Can an ordinary garden really help wildlife? And do wildlife gardens have to look messy?
In this complete guide to wildlife gardening, I’ve brought together four of my most useful videos on creating a wildlife-friendly garden that still looks beautiful and well designed. Settle down for a longer watch!
Many gardeners want to support biodiversity but aren’t sure where to start. Should you stop mowing? Do you need a pond? Do wildlife gardens have to be wild and untidy? And how much difference can one small or middle-sized garden actually make?
In this compilation video I share practical wildlife garden ideas and tips that really make a difference — without spending a fortune or turning your garden into a jungle.
You’ll learn:
• How gardens like Great Dixter combine beautiful planting with thriving wildlife
• Simple wildlife gardening changes that genuinely increase biodiversity
• Whether trends like No Mow May are helpful (and when they’re not)
• How formal or carefully designed gardens can still support birds, insects and pollinators
• Easy ways to make your garden more wildlife friendly without extra time, effort or cost
The good news is that wildlife gardening doesn’t mean giving up good design. Even a small or middle-sized garden can support pollinators, birds and beneficial insects if you understand what really helps.
If you’d like to create a garden that’s both beautiful and good for wildlife, this complete guide will show you how.
Chapters
00:00 Introduction – Do wildlife gardens have to look messy?
00:51 Lessons from Great Dixter
21:05 Gardening for biodiversity – why the rules are changing
36:19 No Mow May – pros and cons
46:50 Easy wildlife garden tips that make a real difference
55:00 Eco-friendly Garden Design video: https://youtu.be/5TyIR09Pgmo
More wildlife gardening advice on The Middlesized Garden:
Great Dixter lessons for wildlife gardens
https://www.themiddlesizedgarden.co.uk/7-lessons-great-dixter-garden-that-supports-wildlife-looks-gorgeous/
5 easy wildlife garden tips that really make a difference
https://www.themiddlesizedgarden.co.uk/5-easy-wildlife-garden-tips-really-make-difference/
Gardening for biodiversity – why changing rules are good news for gardeners
https://www.themiddlesizedgarden.co.uk/gardening-for-biodiversity-why-changing-rules-good-news-garden-lovers/
No Mow May – the pros and cons
https://www.themiddlesizedgarden.co.uk/should-do-no-mow-may-pros-cons/
For garden ideas, gardening advice, garden design and landscaping ideas for your garden or backyard, subscribe to the Middlesized Garden YouTube channel here: https://www.youtube.com/c/ThemiddlesizedgardenCoUk
Whether you love English garden style, cottage gardens or contemporary urban gardening, The Middlesized Garden has gardening advice and garden ideas for you.
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The Middlesized Garden practices sustainability, wildlife gardening and no till methods. If your garden backyard is smaller than an acre, join us and enjoy your garden even more!
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38 Comments
Wonderful😊
My favorite garden YouTube channel 👌
I feed my slugs leaf mold. They prefer it to my hostas.
Unfortunately the so called experts are not always correct. I've never used slug/snail pellets. I've always been aware of hedgehogs, owls , frogs etc. People should stop trying to control everything and realise that there's more on this planet than them.
Awesome Nature's beauty 😍 ❤️
Beautiful flowers,and plants ❤,very informative video friend
Stay blessed always 🙏 ✨️ ❤️ 💖
An excellent video, thank you to you and those you interviewed. Regards from BC Canada
Parasitic wasps LOVE umbellifers.
17:00 I couldn't hear anything.
What bothers me the most are the right fighter gardeners who believe it should be all natural and all native and have no regard for those of us who want to have both non native plants along with natives. I think if people add some natives its a start and we can enjoy both without judgement. I love my native plants growing side by side with my roses and enjoying them equally.
Grey Squirrels are also tick carriers. In my experience.
Thank you!!
Really liked this video, great information! I have been trying to go more native here in my PNW Washington home that I have lived in for over 50 years and it doesn't bother me a bit to have both native and non-native plants if the bugs like them, because the birds I feed also like the idea, ( : I found out by not mowing that there was a grass in my small lawn that puts out tons of seeds that the ground feeding birds just love, so it gave me an even better excuse not to mow ( : My lot is aprox. 100 x 60 ft so I've not all that much room, but I've had over 40 species of birds visit my yard and many that stay through the winter. I only have a couple of small spots of lawn, front and back yard and my whole yard is 'almost' full of trees, shrubs and flowers, and I love it!
