Wildlife-Friendly Landscaping Beginner's Guide

Wondering how to make your garden more wild-friendly? Then you’ve come to the right place!

Whatever style your landscape is, from minimalist landscapes to cottage gardens, there are various ways to support your local biodiversity and make your garden more eco-friendly.

So if you’re looking to do your part for the environment or just love seeing wildlife in your garden, don’t skip any part of this article.

1. What Makes Gardens Wildlife-Friendly?

First things first, note that one wildlife-friendly garden can differ vastly in appearance from another wildlife-friendly garden. Wildlife-friendly garden landscaping isn’t a gardening or landscaping style or aesthetic. It’s the process of steps and practices that make your garden more wildlife-friendly.

As such, it’s not about what a garden looks like, but what it can do for wildlife. So any landscaping style can be wildlife-friendly regardless of what they look like, they just need to support wildlife.

Generally, there are 3 keys to a wildlife-friendly garden, and anything that works towards or directly achieves any one of those keys will make your garden more wildlife-friendly.

Key 1: Plants That Support Wildlife

Plants will likely make up the majority of your garden, so having wildlife-friendly plants goes a long way toward supporting your local biodiversity.

There are two keys to wildlife-friendly plants.

1. Native plants: Native plants help support the local wildlife. Since they’re native plants, the local wildlife will over the years become used to them, adapting to use them for food and habitat.
   
   Vice versa, native plants will also adapt to attract and support these wildlife, as they need these insects and animals for seed dispersal. As such, while not all native plants will support local wildlife, native plants will in many cases be better than non-native ones for the local wildlife.
   
   Plus, if a local species wasn’t adapted to the native plants in that region, they likely wouldn’t stay around or be able to survive there. The same goes for the plants themselves, so generally, native plants and local species are crucial for each others’ survival.
2. Food sources: The most obvious way to support wildlife is to feed them. Plants can produce fruits, seeds, and nuts to feed animals and insects, though you will have to do the research to see which ones feed which local species.
   
   Plants that act as food sources can be either native or non-native. As long as they’re feeding the animals and insects, they’re supporting the local biodiversity.
   
   However, again, local wildlife will be more adapted to native plants and more readily go to them. For example, although a non-native plant may also provide pollen for the local butterflies, the local butterflies, having adapted to the nutritional needs of the native flowers’ pollens, may not even be able to get the nutrients they need from the non-native flower.
   
   Native plants also have benefits like lower maintenance and water conservation, so it’s always best to use native plants where you can.

So those are the two main types of plants you need to have in your garden to support the local insects and animals. Any sort of garden will be a habitat for ground-dwelling species like beetles and even small mammals, so having a garden itself is already supporting biodiversity, but incorporating the above mentioned plants will make your garden even more effective.

Now for the next key.

Key 2: Natural Features/Features That Support Wildlife

Your plants are going to be the most instrumental in supporting local biodiversity, but the various other features of your garden can be immensely helpful too.

Similar to your plants, there are two main functions that the other features of your garden will serve when it comes to supporting local animals and insects.

1. Shelters/Habitats: Besides just your garden, there are actually various features like birdhouses that act as habitats and shelter for wildlife. And the good news is, they can be adapted to suit different landscaping styles, so you’ll almost always be able to find one suitable for your landscape.
2. Food/Water sources: Water features will automatically be water sources for animals and insects, but besides them, there are quite a few other features for providing wildlife with food and/or water. Some examples are bird feeders, butterfly feeders, and even seed trays on the ground.

These features fill up the gaps that your plants can’t, such as providing water sources and habitats for creatures that your plants can’t. Using them along with your plants will maximize the amount of support you can provide to the local wildlife and allow you to reach a wider range of animals and insects.

Key 3: Minimize Chemicals

The final key is to minimize the use of chemicals. Even with all the right elements, chemicals can hinder your efforts. While pesticides can kill pests, they also harm and kill other insects like butterflies and bees.

Birds who consume plants treated with pesticides or herbicides can also die, as certain pesticides and herbicides are highly toxic to birds. In fact, they can even die from consuming insects that have come into contact with these plants.

Even synthetic fertilizer can be toxic to birds, so in general, the use of chemicals of any sort will be harmful to at least some wildlife.

So for a wildlife-friendly garden, besides incorporating elements to feed and house or shelter your region’s insects and animals, it’s also important to keep the use of chemicals to a minimum, or you’d basically be undoing the good effects of your features with your chemicals.

