I think this picture, above, illustrates my attitude to gardening and nature conservation better that I ever could.
As long as you own enough of it, our gardens should be managed to provide a pleasant place to relax, as well as a safe place for wildlife to flourish.
I have always promoted the golf course style of gardening where one has 'Rough, Fairway, and Green'. Rough should make-up the majority of your land and should be left to nature, Fairway is the next part which should be tidied 'to an extent', and last is your lawn which is the Green. This not only limits your time spent mowing, but it also gives wildlife plenty of scope to exist without being over-disturbed.
The tidier your garden, the less it will provide safe homes for all our wild friends. If we don't take care of nature, we are not taking care of our world.
My patch is home to all the creepy crawly set. The ants, the earwigs, cockroaches, slugs and snails and underground there are earthworms, more now than originally when there were none. I have bees when things are flowering, but rarely see butterflies, although I do see them in other people's gardens where they have more flowers.
ReplyDeleteGood for you. We have no real garden here, but in France I try to do my best for wildlife. We have a wonderful variety of creatures there; I even once found a Roe Deer sleeping in my veg garden.
DeleteI love a nice garden but when you realize that you can't do it anymore you have to make changes. The landscapers who look after the gardens around the flats where I live do a good job. I do miss having a private garden and most of all fresh tomatoes and green runner beans.There are plenty of places to sit under trees, tho. Plus we have 3 parks within walking distance, including Derby Arboretum.The first park of its kind in the country.Lots of different trees , shrubs etc. Donated to Derby by the Strutt family.
ReplyDeleteI miss my pukka garden too. Here we have private gardens, with one secret bit surrounded by very high hedges. All are tended by landscapers who come every so often, for which we pay an annual fee.
DeleteIf you live in a town you want your garden manicured like a park landscape but in the countryside its good to have a few Dandelions, Buttercups and Daisies growing in the lawns. I also use the sea for a vista from my garden .
ReplyDeleteWe can only just see the sea from our house, but even that is nice.
DeleteMine is closer to the top one but nothing up the walls.
ReplyDeleteI love 'climbers'. In France we have Wisteria, vines, roses, and passion flowers. Of course they all grow like crazy and need a lot of tending.
DeleteOur garden is defintely the first photo. Plenty of places for wildlife to flourish and shade under the lemon trees for us..
ReplyDeleteOne year our neighbour cleared our winter garden and raked up any and all leaves, sticks and stones till the surface was smooth and clean and uninteresting. I couldn't wait for a few weeds to return
Gardens are so much more interesting if they're a bit jungle-like.
DeleteThoroughly agree, Cro... the top picture is our garden and slightly rougher, the meadow.
ReplyDeleteI can watch roe deer from the kitchen window.... we have turtle doves in the trees, night(andday)ingales in the bushes and a kingfisher uses the Bill Oddie™ kingfisher trap opposite the kitchen window [along with numerous dragon and damselflies]
Apart from all the other wonderful insects, I have been running a moth trap and currently the running total stands at 400+ species... some I can't get to species level because that requires disecting a specimen and I have a "NoKill" policy... even the flies trapped indoors get caught and released.
We are about to enter "NoMow May".... please don't! "Mow Infreqently May" would be far better or MowPrettily. Part of it is to allow early nectar plants like Dandelions and Clover for bee species.
From personal experience, these set seed inside a fortnight and stop flowering.... so I now mow alternate strips with the mower set high, and the dandelions reward me by flowering abundantly... the strip I mowed two days ago already has flowers, the strip I will mow next week has almost gone over and the strip I will mow the week after is almost solid yellow with dandelions.... and it doesn't ever get to the point where you need to hire specialist equipment to mow!!
In France we have some wonderful wildlife. Big green Lizards, goodness knows how many types of Dragonflies, Stick insects, Mantis, and wonderful Swallows that swoop down over the pool to drink and bathe. We did have a Nightingale, but he seems to have gone. We do have Hoopoes though.
DeleteMine's the first one, without the regimented row of plants on the left.
ReplyDeleteThat sounds perfect.
