David Domoney: Why wildlife friendly gardens make better gardens.
4 December 2023
Wildlife Friendly Gardens
Your garden is a wonderful place to enjoy yourself, either on your own, with your family, or hosting your nearest and dearest. But it isn’t just people who find a haven in gardens around the country, but local garden wildlife too. With natural habitats disappearing and pollinators in decline, residential gardens are more valuable than ever to our smallest garden visitors.
You may be concerned that adding wildlife-friendly features to your garden may mean sacrificing parts of your carefully curated design. But never fear, there are plenty of decorative and subtle ways to support and encourage wildlife into your garden, helping them to thrive.
Inviting Entryways
Introducing you to the garden is an inviting entryway paved with Pavestone’s Dolomite Dark porcelain paving. With its clean lines and slate-grey tone, it clearly and invitingly welcomes you to your outdoor space. Framed by green garden borders, it has a refreshing and cleansing feel to it.
The lovely wall plant Photinia x fraseri ‘Red Robin’ next to the wall opposite the garden border ensures this is not only an invigorating entryway to the garden, but practical too. This well-structured border has created identifiable layers, with taller plants towards the back, such as Acer palmatum (Japanese maple), mid-height in the middle with Lavandula angustifolia (English Lavender), and a compact Buxus sempervirens (Common box) working its way around the front edge. This allows you to make the best of each of your border plants, so you can enjoy them all in one glance.
Busy Borders
This also helps with garden border maintenance throughout the year. Because it is a large element paving, you can easily create an effective stepping stone effect whilst giving you a lot of room to walk, reducing the chances of slipping.
Pavestone’s Dolomite Dark Porcelain paving also makes for a wonderful feature across a lawned area, as has been carefully executed in this garden. It allows you access to the full length of your garden, even on rainy days, without worrying about attempting to navigate your sodden lawn.
Light and Bright Hosting
Moving from one space to the other is delineated by a change in paving, from the Dolomite Dark to the lighter timber-looking Deckwood Ash. Demarcated out by two planting areas, the different paving styles work effortlessly together to create separate spaces. The dark charcoal veins in the woodgrain effect on the Deckwood Ash give the space unity, matching closely to the dark shade of the Dolomite.
Not only this but the bespoke bar top has also been completed with the very same paving, Dolomite Dark. This further helps to create harmony in the garden, pulling all the elements together across the entire space
The hosting area of this garden has been carefully curated to have a relaxing, warm, and welcoming atmosphere. Choosing Pavestone’s Deckwood Ash paving is the perfect choice for an area like this. The light shade brightens, whilst simultaneously warming the space up, thanks to the cosiness evoked by the woodgrain appearance. This is further enhanced by the natural wood pergola, creating an isolated seating area to enjoy freshly mixed cocktails.
Creating Wildlife-Friendly Spaces
A garden like this has been carefully curated to be the perfect spot for hosting, whether it be friends, family, neighbours, and more. But your garden is not just host to your human guests, but your garden visitors also.
There are several easy, subtle, and design-friendly ways to support nature in your garden, without sacrificing the beautiful design that you have cultivated. It is always worth allowing a corner or small area to grow wild in your garden.
Helping Hedgehogs
Hedgehogs barely need to impact your garden at all. One of the simplest ways you can support them is by creating small gaps at the bottom of your fence the size of a side plate. This allows hedgehogs to travel without difficulty between gardens in search of food and shelter. You can even try to encourage your neighbours to also make this small adjustment, creating a Hedgehog Highway through your neighbourhood.
At this time of year, Hedgehogs are trying to gain weight so they can safely hibernate through the winter. Consider giving them a helping hand by leaving some hedgehog-friendly food outside to enjoy at their leisure. Wet cat food is a perfect choice, and affordable too. Try to choose white meat foods, such as chicken or turkey, preferably in jelly rather than gravy. Just make sure to check the food regularly, to see whether it needs topping up, and leave some water available too.
Give Birds a Boost
You can help birds in your garden easily, and decoratively, which may even add some additional flourish to your garden design. You may find a lovely birdbath which is in keeping with your design. If not, you can just place a bowl of fresh water out, provided it is no deeper than 2 inches. Just make sure to clear any ice when you can on colder days.
Bird Boxes
Bird boxes are another subtle way to help our feathered friends, which you can choose to tie in with the colour of your fence or wall. You could even nestle it in amongst your wall plants, such as the Photinia x fraseri ‘Red Robin’ in this garden. Try to place a variety of nesting boxes around, as different birds prefer different styles and heights.
Planting bird-friendly shrubs is an additional change you can make to the garden to support birds. Berry-rich shrubs such as Holly and Rowan provide shelter and food for birds, whilst also providing year-round colour for your garden borders.
Benefitting Bugs
This garden already has some pollinator-friendly features, so it’s easy to do without having to change your design. For example, this garden features English Lavender in the borders, which is an infamously popular flower with pollinators in the UK, bees in particular. Some wonderful plants you can grow to support pollinators through the winter include Helleborus (Hellebore), Crocus, Clematis cirrhosa (Winter-flowering Clematis), and Galanthus nivalis (Snowdrop), which will emerge in late winter-early spring.
For other beneficial insects in the garden, consider positioning a bug hotel. This can be a great activity to get the kids involved in, as you can make your own easily at home with sticks, leaves, logs, pinecones, and other easily scavenged materials. You can make this any size you like, so if you would prefer something more discreet, just find a smaller, sturdy container to get you started.
Jon Layton, Group CEO of Pavestone:
This garden was created by Tam Astley of the Astley Partnership and I feel this is a wonderful demonstration of how best our products can be used for a beautiful, finished garden design.
As a professional designer, Tam appreciates what our customers want out of Porcelain paving and have done a wonderful job with our Deckwood and Dolomite paving in this space. As David has described in this blog, ensuring that your paving all works well together is vital for garden design.
There are many more stunning videos of beautifully landscaped gardens using Pavestone landscaping and building materials featured on the Pavestone website for you to explore here.
David Domoney, TV gardener, horticultural expert ,and Pavestone brand ambassador blogs monthly on the Pavestone website on all things landscaping related. We look forward to seeing you back again next month.