Tips for Designing a
Wildlife-Friendly Small Garden
Hello Friends,
Keep it simple but plant it thick. Accept your garden’s limitations and work with them by
keeping plantings simple. It’s going to look chaotic if you have 30 plant
species in 100 square feet. Instead, choose 10 to 12 species, or fewer, and try
to have two or three of them be a grass or sedge. Grasses and sedges
provide winter shelter and nesting material for birds, and they tend to
out-compete weeds with their fibrous root systems and soil-shading nature.
These will become your base layer that ties everything together in a cohesive
way. Match them to your soil, light conditions are for best long-term
performance. Grasses generally need full sun, whereas sedges are more
adaptable.
Mass flowers. In
100 square feet, you could include four to six species of flowering perennials,
planted in clumps of two to three. Planting in clumps not only helps the
landscape look organized, but it also serves as a stronger beacon for
pollinators flying overhead. If you want the space to be more formal, place
shorter plants toward the front of the design and taller ones toward the back.
You can also mix and match for a more natural appearance, with the mass
plantings helping to avoid a messy look.
Create a path. Mulch works great,
or you could dig in some steppingstones. Maybe you can place a birdbath with a
narrow or small footprint in there too. Even a little bench nestled among the
plants would show that the space is made for bridging the world of humans and
other species, making it inviting to all.
If you put
everything together, you have a garden that’s doing many things for
wildlife:
o - Grass provides
birds with nesting material and insects to eat.
o - Moths and
butterflies lay their eggs on milkweed, asters, cone flowers, wild indigo and
grasses.
o - Flowers provide
pollen and nectar to pollinators.
o - Ornamental seed
heads create winter interest.
o - A thick
planting scheme of grasses and sedges combats weeds.
- All told, you
may have roughly 50 plants in a 100-square-foot bed, depending on if you have a
path and how wide it is. If you can buy plugs or 3-inch pots, you may spend in
the neighborhood of $250 to $350 on the plant material.
ERA
Skyline Real Estate
3376
Harrison Blvd.
Ogden,
UT 84403
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