DeleteWe border onto a small wood, right on the edge of town, with hedges made up of trees and shrubs that have wound together over the 50 or so years that these houses have been here. Ferns and woodpiles and neglected corners allow for plenty of wildlife. It's pretty from benign neglect.
ReplyDelete'Benign neglect' is good for the planet, but not always good to look at. A happy medium should be our aim.
DeleteOur quite large garden is mixed, like the top picture, but sadly either side of us are very rough, basically untended gardens, and all their nasty weeds come creeping under the fences, which makes for a lot of hard work for me!
ReplyDeletePeople who leave their gardens to run wild are almost as bad as those who over-tidy.
DeleteI read once that a mowed grass lawn, was a sign that you had to much land and money, that you could farm something that produced nothing.
ReplyDeleteSadly a decent sized mower is far cheaper than a tractor and all the kit required to grow things. I have created a good orchard on part of our garden, but a lot still remains lawn.
DeleteWe have neighbours on both sides who manicure the grass and polish the trees - I think we are a big disappointment to them ;-)
ReplyDeleteSuch gardens look nice in photos, but otherwise they are not doing much for nature. No doubt they also spray weed-killers everywhere too.
DeleteThat philosophy would work well in the case of big gardens - like the one at your country estate in France. Not so much with postage stamp size gardens in crowded urban areas.
ReplyDeleteI did hint at that in para 2. Actually I think most of our huge French estate has been sold, or is in the process. I will be left with possibly less than half an acre; which suits me fine!
DeleteTotally agree Cro. I am on a steep slope and there are many steps which I can no longer manage, but I do encourage wild life. I weed where I can reach and the other day, clearing dead bits out of a London Pride clump. a large woodlouse came out with the dead bit and he?she? indignantly marched back into the living clump. I pokedhim out with my finger and I had hardly put him on the patio slab before he was back in again, quicker than ever. I don't think they do any good at all, but he deserves to be there as much as I do so I left him be.
ReplyDeleteI think Woodlice create 'compost' for the soil. They are very ancient creatures; not pretty, but essential.
DeleteFor about ten to fifteen years now, a lot of gravel gardens have turned up here. Especially the front gardens are covered with gravel, with may be one or two planters in it, and more gravel surrounding the lawn in the backyard. A young couple in our neighbourhood has a good-sized garden which contains 9 cherry laurels, 20 lavender plants, a tiny cherry tree and 16 thuja trees. The rest is lawn, gravel and pavement.
ReplyDeleteSome towns have banned gravel gardens now because they not only don´t have any kind of wildlife, but they heat up their surrounding.
Hilde in Germany
Unfortunately 'easily maintained gardens' are very popular, and estate agents are eager to stress how wonderful they are. Personally I prefer the total opposite, and enjoy both the work and the exercise.
DeleteI agree entirely, gardens do not have to be high maintenance perfect lawns. My property is mostly forest with paths meandering past very large trees, some 20 inches in diameter. Closer to the house on all four sides are shrubs and trees growing in large circular, oval and triangular mulched island beds. My grass is a mix of greens clover/grass/dandelions) and I am fine with that. I am attempting to expand with more fruit trees and this will reduce the lawn again. A new tumbled blue stone pathway is currently underway. Less lawn is less maintenance and always good.
ReplyDeleteSounds lovely. The orchard I established in France was my 'pride and joy', sadly now possibly sold with the barn. I shall have to be content with my much smaller orchard at Haddock's. I will plant more trees this Summer.
DeleteEven the most wildlife friendly of those pictures is 'tidy', but at least it isn't boring. As my brother remarks about his garden - there are no straight lines in nature.
ReplyDeleteAn elderly gentleman was tending his vegetable garden when the village priest leant over the wall and said "Aren't God's works wonderful". "Yes" replied the gardener "But it wasn't quite so productive when he was doing all the work by himself"
DeleteHear, hear! I wish more people created habitat gardens to support the living things in our natural world.
ReplyDeleteWe've all been programmed to think that neat and tidy is best!
DeleteCertainly the first one for us...hooray for food and insects!
ReplyDeleteBut without too many Aphids.
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