Gardening for Wildlife
Create a garden alive with birds, bees and butterflies. GreenArt designs, builds and cares for biodiversity-rich gardens with ponds, planting, and habitat features that bring nature home.
Imagine stepping into a garden that feels vibrant and alive, where flowers bloom across the seasons, birds find food and shelter, and bees and butterflies thrive. GreenArt can support your garden to become just that, a living ecosystem buzzing with bees, alive with birdsong, full of butterflies and hedgehogs, and connected into the wider landscape. We design and care for gardens that are beautiful, resilient and rich in life.
What Do We Mean by a Biodiverse Garden?
A biodiverse garden is one designed to maximise life: from soil fungi and pollinators to birds and small mammals. It’s about weaving together plants, habitats, and water to create a mosaic where wildlife can feed, breed and shelter.
We follow seven key principles of ecological gardening:
1. More plants, more seasons – flowers from February through November, host plants for caterpillars, fruit and seeds for birds.
2. Habitat mosaics – a mix of habitats including ponds, log piles, dead hedges, sand patches, bug hotels, bird boxes and hibernation spaces.
3. Connectivity – hedgehog highways, green corridors, linking front to back and into neighbouring gardens and nearby green spaces.
4. Soil & water as the engine – healthy, peat-free soils, raingardens, low-fertility pockets for wildflowers.
5. Light & night – warm-white, shielded lighting; keep dark corridors for bats and moths.
6. Gentle management – seasonal care, no mow zones, leaving stems and leaves over winter, avoid chemicals.
7. People & place – wildlife features designed to be seen and enjoyed, balancing beauty and wildness.
Small touches can make a big difference: nest boxes for birds, a bat box in a sheltered spot, or a pond that becomes a lifeline for frogs and toads through the seasons.
How GreenArt Can Help
Ecological Garden Assessments
A simple, on-site survey using our Garden Biodiversity Index. You’ll get a scorecard, a clear picture of your garden’s ecological potential, and your top priority actions.
Design & Build for Biodiversity
o Ponds and Raingardens
o Wildflower meadows and pollinator strips
o Log piles, dead hedges, gabions and brownfield pockets
o Hedgehog highways and climber corridors
o Bespoke bug hotels, bee posts and bird boxes
o Planting palettes designed for Oxfordshire and Berkshire soils
Wildlife Gardening & Coaching
At GreenArt, we see our gardeners as a keystone species. Just like beavers shape rivers or earthworms transform soil, pigs cultivate land, our gardeners act as “ecosystem engineers” tending living systems so that they continue to flourish.
This goes beyond conventional maintenance:
• Wildlife-friendly care – mowing in a mosaic, leaving stems until spring, pruning at the right time for nesting birds and pollinators.
• Habitat creation and enhancement – dead hedges, refreshing log piles, topping up ponds, re-seeding wildflower patches.
• Observation & adaptation – noticing changes in plant health, soil condition or wildlife use, and adjusting management accordingly.
Our Wildlife Garden Care Plans ensure your garden isn’t just kept neat, but kept alive.
Why It Matters
• For nature and wildlife: UK gardens combined cover 3x more land than all our nature reserves, making them vital habitats for species from hedgehogs and bats to butterflies and birds. Every garden can offer a home and play its part in nature recovery.
• For you: a garden alive with butterflies and birds offers daily joy and proven wellbeing benefits.
• For the future: biodiverse gardens are healthier, more resilient, and protect your investment.
