just One Thing for Nature

Based on the idea that a person's health can be improved by adopting one good habit. So why not make your garden a better place for nature, with one small action? It need not be a grand pond or a wildflower meadow, but could be as simple as a bird nesting box or leaving one corner as a wild area for nature to live in. If every garden adds just one thing then the cumulative impact could be huge.

The list is long, including bat boxes, bee nest hotels, log piles, brush habitat piles, hedgehog houses, stag beetle habitat, rainwater storage and providing water. All that really matters is that it is accessible to target wildlife and ideally in a relatively peaceful location. Insects, fungi, plants and animals soon move into suitable habitat, sometimes surprisingly quickly.

Log walls make great homes for many creatures. Frogs, toads and newts will live near the base, where it is damp and cool. Insects will move into the crevices, and under the bark of the slowly decaying logs.

The peeling bark and those cracks make homes for a wide variety of insects.

Holes, drilled into the sunny ends of the logs, provide perfect homes for various solitary bees, and their accompanying parasitic wasps. A variation on this is a mud house. Mix clay and sand, place inside a wooden box frame and hang in a sunny spot. This habitat seems particularly attractive to Anoplius spider-hunting

wasps.

Mud house for bees and wasps

Solitary bee house made from lengths of bamboo

Instructions to build your own bat and bird boxes are available online from your local Wildlife Trust.

Hedgehog populations have declined by about 30% in the last 25 years. A few simple acts can help them in your garden. There are many models of hedgehog houses available to provide a safe nesting place for them. Fences, especially those with concrete gravel boards, create barriers so blocking animal highways. Cutting holes in the bottom, or using concrete gravel boards, reinstates these paths that hedgehogs use to find food, new territories and mates.

Water attracts animals and plants that live in it, and also many creatures that visit to drink and bathe. From a simple upturned dustbin lid, to a larger pond or old stone sink, providing water is a great way to create habitat. Invertebrates will often colonise water on their own, or can be introduced on bought plants. Spectacular damselflies and dragonflies will lay their eggs into a small pond and are a wonderful sight in the summer. A pile of bricks, stones or broken tiles situated near the water, makes a perfect damp and shady home for amphibians.

Weeds are often the preferred food source for the larval stage of butterflies and moths. A particular favourite is the orange tip butterfly. Its larvae feed on garlic mustard and spend most of their life as a pupa. So after they have fed to maturity, they require uncut plants to attach to.

Any garden will generate waste, and composting is a brilliant way to recycle nutrients and organic matter. As well as rodents and countless invertebrates, a frequent resident is the grass snake. They will often lay their eggs in the heap, especially if it is covered. If you are really lucky, a slow worm may turn up. These legless lizards are a beautiful bronze colour and feast on slugs and snails.

Piles of brush delineating paths

In a larger garden that produces a significant amount of pruning, placing the cuttings in piles and lines can be decorative as well as providing homes for many species. Many flies use loose piles like this as places to hide when they are not on the wing. The waste will be broken down over time by fungi and bacteria, and then provides organic matter and nutrients for insects and other invertebrates. In a similar vein, dead hedges, made of hedge prunings and similar woody waste, are a great way of making a garden boundary and a habitat in one go.

Nature