Creating a Wildlife Corner in a Tiny Garden

Why a corner is worth more than you think

Most British gardens are small. A typical urban yard might be three metres by four, half of it in shade, with a wheelie bin and a washing line competing for space. It is easy to assume that wildlife needs countryside, hedgerows and a pond the size of a tennis court. It doesn't. A frog needs somewhere cool and damp to spend the day. A bee needs a few flowers within a short flight of its nest. A sparrow needs a shallow drink and a dust bath. All three can be provided in a corner no bigger than a dining table.

The trick is to think in layers and textures rather than in size. Water at ground level, shelter just above it, flowers at waist height, and a bit of untidiness left alone. Get those four things right and your little patch will start to hum, rustle and splash within a season.

Start with water: the shallow dish

Water is the single fastest way to bring life into a small garden, and it does not need to be a pond. An old washing-up bowl, a glazed saucer, or a ceramic planter with the drainage holes plugged will do. What matters is that it is shallow — around 5 to 10cm at the deepest — and that anything that falls in can get back out.

• Sink the container into a border or sit it at ground level among pots, so frogs and hedgehogs can reach it.
• Add a ramp: a few stones, a piece of slate, or a short length of untreated timber leaning into the water.
• Fill with rainwater from a butt where you can. Tap water is fine in a pinch, but rainwater settles faster and attracts more.
• Top up in dry spells and give it a rinse every couple of weeks in summer. Never let it dry out completely in spring, when frogspawn and tadpoles may be present.
• Pop in a small clump of oxygenating weed such as hornwort, and a native marginal like water forget-me-not or marsh marigold in a basket of peat-free compost.

Birds will bathe in it, bees will drink from the edges, and if you are lucky a frog will take up residence and spend the summer eating slugs for you.

A log pile that earns its keep

Dead wood is one of the most underrated habitats in a British garden, and a small pile takes up very little room. Choose a shady, slightly damp spot behind a shed or under a shrub — the north side of a fence is ideal.

• Three or four logs, 30 to 60cm long and 10 to 20cm thick, stacked loosely with gaps between them.
• Partially bury the bottom log. Contact with soil keeps it damp and helps fungi and beetles move in.
• Use untreated hardwood — oak, ash, beech or apple. Avoid anything that has been stained, painted or pressure-treated.
• Add a few hollow stems or a bundle of bamboo canes nearby for solitary bees, and leave them undisturbed.

Leave the pile alone from November to March, when frogs, newts and beetles may be sheltering inside it. If you must move it, do so in late spring. A log pile in a small garden rarely looks untidy if you tuck it behind planting — and it will quietly become the busiest part of the garden after dark.

Native flowers, even in pots

You do not need a border. A group of three or four pots in the sunniest spot you have will feed a surprising number of insects, provided you choose the right plants. Aim for a long season: something early, something for midsummer, something that keeps going into autumn.

• Spring: pulmonaria, native primrose, cowslip, and wallflowers.
• Summer: ox-eye daisy, purple loosestrife (keep it in a pot — it spreads), wild marjoram, betony, red campion and bird's-foot trefoil.
• Late season: lavender, catmint, yarrow, and a few borage or cornflower sown from seed in May.
• Herbs: chives, thyme and rosemary earn their place twice over, in the kitchen and in the bee's diary.

Use peat-free compost, water in the first summer, and resist the urge to deadhead everything. Seed heads feed finches in winter and give insects somewhere to overwinter.

Leave a little mess, on purpose

The hardest advice to follow in a tidy British garden is to do less. A patch of long grass, a pile of leaves in a corner, a few dandelions left to flower in April, and ivy allowed to climb a fence will between them support more wildlife than any amount of bought-in habitat boxes.

• Skip the pesticides and slug pellets entirely. If you have frogs, birds and hedgehogs, you have slug control.
• Leave seed heads and hollow stems standing over winter rather than cutting everything back in October.
• Rake leaves into a corner instead of bagging them. They will rot down into free mulch and shelter insects.
• Keep a small gap under a fence panel if you can — a 13cm square hole is enough to let hedgehogs pass between gardens.

Keeping it going through the year

Once your corner is in, the maintenance is minimal. Top up the water dish weekly from April to September. Cut back the flower pots in late February rather than autumn, leaving the stems a little longer than you might like. Check the log pile in spring for frogs and slow worms before you move anything, and add a fresh log every year or two as the old ones soften.

Expect the first visitors to be small: a solitary bee, a hoverfly, a robin at the water. Frogs take longer, often a year or two, and they usually arrive on a wet night from a neighbouring garden. Give them a quiet, damp corner and they will stay. Within a couple of seasons, a patch of yard the size of a doormat will be doing more for British wildlife than most lawns ten times its size.