?name please of that huge bush behind you in the beginning❤
Hyped up 3 times 🙂💚
Other than native foxes and my son has seen an occasional badger (and birds) mine seems to be alien invasive species gloare – screeching green parakeets in this bit of Outer London for the last 5 years at least, muntjac deer sometimes. If I leave the lawn for about 2 or 3 weeks in May it goes go a nice yellow and purple from the flower but is then very hard to mow after that so not really worth the huge extra effort and I have let it mostl go to moss, nearly 3/4 acre of moss other than a few minor borders, hedge and a wooded area.
Catastrophe Averted!!
Great video to get the good word out!!!
👍 👍 👍
Thank You! ❤
Note on Bat Boxes:
For places outside of England,
which have hotter,
more harsh Summer temperatures,
proper placement of Bat Boxes is a bit different.
Bat Boxes get too hot when placed facing the West, in certain places, or countries.
Please do research for proper Bat Box placement for your specific area.
I love your videos. Thank you for the great information.
I swoon every time you show that Great Dixter border. My closed patio umbrella is a favorite daytime bat hideout. I rarely put it up, but I take a good look inside before I do. 😮
I wonder about owl boxes if you need video ideas. 🦉 Interesting tips, and I liked the bat boxes and how to place them. 😊🦇
one major mistake in this video is the assumption that the modern english countryside is environmentally and ecologically healthy. It isn't. The countryside is a dead waste of biodiversity .
mixed forests, wetlands, peatlands that was what england looked like.
Not feilds with some pitiful hedges
Have you caught John Little? I'm sure you've heard/seen him before. He would have been a great addition to this set of great interviews.
Regarding lawn mowing, I found mowing at the edge of borders and keeping them neat helps prevent borders getting over run with weeds. I try and keep those areas cut lower and edged, but then let middle of the grass (or by fences) get longer. That seems to give that balance of long and short while not compromising borders. If you're having to cut grass, make sure the clippings are taken away (i.e. compost them, or use it as mulch if there's no weed seed). We have a number of trees on our road, and planting naturalised bulbs under them means the council won't cut those patches of grass till later in the season.
My next door neighbors always comment about how lush and green my grass is! I tell them it's not grass. Some of it is but really it's clover and plantain etc. That all stays lush and green and looks like a lawn when it's mowed. Around 2002,I quit trying to plant grass c and just let nature do it's job. I also don't rake leaves. I let it sit all winter and use my mulching mower to chop it up in late February to late March depending on the weather that year. It creates a beautiful topsoil layer and everything flourishes. I have red Geotgia clay in my yard. But when I dig down I can see a rich topsoil layer of about an inch to 4 inches depending on where the trees are. I also use tough plants that can survive the extreme heat of my climate! The clay can literally be like brick if it doesn't rain and is hot! If you try to plant at the wrong time,you might as well be trying to chisel concrete! But everything thrives! I plant between rains and after rain only. I never have amended my soil. Everything likes it as long as it can live through the extremes. Every February I go on a killing spree to remove unwanted saplings.
Well. To be very precise. Wild bees, butterflies, all the wildlife we try to attract or maybe even do a favour to…they (in the first place) don’t need “diversity” or any of the other stuff mentioned…first of all they need native plants, because for hundreds of years they are adapted one to the other. They (in Europe) don’t need dahlias, amaranthus or Mexican salvias. They need native plants. Some insects so specialised that they can’t live without a very specific (native) plant. And obviously I’m not talking about honey bees which might be even more of a problem rather than a species needed to be protected. And THEN they also need diversity (of native plants), lots of “messy spaces” and all the rest. I myself do also have non native plants in my garden because I like them and they also mostly are beneficial to wildlife. So I’m not pointing my finger to anyone. And a Portuguese laurel might even be more beneficial to wildlife than the native yew. But still- if we really really want to help wildlife first thing to do is plant a lot and then plant native species. Very easy. Apart from that – I very much love your videos and I’m really thankful for all the energy you’re putting into them. So thanks a lot. Lots of love from Germany, Cornelius.
