Small features that join up habitats and give shelter bring far more wildlife into a garden. Here's how to build them.
Created by jflgardens.co.uk
Wildlife doesn't just need food – it needs shelter and a way to travel safely between gardens. A few simple features can turn your plot into a stepping-stone that birds, hedgehogs, frogs and beneficial insects actually use.
Instead of isolated features, link your beds with continuous planting – a rough grass strip, a hedge bottom, a line of shrubs – so creatures can move through without crossing open, exposed space. Hedgehogs and insects alike use these green corridors.
A simple pile of logs and branches in a quiet, shaded corner is a five-star hotel for beetles, woodlice, frogs, toads and grass snakes. Rotting wood is a whole ecosystem – and it eventually becomes rich compost for your beds.
A patch of long grass, a nettle corner or some dead flower stems left over winter provides food and shelter that a manicured garden never will. It's remarkable what appears the moment you stop being quite so tidy.
Corridors and shelter matter most in cold and wet months. Keeping some rough cover through winter – rather than stripping everything in autumn – is what lets the population survive to benefit your garden the following spring.
From planting & borders to a full wildlife-style overhaul, the JFL Gardens team works across Surrey and London.
