Notes and photos from making my front garden more wildlife friendly

I live in a fairly suburban road. It’s right on the edge of the London and Surrey boundary, and has some amazing ancient woodland just at the end of the road and open land beyond that in the south, whilst at the same time getting increasingly urban if you walk in the other direction. It’s a 1940s house with reasonable sized front and back gardens. When we bought it the front garden was a very typical (for this area at least), smallish patch of grass with an ornamental weeping willow tree. I tended to cur the grass occasionally and maintain it to the bare minimum. It looked like this (reindeer not always present

2 years ago I started on a different direction to make it wildlife friendly with a particular focus on bees. In my mind it would become a meadow filled with grasses and wildflowers, but I had no idea how long it would actually take or what work it would take to achieve. Because of the locality, the ground contains a lot of deep moss amongst the grass. In the first year, I just let it go completely wild and waited to see what would happen. The answer was that it grew to some extent, but (with obvious hindsight) there wasn’t much actually plant diversity to grow. Some of the grasses grew out, went to seed, which was nice, a few ragwort flowers appeared later in the season, and some knapweed too. It had started, but it wasn’t very diverse!

I wanted to speed up the process, so last year I invested in some Butterfly and Bee Wildflower and Grass Seed Mixture and plug plants. The plants I planted in spring and the seeds mostly in autumn. They don’t always flower in the first year, but it’s all about the long term diversification for me.

One year later whilst the garden doesn’t quite look like the meadow photos just yet, the diversity of plants and early flowers is amazing. It’s bringing me complete and utter joy watching them all sprout, work out what they are, see the flowers start and watch the bees and insects embrace them.

It’s still only mid-May as I write and there’s lots more to come out yet. I’ve spent many happy hours already this year, sitting on the front step, just watching. The willow (which provides beautiful flowers itself early in the season, which the bees love), has gone very wild, and a lovely dog rose has grown up amongst it as well now. This to some just looks like a gnarly giant bush (some of my neighbours commented negatively on it and were taking the piss a bit, but I’m fine and expectant of that!), but to me it now is the house where the family of sparrows live, and where the robins and tits hang out too, happily chirping away all day, whilst occasionally swooping down into the grass.

Here’s what it looks like today, maybe not the obvious meadow beauty yet, but it’s a work in progress, and already returning results in terms of its diversity and what it brings to the bees. I’m hoping it will continue to grow and spread. I occasionally scratch out a small patch of moss, and either re-seed that patch or let it self seed.

and the badger trots through most night too!