My garden is so wildlife friendly it is now full of mice… I'm worried they are going to try to come inside
I do really struggle with slugs and snails. I tried all manner of natural deterrents such as boiled garlic water sprayed on plants (seemed to attract even more slugs!), wool pellets, etc. but none seemed to work at all for me and I just could not get young plants to survive – the slugs would eat them right down to the ground every night. I’ve unfortunately had to resort to slug pellets as my only option, and it does wipe them out, but I try to only use them when plants are emerging in the spring or around very young plants that they would eat.
An apology! At 17:00 I show a habitat pile at Great Dixter so you can hear the munching of the insects inside. Unfortunately this sound has been accidentally erased by processing, so you'll want to skip that bit! And here is a short with the real sound of the munching inside: https://youtube.com/shorts/Q6FlCeAB1-A
Love this! The references to moss-killing was so surprising to me – it's too hot and dry for moss where I live, so a moss lawn sounds magical. It seems so lush and soft and friendly compared to grass (which is usually brown and spikey, as in 46:30). I've been wondering about how I could get climbers up my walls without damaging the weatherboards, so this has inspired me to do some research.
Edited to add that "not spending too much money, putting in much effort, or changing things too much" are my three favourite hobbies so I loved hearing that bit.
Wildlife gardens, one of my favorite gardening topics! By the way, euphorbia is a great wildlife-friendly plant and the one behind you at the beginning of the video is huge! I have several varieties here in California but none that big. Thanks for another great video!
Brilliant ! Thank you Alexandra for this very useful summary … From Normandy . L
Please linger longer on lovely landscapes.
Any plants that you buy that are not certified organically grown will poison the creatures you try to help. Lots of pollinator "friendly" plants are grown with insecticides and fungicides that not only leach into the soil but damage any insect that uses them. There are some good organic growers online (rosy bee for example). Plant native, plant peat free and plant organically.
Super interesting and informative video, Alexandra — I really enjoyed all the interviews, especially the one with Fergus at Great Dixter. It’s an amazing garden, and when I visited a couple of years back it was in much better shape and still flowering, versus Sissinghurst at the same time, where things were dying back a bit.
Biodiversity has become a bit of a buzzword. I hear myself using it and sometimes have to stop and ask, what does that actually mean? In New Zealand, we’ve had a massive import of plants — around 25,000 compared to about 2,200 natives. Unfortunately, some of these have become major invasive weeds — perhaps 300–600 of them — things like bindweed, which Fergus mentioned. They are now threatening a lot of the native forests.
So the idea that “more is better” isn’t always true — it can actually wipe out native populations, as many of these plants are highly adapted to survive and spread. I think it’s an important distinction, and it even carries through to one of the main design principles: sometimes less is more, and unity is key to any overall garden design. Too many elements can lead to confusion.
I have a video coming out this Saturday where I look into invasive weeds that have started to take over. And not to mention the various wasps that have been introduced — like the latest one, the yellow-legged hornet — which is trying to establish itself and could severely impact native bees, honey bees, and other insects.
I agree about lawns — but if you are a lawn person, then regular mowing is key to maintaining a good lawn. Many of us, however, have weedy lawns, so it doesn’t matter too much.
Amazing! I am doing a lot of native planting in my garden this year to make it more wildlife friendly. And I made of those habitat piles last year!
I love this video, it’s reinforced my belief in what I’m doing in my own garden. I love the moss and the lichen, and the little corners with nettles or broken pots – I see the birds hopping in out of these areas which means there must be food for them there. I wish I hadn’t burned my prunings this year though I could have used them to build up the side of my new pond. However the potassium left by the burn will be excellent for growing winter squash so all is not lost. Also I let a lot plants self seed because it saves me money – so granny’s bonnet, cow parsley, chamomile, poppies and foxglove are all merrily making my garden pretty . ❤
What a lovely video. Don’t forget, if you are encouraging wildlife, to sit out and enjoy it. Talk to the birds. Get a trail cam to record it….and especially all the nighttime visitors too.
A garden filled with nature feeds your soul as well as the wildlife!
🦋🪱🌷🌸🌻🐞🪺🍄🪻🦔🕷️🐝🐸🌺🌹🐾🦉🦇🦟🪲🦊🪷🐦⬛🌈
Boost for the valuable information.
I could benefit from information on how to properly grow climbers up my south facing brick wall of my home. I’m very nervous about harming the exterior of my home but I do have a 2/3 story height of brick. The weight of it all and type of plant that won’t damage my home. But also look good year round. Thank you for the lovely information!