Autumn WILDLIFE
Adrian Thomas looks at how to create a woodland area in your garden to benefit both you and wildlife
In the home, many of us are skilled at fitting as much as we can into a small space, and what we don’t do is limit ourselves to storing everything on the floor – how illogical would that be? No, we put up shelves and install sets of drawers and mount kitchen units: we think vertically.
It’s a great lesson to take into the garden, and I don’t mean in how to organise your shed and greenhouse (although, of course, it’s very useful there, too!). I mean as inspiration for filling your space with plants and benefitting wildlife in the process.
It’s all about taking advantage of the fact that plants are excellent at creating their own stacking system, layer after layer from the ground right up to the canopy. The sky is almost the limit!
You can see it to natural effect in our best woodlands. Mature trees tower into the sky, branching out in full grandeur, hogging the limelight, but they create vast spaces beneath them. This is where shrubs and saplings can grow, while beneath them is a rich ground layer of bulbs, flowering plants and ferns.
On the one hand, you could see all these plants as if engaged in a desperate battle for supremacy, with the ancient trees winning the lion’s share of the light. But it’s more fitting to view it as a community living harmoniously together, each species occupying its own niche, and many actually aiding those around them with their presence.
So, the trees may look dominant but they are actually feeding the woodland floor beneath with their leaves when they fall each autumn, and we now know so much more (but still have plenty to learn) about the great interconnected web of fungi threads that engage the trees and woodland plants in a network of underground chemical communication and collaboration.
This storeyed effect is a multi-layer cake that you can cook up in your own garden. I don’t mean all over it – not many of us want to turn our entire garden into dense forest. But having an area that is tiered in its planting will add height and structure and diversity.
The benefits of woodland areas in gardens extend to the environment as a whole. In particular, the shade cast by trees is wonderfully cooling. Recent research found that tree cover in cities can reduce the land temperature by between as much as 12 degrees centigrade. I’m sure that in the ridiculous 40-degree Celsius summer temperatures of 2022, many of you found that sunny parts of the garden were no-go, but sitting in the shade was a blessed release.
