The Wildlife-friendly Garden. Michael Chinery

      Contents

       Cover

       Title Page

The Garden Habitat

Garden diversity

Wildlife-friendly gardens

Planning your garden

A wildlife meadow

The garden hedge

Wildlife walls

The garden pond

       A log garden

       Under your feet

       The compost heap

       Garden Mammals

       Reading the signs

       Hedgehogs

       Rodents

       Deer

       Foxes

       Badgers

       Bats

       Garden Birds

       A beak for the job

       Food for the birds

       Plants for birds

       Familiar garden birds

       Identifying garden birds

       Houses for birds

       Dealing with casualties

       Reptiles and Amphibians

       Lizards

       Snakes

       Frogs, toads and newts

       Insects and Other Invertebrates

       Butterflies

       Identifying butterflies

       Garden moths

       Identifying moths

       Bees and wasps

       Dragonflies

       Ladybirds

       Spiders

       Keep Reading

       Keeping a record

       Useful information

       Bibliography

       About the Author

       Copyright

       About the Publisher

       Michael Chinery

PART ONE

       The Garden Habitat

      All over the world, forests are being felled, wetlands are being drained, and heaths and grasslands are being ploughed up to make way for crops and houses. However, while these natural or semi-natural habitats are shrinking in the face of the increasing human population, one habitat – the garden – is increasing, and I think it is no exaggeration to say that today’s gardens are our most important nature reserves.

      Gardens cover almost a million hectares of the United Kingdom alone, and it is this enormous extent, as well as their great variety, that makes them such valuable wildlife refuges. In some areas, gardens are undoubtedly more important for wildlife than the surrounding ‘countryside’, with its pesticide-drenched monocultures. This is true even where the gardener does nothing in particular to encourage visitors: the wide range of plants cultivated in a typical garden is itself enough to attract lots of insects, and the insects bring in the birds.