You might have a beautiful garden full of colour and fragrance as we enter the peak growing season but, attracting wildlife to your garden can add even more pleasure to your garden. There’s nothing better than sitting with a morning coffee on a warm June morning, watching and listening to the birds, bees and other insects flitting around your garden.

If you want to attract more wildlife to your garden, you’ll need to provide food, water, shelter and a place to breed. You don’t have to have all of them, but at least a couple will dramatically increase the amount of wildlife that enters your garden. Here are some of the top ways you can attract wildlife to your garden. And the good news is, it doesn’t have to break the bank or involve a complete redesign of your garden.

Add bird boxes and food

Birds are a key part of your garden’s ecosystem so encouraging them and providing them with a safe space will help your garden to thrive.

Add a bird table or bird feeder to a quiet spot in your garden and sit back and watch the birds flying around your garden. Providing them with food, especially in harsh conditions, is a great way to look after your local ecosystem and help the birds continue to thrive.

If you want to go one step further, bird boxes are a great way to encourage birds to breed. Make sure the bird box is sheltered from the elements and try to put them up before spring to avoid any disruption to the breeding season.

Provide Water

If you only have a small space, adding a bird bath will provide hours of enjoyment as you watch birds fly down to your garden to have a drink and to bathe.

In an even bigger garden and to attract a much wider range of wildlife, a pond is a great addition to any garden. Add stones and branches so frogs can climb in and out and provide some shade to provide somewhere cool for wildlife to go during warmer weather.

Grow climbers

Climbers not only provide a source of food and pollen for the wildlife in your garden, they also provide year-round protection for birds and insects that need somewhere to shelter.

Ivy is the best plant for wildlife because it’s evergreen and spreads quickly. It will provide shelter all-year round, which means you can enjoy watching small insects and birds in your garden, even during the colder months.

Clematis, wisteria and climbing rose varieties also provide a perfect habitat for wildlife.

Create a compost heap

Creating a compost heap in your garden will provide you with a natural way to enhance the soil in your garden year-after-year which will help your plants to thrive. It will also provide the perfect habitat for worms, wood life and other small insects which can attract hedgehogs and birds to your garden.

Grow flowers

Planting flowers in your garden is a great way to provide colour, beauty and fragrance but flowers are one of the key ways to provide food for insects. If you want to provide colour and a wildlife-friendly environment from spring through to autumn, make sure you plant a range of varieties that all bloom and flourish at different points in the season.

If you want to attract as much local wildlife as possible, try to plant native plants to your area. These are the flowers that have evolved along with the local wildlife so they will be perfectly suited to each other.

Grow a mix of trees and shrubs

If you have a fairly large garden, planting a mix of both trees and shrubs will provide both food and shelter for a variety of wildlife. Shrubs are available in a range of sizes and provide a place for nesting birds and hibernating insects to hide. In addition, they provide them with cover to move around unseen and shelter from the elements.

If you want to provide shelter throughout the year, try to select shrubs that flower at various stages in the year. This will not only provide somewhere for wildlife to go, it will also keep your garden looking colourful all-year round.

Attracting wildlife to your garden all-year round will help to support the eco-system in your local area by providing food and shelter but it will also provide you with entertainment as you watch to see which creatures have come into your garden.