Planting Your Garden for Birds and Wildlife

Plants are an important feature in the garden for their aesthetic appeal and as a source of food and shelter for insects and birds.

A bird-friendly garden doesn't have to be wild or overgrown but can look attractive all year round. Growing a wide variety of plants to attract wildlife will provide you with something to look at and offer birds food and shelter to help them survive the winter and feed hungry fledglings in the spring.

The size of your garden will limit what you can plant but it is possible to provide something on even the smallest balcony or terrace.

This section tells you everything you need to know about planning your garden and selecting, planting and managing trees, shrubs and flowering plants to achieve the maximum potential for birds.

Create the Right Environment

Creating a rich habitat of trees, shrubs and flowers is the key to planting for birds. This provides insects, fruits and seeds that birds will eat. You might like to think of it as the equivalent of a motorway service station, a place to stop over for food and a rest. Try to include many different kinds of plants, including evergreens, fruit trees, colourful cottage garden plants, annuals and wildflowers. This variety prolongs flowering and fruiting times, giving a year round food resource in your garden.

A well-managed area of trees, shrubs and flowering plants will support a range of wildlife. Creating a range of well developed physical and age structure to your plants has many benefits for birds and insects. Good structure provides somewhere for birds and insects to breed, feed and shelter.

Plant Some Native Species

Native species are a rich source of food. However, many non-native garden plants are closely related to their native counterparts and palatable to most insects. Equally, birds seem to find the berries of non-natives such as Cotoneaster or Pyracantha just as edible as those of the native hawthorn, for example.

One of the richest natural habitats for wildlife in the UK is the woodland glade which offers a mix of vegetation, light, shade and shelter. A well-planned garden should aim to replicate this by using plants of different shapes and sizes planted in borders with wavy edges.

A variety of natural features in gardens will attract birds that have evolved to use different parts of the habitat. Blue tits use the tree canopy, great tits feed in the lower branches of shrubs and dunnocks and blackbirds feed on the ground. Dense evergreen or deciduous bushes, tangles of clematis and honeysuckle and an old tree can shelter nesting blackbirds, chaffinches, robins and dunnocks.

Don't Overdo Your Garden Maintenance

Over tidy gardens are not great for wildlife but that does not mean you have to let your garden run completely wild! Some maintenance such as regular pruning is necessary to enhance the benefits a garden brings to wildlife.

Any maintenance should be timed and planed with care. For example, if you tidy up and trim immediately after plants have flowered birds can't use the seeds, so think about letting plants die back naturally and then tidying them up later.

Other ideas include allowing ivy to scramble up a fence at the end of the garden, leave piles of leaves and fallen fruit and let a patch of flowers go to seed. Just listen to the blackbirds routing through the dried leaf litter in your shrub border, they love it!

You will find you soon create the kind of habitats to attract birds. You might spot blackcaps eating the red berries of honeysuckle in the autumn, blackbirds gobbling up cotoneaster berries all through winter, wrens foraging for insects under hedges all year round and hungry finches and tits descending on the seed-heads of thistles, golden rod and other flowers in frosty weather.

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