Wildlife gardening doesn’t require a sprawling landscape to work with. As my returning guest Kate Bradbury explains, anyone can support wildlife through gardening, even if they only have the space for a pot of herbs.
Kate is an award-winning writer specializing in wildlife gardening. Among her books are “The Bumblebee Flies Anyway,” “How to Create a Wildlife Pond,” “The Wildlife Gardener” and “One Garden Against the World: In Search of Hope in a Changing Climate,” She’s the wildlife editor of BBC Gardeners’ World magazine and has a regular Country Diary column in The Guardian. She writes regularly for the RHS’s The Garden magazine, The Wildlife Trusts members’ magazine and BBC Wildlife. Her garden was featured as part of the BBC “Springwatch Garden Watch” campaign, and she and her garden have also appeared on “Autumnwatch” and “Gardeners’ World.”
Kate Bradbury is a garden writer and conservationist. She recently released an updated edition of her book “Wildlife Gardening for Everyone and Everything.” Photo courtesy of Kate Bradbury
Kate was my guest one year ago to discuss “One Garden Against the World.” Now she’s back to talk about the second edition of “Wildlife Gardening for Everyone and Everything,” which she originally released in 2019. This book is your go-to guide to learn how to attract more bees, birds, frogs and — depending where in the world you live — hedgehogs into your garden. The second edition, made in partnership with the Royal Horticultural Society and Wildlife Trusts, shares expert, up-to-date advice on nature-friendly gardening and how to offer local wildlife natural food and shelter.
I am passionate about wildlife gardening, and I encourage everybody to include it in their gardening activities. These days, gardeners are often thinking about more than just the beauty of the garden, but the entire system related to it. More gardeners are realising how important of a role they can play personally, no matter the size of their garden plot, whether it’s an apartment balcony, a patio, an allotment garden or bigger. We can have an impact.
Kate says the science has progressed since the first edition was published, prompting her to update the book. She added new information on climate change, biodiversity and the importance of gardeners making records about their garden visitors — that is to say, what species of wildlife is coming into the garden, in what numbers and how often.
Gardeners can share their recordings with iNaturalist or other citizen science apps and websites so researchers can take that data and decipher the best ways to combat biodiversity loss.
As Kate notes in her book, in the United Kingdom, one in six species are at risk of extinction, and that doesn’t even account for the dramatic declines of the populations of so many other species. It’s a tough pill to swallow, and it seems to be happening at a fast rate.
“In the UK, we’ve dealt with habitat loss for years and years and years and really a general sort of suspicion and unwillingness to share space with wildlife for a few centuries now,” Kate says.
The U.K. is a small landmass where people continue to take space from wildlife, she points out.
“On top of all of that, we’ve now got climate change,” she says. “Climate change has been around for a while, but it’s really starting to rear its head now. We’re really starting to notice it, and that’s just putting additional pressure on species. So it’s just like a quadruple whammy, at the moment, for our wildlife.”
Kate says helping out threatened and endangered species may ultimately be futile but adds that at least she will be able to say she tried.
Commercial Ag and Government Setbacks
The prevalence of pesticides and chemical fertilizers in commercial agriculture can be traced back to World War II.
“After the Second World War, the reason we’ve got these pesticides is because the businesses who made the bombs wanted somewhere for the chemicals to go so they could carry on making money,” Kate says. “It’s all just a ruse. I don’t believe we needed them. I don’t believe we need them now. We’ve got into a cycle of using them and believing that we need them. We’re killing our soils. We’re making our soils less fertile.”
There are more crop failures, and harvests are getting smaller.
Here in the United States, just this month the administration rolled back Endangered Species Act regulations, including eliminating protection for imperiled wildlife against logging and oil drilling. The moves removed “habitat destruction” from the legal definition of harm and canceled automatic protections for species deemed to be threatened.
It’s upsetting and very disappointing.
“ It’s exactly the wrong time to be doing this as well,” Kate says. “We need to be restoring habitats. We need to be drawing down carbon and protecting habitats, protecting landscapes, protecting species that keep those landscapes going.”
I’ve been a long-time avoider of pesticides. I don’t see the need for them, and especially if you create a healthy habitat and ecosystem, nature’s natural systems take care of all of that. There’s nothing under my watch that will do harm to any wildlife that wants to be here. And that speaks to my heart and feeds my soul,
“ When we use insecticides specifically, we’re not just killing the pests, we’re killing their predators as well,” Kate says. “So when we stop using those pesticides, it’s going to take a while for those predators to come back and start controlling the pest populations.”
Wildlife gardeners in the U.K. may encounter hedgehogs. Photo Courtesy of Kate Bradbury
Decline Is Not Inevitable
No matter the size of the area that we control, we can make space for wildlife.
Kate points out that in the U.K., it’s estimated there are 30 million gardens.
