If we combined all of our gardens in the U.K., the area would be greater than the total of all our National Nature Reserves. Just imagine if every one of us gardened for wildlife – we could reverse the biodiversity crisis.
Our Wildlife Gardening Champions project, run in collaboration with Wilder St Albans, aims to help this become a reality. We are keen to support people who want to do more for wildlife in their garden, by offering our service free of charge to residents who live either close by or on a Wilderhood Watch street. If you’d like to invite a Wildlife Gardening Champion into your garden, you’ll receive tailor-made, expert advice on how to make your green space both stunning to look at and a wildlife paradise.
Our wildlife gardening experts will give you lots of tips on how to garden in an environmentally sensitive way. They will provide a wealth of advice on planting that will not only provide year round colour and interest for you, but year round food, shelter and water for pollinators and other wildlife. Enhancing and creating habitats will guarantee you a beautiful, interesting garden bustling and buzzing with wildlife.
What to expect
On arrival, a pair of Wildlife Gardening Champions will first of all chat to you about your space and how you like to use it. They’ll take a quick survey of how wildlife friendly your garden is already, and start to look at ways in which it could be enhanced. This will include taking into account the size of your garden, as well as considering areas of sunlight or shade, or permanent garden structures such as sheds or patios.
Having assessed your garden, our experts will then talk to you about opportunities you may have for habitat creation or improved planting schemes. In sketching a plan of potential changes you could make, they will make sure this is something you’ll be able to work from that will suit your needs. This consultation should take about an hour, after which our gardening experts will either give you your plan or email it to you after a bit of refinement!
Once you have your garden plan, you can choose which changes you’d like to make, and the Wilderhood Watch team can give you continued support to do so. For example, if you decide you’d like a wildflower meadow, a volunteer can come and help you scarify your lawn and provide seeds or plug plants. We can also source seedlings and cuttings for border perennials from the many experienced gardeners who are part of Wilderhood Watch. We know that by helping each other on our streets, we can bring wildlife back into our gardens and help it thrive.
All Wildlife Gardening Champions are not only Wildlife Trust volunteers, but have completed an RHS course in wildlife gardening, funded by the Wilder St Albans Project.
Here are some of our Wildlife Gardening Champions clearing a large plot of land behind the George Street Canteen in St Albans. We have now turned this into a little paradise for wildlife, honing our gardening skills in the process and creating an exemplar garden for fellow gardeners to view.
If you’d like to see more plans we’ve been creating for people’s gardens, you can download them from our resources page. And for more information on rewilding your garden, check out the Rewilding Britain website.
Please don’t hesitate to contact nadia@wilderhoodwatch.org if you’d like to book a consultation.
