Small garden, serious wildlife value

A courtyard, a balcony, a strip of grass behind a terraced house — none of these is too small to matter. Wildlife does not need a nature reserve. It needs food, water and somewhere safe to rest, and those three things can be provided in a few square metres if you place them thoughtfully. What follows is aimed at anyone with limited space who wants to do something genuinely useful rather than simply decorative.

The guiding principle is simple: think about what a creature needs at each stage of its life, then squeeze in as many of those things as you can. A garden that feeds adult bees in July but offers nothing in March, and nowhere for anything to shelter, is doing half a job.

Choose flowers that earn their place

Nectar and pollen are the currency of a wildlife garden. If you are short of room, pick plants that produce a lot of both over a long season and that suit our native insects, which are often fussy about flower shape.

• Catmint (Nepeta) — a magnet for bumblebees from May to September, and happy in a pot if you cut it back after the first flush.
• Lavender — drought-tolerant, fragrant, and covered in bees in midsummer. Plant it somewhere sunny and freedraining.
• Foxgloves and hellebores — early and long-tubed, ideal for the bees that emerge in late winter when little else is open.
• Sedum (ice plant) — a late-season lifeline. Leave the faded flowerheads standing through winter; they look good frosted and the seedheads feed birds.
• Marjoram, chives and borage — herbs that double as pollinator plants, and you can eat them too.
• Ivy — the single best plant for a small garden. Its autumn flowers feed late bees and hoverflies, and its berries feed thrushes in February.

Aim for something in flower from February to November, and favour single, open flowers over doubles. Double blooms often have little or no nectar, and they are useless to anything that needs to get inside them.

Water: the cheapest win available

A shallow dish of water will bring in more wildlife than almost anything else you can add per pound spent. Use a saucer, an old washing-up bowl or a bird bath, and keep the water no more than 2–3cm deep with a few stones or a piece of brick sloping in as a ramp. Bees and hedgehogs drown in steep-sided containers, and they cannot climb out of glazed pottery.

Place it in the shade on hot days and refresh it every couple of days — stagnant water breeds mosquitoes, and clean water is what birds actually want. If you have room for a small barrel or a sunken washing-up bowl with a couple of native plants such as water forget-me-not, so much the better, but do not feel you need a pond to make a difference.

Shelter in quiet corners

Wildlife needs somewhere to hide, nest and overwinter, and this is where most small gardens fall short. The answer is not tidiness. It is a few deliberate, undisturbed patches.

• A log pile in a shady corner, made of untreated wood, stacked loosely with the bark on. Beetles, centipedes, frogs and solitary bees will all use it. Even half a dozen logs will do.
• A leaf pile left in place over winter — hedgehogs and insects use it, and it costs nothing.
• A hedgehog highway. A 13cm square gap at the base of a fence or wall lets hedgehogs move between gardens, which they must do to find enough food. Speak to your neighbours; a connected row of gardens is far more valuable than one isolated plot.
• A nest box fixed two to three metres up, facing between north and east so it does not overheat, and away from a bird feeder where the traffic will disturb nesting birds.

Skip slug pellets and insecticides entirely. A garden with a few nibbled leaves is a functioning garden; a garden where nothing eats anything is not.

Go upwards when you run out of ground

Vertical space is the small garden's secret weapon. Fix wall planters and hanging baskets on a sunny wall, grow honeysuckle or a climbing rose up a trellis, and let a pot of Verbena bonariensis rise above everything else at eye level, where butterflies will find it. A shed or bike store roof can be topped with a shallow tray of sedum, which is light, needs almost no watering, and provides nectar for bees.

Containers dry out quickly, so use a peat-free compost with a bit of loam or grit mixed in, water in the evening, and mulch the surface with gravel or bark to hold moisture in.

Do less, later

The final piece of advice is the hardest for keen gardeners: resist the urge to tidy up in autumn. Seedheads feed finches, hollow stems shelter overwintering insects, and dead foliage protects crowns from frost. Cut back perennials in late March or April rather than October, and leave the cuttings in a heap at the back of a border instead of bagging them for the tip.

If you have space for a small compost bin, add it — it recycles your green waste and provides habitat for slow worms and beetles. Above all, be patient. A new wildlife garden takes two or three seasons to settle, and the first hedgehog or solitary bee you spot will make the wait worthwhile.