“That’s 30 million opportunities to fix stuff, to connect our gardens to each other, to connect our gardens to the wider landscape, and I think the more of us that see that, the more of us that do that, the more of us understand that these widescale habitat destruction projects that are going on are bad,” Kate says. “And I think the increasing connection that we have by working in our gardens and fostering habitats and looking after wildlife actually helps us see the bigger picture, and maybe we can push government to do the right thing in future.”
Rewilding
“There’s loads of stuff we can do,” Kate says. “We can let the grass grow long. We can grow flowers. We can feed the birds. We can put in ponds. We can restore little areas.”
When people hear the term “rewilding,” they may think of “wild” in a derogatory sense. What we’re really talking about is re-naturalizing, meaning getting things back to the way they were prior to all the habitat loss.
Residents of homeowners associations may be frustrated by archaic covenants and bylaws that haven’t kept up with the changing times and what we must do to combat biodiversity loss and mitigate climate change.
Even Kate’s allotment is challenging her efforts to support wildlife, raising complaints that not enough of her allotment is being cultivated.
“Why are we adhering to rules that are just so outdated?” Kate wonders. “They don’t serve anyone. They don’t serve wildlife. They don’t serve us. Why are we kowtowing to that?”
She explains that the basic principles are providing food, shelter, and water.
“We’re all the same really, all of us living beings. We’ve all got the same needs. So you just need to provide a home for as many species as possible, and home is different things to different species. So a pond is home to some species, but it’s drinking water to other species, it’s bathing water to other species. It’s a breeding habitat for some species.”
Rewilding is about respecting and trying to mimic the ancient ways that animals managed the land, she says. It’s not about taking ourselves out of the garden and not doing anything.
“Who wants to do that?” she wonders. “We’re all gardeners. We love gardening.”
Rather, it’s about changing one’s thinking”
“Instead of pruning with my secateurs, I’m just grazing like a deer. I’m browsing,” Kate says. “Instead of sowing seeds, I’m trampling like a cow, or I’m rootling. Instead of digging the soil, I’m rootling like a pig. And so you do these things mindfully, respecting the natural ways of managing the land.”
A pond supports various species.
Photo Courtesy of Kate Bradbury
Wildlife Corridors
Wildlife corridors are essential, critical connections that we can make with our neighbors and our community, neighbor to neighbor, neighborhood to neighborhood, community to community.
It can include adding holes through gates, fences or walls to allow animals like hedgehogs to pass through a garden. And adding a water source, as small as a bird bath or as large as a pond, between natural bodies of water goes a long way in helping wildlife in suburban and urban spaces.
Piling leaves into borders, around plants and under hedges — rather than sending them away to a landfill — provides food for beetles and earthworms and shelter for moth cocoons as they overwinter. And the insects in turn serve as an essential food source for birds.
“ Gradually, all of those leaves rot down,” Kate says. “I see worms taking the leaves into the soil. These are all natural processes, age-old natural processes from which the foundations of life exist.”
Watching all the species come in, in response to the natural responses you have facilitated in your garden, is something really special, she says.
A small garden can be a “stepping stone habitat” for wildlife.
“ You can grow plants for pollinators. You can grow Mediterranean herbs in pots on your doorstep, and bees will find them, and bees will use them and go from one to the next, to the next,” Kate says. “You can do loads of things. You can provide a little bit of nectar. You can provide some caterpillar food plants. You can provide a little shady area with a few shade-loving plants for amphibians to just take a rest when it’s really hot. There’s loads of things you can do in a small space, so don’t ever think that your space is too small.”
She says that if we connect to those species, if we provide habitats and love for these species, then it opens up a world of understanding between us and other species on Earth that is invaluable.
This patio gardens fits a lot of valuable biodiversity into a small space. Photo courtesy of Kate Bradbury
If you haven’t listened to my conversation with Kate Bradbury on wildlife gardening, you can do so now by clicking the Play button on the green bar near the top of this post.
How have you integrated wildlife gardening into the space that you control? Let us know in the comments below.
Links & Resources
Episode 077: The Beauty and Importance of Native Plants: The Ethos of Mt. Cuba Center
Episode 142: Why Our Plant Choices Matter: Nature’s Best Hope, with Doug Tallamy
Episode 152: The Native Plant Trust: Why Plant Choices Matter
Episode 237: Ecological Gardening: Creating Beauty & Biodiversity
Episode 242: Grow Now: Change the World, One Garden at a Time, with Emily Murphy
Episode 331: The Ecological Garden Blueprint: 10 Essential Steps That Matter Most
Episode 429: One Garden Against the World, with Kate Bradbury
Episode 463: Ecological Gardening Essentials for Working in Concert with Nature
Episode 466: Mimicking Natural Habitats to Support Wildlife in Gardens
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Kate Bradbury on Instagram | @katebradbury
One Garden Against the World Substack
“Wildlife Gardening for Everyone and Everything” by Kate Bradbury
“The Bumblebee Flies Anyway” by Kate Bradbury
“How to Create a Wildlife Pond” by Kate Bradbury
“The Wildlife Gardener” by Kate Bradbury
“One Garden Against the World: In Search of Hope in a Changing Climate” by Kate Bradbury
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