Kate Bradbury - Wildlife Gardening: For Everyone and Everything

My friend Helens garden in Hove in Sussex. Sparrow nest boxes, pollinator-friendly borders and still space for her young family to play.

Preface

When I wrote my first book five years ago, its purpose was simple: to encourage readers to provide garden habitats for wildlife. At the time I had a tiny, shady garden in a very built-up area of east London. There was little wildlife there, but I made the garden home to a variety of bees, birds and butterflies as well as field mice and frogs.

Since then I have moved house twice, and at the time of writing, I have a small, north-facing garden in Hove, near Brighton, plus a wonderfully wild allotment. In the past five years, I have become a better gardener, and Im more knowledgeable about wildlife and how we can use our gardens to mitigate habitat loss in the countryside.

During this period, conservation and science have moved on as well. We now know much more about solitary bees. We also know more about the flower choices of pollinators, and the food preferences and migration routes of certain garden birds goldfinches, for example, have decided they prefer sunflower hearts to niger seed. I even conducted a bit of citizen science myself, by compiling a list of rose cultivars and other plants that are known to be used by leafcutter bees (see ). How did I achieve this? With help from a few friends on Twitter, I asked gardeners to tell me which roses the leafcutters were choosing in their gardens. I sent emails and put pleas in newsletters for people to get in touch. I even had well-known rose growers check their fields for the telltale elliptical markings on their rose leaves. Gardeners love growing roses, and now we can make more informed choices about which roses we can grow that we know leafcutters love. Its a lovely thing to have been a part of.

These last five years have also seen two State of Nature reports, in which conservation groups have worked together to identify the continued decline of many of our best-loved wildlife. There have been other, more specific studies too, including the 75 per cent decline of flying insects from some protected areas in Germany over a 27 year period, the loss of butterflies and the drop in hedgehog numbers.

Yet in these five years, I have also witnessed hope. Thanks in no small part to TV programmes such as the BBCs Springwatch and the efforts of charities like The Wildlife Trusts and the Royal Horticultural Society, I have seen a massive surge in the popularity of wildlife gardening. So disconnected are many of us from the natural world that more of us are wanting to bring wildlife to our back door. More of us have read about the plight of bees and hedgehogs, and want to help. More of us are taking matters into our own gardens. Wildlife gardening is here to stay; dare I say its now mainstream. We cant replace the lost habitats in rural areas, but we can provide habitats for some species in our gardens and, crucially, we can link them together to create corridors from one significant habitat to another. Not just in our gardens at home but in our parks, communal and public spaces, schools and hospitals too. The more habitats there are, the more and greater opportunities wildlife has to expand territories, meet and breed, and adapt to climate change.

Introduction

There was an old woman who swallowed a fly.

I dont know why she swallowed a fly.

Perhaps shell die.

There was an old woman who swallowed a spider

That wriggled and jiggled and tickled inside her.

She swallowed the spider to catch the fly.

I dont know why she swallowed the fly.

Perhaps shell die.

There was an old woman who swallowed a bird.

How absurd to swallow a bird!

She swallowed the bird to catch the spider

That wriggled and jiggled and tickled inside her.

She swallowed the spider to catch the fly.

I dont know why she swallowed the fly.

Perhaps shell die.