How to create both a beautiful garden as well as sustainable ecosystem.

All outdoor areas, no matter the size, can give a home to wildlife without having to transform your garden into a wild jungle.
Without realising, you can be offering an extensive variety of habitats for wildlife. Habitats can thrive in the most unassuming garden features such as an area of long, uncut grass. Lawns are a crucial to house certain insects and mini-beasts and in turn provide food for the birds to feast on.

If you are starting your garden project from scratch, D&J is a one stop shop for all you need and can even provide the turf. Laying turf not only gets your garden off to a quick and convenient start but also introducing a lawn is the first step to paving the way to a beautiful garden full of wildlife.

Hedgerows, flowers, water features, compost and rockery gardens are among a few easy to create and visually appealing features you can add to your garden and in turn provide a sanctuary to ourwildlife, continue reading to find out why.

Trees, Bushes and Hedgerows.

Trees and hedges not only provide your garden with privacy and a neat border but they also offer the perfect habitat to birds and mammals. They provide a great roosting and nesting site up high as well as shelter and cover from rain, wind and predators lower down for our hedgehogs.
In addition, growing a range of trees and hedges can also provide food within this habitat, in the form of flowers, fruit and seeds. In turn, this also supplies you with a delicious, home-grown crop!

Flowers

Planting flowers is a great way to naturally provide the ecosystem with food, without having to litter your garden with food sources. An array of colourful flowers will attract bees, wasps, butterflies and other insects. Not only that, but the nectar rich flowers will provide your garden with bursts of colour to bring it to life!
Finding a variety of plants that flower at different times throughout the year will enable your ecosystem to thrive all year round. For example, Ivy provides nectar during the autumn months for insects and in turn, the birds will enjoy the late winter fruit.
Choosing the right flowers is vital, without providing our bees (and other insects that will conduct fertilisation) with flowers that produce sufficient nectar then the production of seed and fruit would drop dramatically.

Compost

Composting your garden waste will provide a great addition to mix into your soil, allowing your plants to thrive into the most nectar rich flowers possible to feed the butterflies and bees.
If you don’t already have a compositing system or heap in your garden, you can introduce compost into your flower beds, as much or little as required with D&J’s bulk, half or poly bags.

Water and Rockeries

Birds and mammals must be able to source water for both drinking and bathing, this is crucial for their survival, especially in extreme weather conditions. If space is not a restriction, then creating a pond in your garden would also provide a home for insects and amphibians.
Installing a pond is without a doubt one of the easiest ways to encourage wildlife into your garden. Accessorising your pond with beautiful pieces of rockery will not only create a visually appealing, calming feature to the garden but this is also an important requirement for the ecosystem. Frogs need both places where their prey can thrive but equally, they need to be able to hide from their predators – log piles or rockeries are ideal for this.

At D&J we provide an extensive range of fish friendly rockery including Slate. Simply browse online, choose the colour and quantity you would like, position around your pond and watch your miniecosystem thrive!

These are just a few ways to help these amazing creatures flourish and in turn transform your outdoor space. If you have found this helpful, please share the article to spread the awareness and help us celebrate National Gardening Week (6th -12th June 2022).