Now, let’s explore in detail how to implement each of the three keys.

2. Incorporating Plants That Support Wildlife

When incorporating these plants, here are some things to keep in mind.

Do Your Research

Remember that you can’t just choose random native plants or native plants that look nice and expect them to feed or act as habitats for the insects and animals in your area. Instead, do your research.

Find out specifically which species you’re looking to attract and their needs, and then shortlist the plants that attract them. From here, you can choose from this pool of plants the ones that best fit your landscaping style.

Ensure Year-Round Support

Don’t forget to plan for different seasons so that you can continue to feed and provide shelter for your local creatures all year round.

Incorporate Variety

Firstly, for your plants that function as habitats, you want a variety of heights, from your groundcovers to the trees so that you can support a variety of wildlife.

Next, this ties in with the previous point. You should be supporting a variety of wildlife with a wide range of plants rather than supporting more of the same wildlife with the same few plants. This is so that when one plant is plagued by disease or pests, it’s less likely to spread to the whole garden.

Since pests and pathogens usually target a specific plant, by having a variety, you have a much lower risk of widespread disease as compared to a garden with only a few plant species.

3. Which Other Features Support Wildlife?

So that’s it for the plants. Now for the other features.

Water Features

Water is a basic survival need, so this is a guaranteed way to attract and feed the creatures around you.

As mentioned earlier, any water feature will function as a water source. But if you have limited space or budget or just don’t want a larger water feature due to your landscaping style, consider birdbaths, which are smaller and more affordable.

Just make sure that for your water features besides your birdbath, there is movement in the water of some kind to prevent mosquitoes from breeding. If you have a fountain, then that’s already taken care of, but if it’s a pond or something similar, aerators are a good choice to both oxygenate the water and deter mosquitoes.

Shelter/Nesting Sites

For birds, you should install birdhouses. Certain species of birds have strict requirements for their habitats or nests which can be hard to find, and providing that will be a great aid to them.

For bats, you should be installing bat boxes.

For insects, it’ll be insect hotels.

For all of these, don’t forget to look up the specific needs of the species you’re trying to attract and tailor the habitat accordingly. This includes the height, the size of the openings, the materials, and so on.

Food Sources

To provide food to the respective species, you can’t just place it inside their habitats as it can attract pests and even predators.

Instead, you need separate feeding stations or to provide food in the form of plants.

For birds, you’ll need specialized bird feeders. There are many different types that feed different things, so do your research to find the best one for your target bird species.

For bats, they’ll eat insects or fruits from plants, so the best you can do is to grow fruits suitable for their diets or that support insect life.

For insects, there are bee feeders, butterfly feeders, and nectar feeders.

4. Reducing Chemical Use

Chemicals are the easiest and most straightforward, which is why so many people turn to them, but there are actually quite a few methods to cut down on the use of chemicals.

Pests

First off, using native plants will already help, as they will have adapted to local pests and thus require less measures on your end to deal with pests.

Next, if you still have to deal with pests, there are actually many alternatives to pesticides, such as traps and barriers. It just takes some research to find the right one for the pests you’re dealing with.

Creating habitats and providing food and water for pest predators will also aid greatly in bringing them to your garden to help you with pest control. Some examples of pest predators are birds, bats, praying mantises, and ladybugs.

And if it’s a really serious problem and all else fails, opt for natural pesticides that are less toxic to other species that aren’t the target

Weeds

For weeds, there are actually various commonly known alternatives to herbicide.

For weed suppression, you can employ mulching, dense planting, and even covering the soil with stuff like cardboard and newspapers to block out sunlight and stop the weeds from growing.

And for weeds that need to be removed, use your hands or tools to remove them instead of herbicides.

If you really must use herbicides, then use organic solutions like vinegar solutions.



Conclusion

There you have it, the 3 keys to a wildlife-friendly garden as well as various ways to put them into action.

Before we end off, just one last tip. When you put out habitats or food for your local wildlife, they need to be carefully monitored. You don’t want to end up making them too overdependent on it such that they start to lose their natural ability to forage or hunt for food, which can actually end up being detrimental.

The key is to not provide too much food such that they end up still having to go out and find food themselves. You will need to monitor their behavior and adjust the food amounts accordingly.

If you find that your target species just hangs out at your feeder most of the time without leaving it or becomes territorial about the feeder and aggressively chases away other creatures that come to it, it’s time to reduce the amount of food or even stop completely.

With that, it’s time for you to do your part for the environment and help support the local animals and insects. Adios!