I have long been a champion of wildlife gardening, and as a former beekeeper, understand the value and importance of using our little patches of private land to help and support our local flora and fauna. Much as I appreciate beautifully laid out borders and clever planting, my favourite bits in any garden space are the scruffy edges and habitat areas. My last garden was large, wild, and a small oasis in an agricultural desert. The garden at this property is smaller and needs to serve a multitude of functions, but the pockets of wildness where the spiders bask on cracked slate tiles, and the ants patrol their territory are the areas I gravitate towards. I noticed a tortoiseshell butterfly visiting the clump of nettles between the tubs of potatoes, so I’m hoping it might have laid eggs – I love watching caterpillars on nettles.
The garden was landscaped recently, and the night before the chaps arrived I carefully saved an ancient ants nest and put as much of the tunnelled and chambered mound as I could into the safety of the compost bin. I have a wormery for useable compost so the bin is more there to encourage slow worms and grass snakes. Unlike bees, ants can reform their nest without too much disruption so hopefully these little yellow meadow ants will be happy in their new home. There are lots of black ants in the front garden, and there’s a raised areas which was meant to be a vegetable bed but didn’t really work, so I am going to keep that section ungrazed for the grasshoppers. I have three guinea pigs who mow the rest of the lawn which is brilliant as they add some gentle fertiliser, and also delight the people passing by.
I would like to try an illustrated something-or-other to promote wildlife gardening, maybe a poster? Or an e-book? I don’t know. Anyway, with this in mind I tried some drawings/paintings to see how they looked. I really like the illustrations of the bird books but I wanted something looser. I had done some gouache paintings of seals and liked how they turned out so I used the same technique for some of the creatures we get in our garden. I put them on a better background in Photoshop but here they are:
I think they have worked really well. I’m going to paint some more and then see if I can work out how best to use them!
