How gardeners can help Bumblebees
How to make a house for Solitary Bees
Biodiversity Begins at Home...
Wildlife-friendly gardening does not have to mean weeds and wilderness. It's simply about choosing plants and managing your garden so that your local wildlife will feel at home. Most styles of garden can be managed in a wildlife-friendly way.
Use these pages to find the information you need to create habitat that will sustain your local wildlife.
This is an independent site, and its contents are based on my own experience, over many years, as a wildlife gardener and naturalist.
I've done all the spadework, to provide you with lots of information about wildlife friendly gardening. My basics page tells you what it is all about. I've written a series of fact sheets which cover several subjects including what to plant to attract wild bees and moths, and herbs for the wildlife garden. I also give lists of recommended books and an extensive annotated bibliography, and suggest some high-quality gardens to visit. If you are reading this in the USA or Canada, there is a special North America page for you as well as a special North American books section in the bibliography.
I believe that gardens should be places of beauty. They are also the places where many people have their main interaction with wildlife, in the form of garden birds and insects. Gardens can fulfil both roles, and with increasing urbanisation, their potential to sustain biodiversity is being appreciated. All styles of garden can be managed in a wildlife-friendly way, including formal gardens.
We've done it with our garden, it's tremendously rewarding, so why not give it a try?
- Marc Carlton
About this website and its author
Our London Garden (archived pages) :
- About
- Pictures
News for 2009: Our New Garden
For many years my partner and I lived in Penge, in South London. Our garden developed and evolved over that period, as indeed did my own interest in the ecology of gardens. I eventually became very interested in the relationship between plants and pollinators. In recent years I studied ecology at Birkbeck College in London, and chose to investigate aspects of the ecology of bumblebees for a dissertation project.
In March 2009 we moved to Chepstow or Cas-gwent, in South East Wales. We are going to plan and develop our new garden especially with wild bees in mind - mainly through our choice of plants. With the concern about the decline of bees now featuring heavily in the media, this is very topical. A few year ago, when I first wrote the information sheets about wild bees (which you can download from this website), I felt a bit like a lone voice - but suddenly and belatedly the world of horticulture is waking up to the importance of bees of all kinds as pollinators.
We are also planning to incorporate many more fruit trees and bushes throughout the garden than we had in our last garden. Again this is becoming a topical subject as more gardeners start to 'grow their own' again. I will be writing much more about this in due course.
It is still early days for us in Chepstow - at the time of writing this (May 2009) we still haven't unpacked and sorted out all the boxes from our house move, let alone started re-developing the garden! But in the meantime I will continue to review, maintain and update the website as an information resource for gardeners. Later this year I plan to expand my coverage of bumblebees and what flowers to grow to provide forage for them.
You can still read about our former garden in London, and the basic principles of garden ecology which it exemplifies, on the page entitled About Our London Garden.
© Marc Carlton 2009. Contact