Introduction to garden habitats
We have seen in
The Garden Resource that looked at collectively, our gardens are an enormous resource for wildlife.
The “garden habitat” is also exceedingly rich and biodiverse, as shown in the section
Gardens and Biodiversity. But one of the reasons for this high biodiversity is that gardens are not a uniform habitat, but contain lots of mini-habitats in close proximity. Few gardens don’t have a bit of lawn, a veggie patch, flower beds, perhaps a hedge and a shrub or small tree, and each mini-habitat will probably support different creatures - although this is an area where further study would be useful.
Many of the habitat patches in gardens resemble or substitute for semi-natural habitats in our countryside. Lawns quite closely resemble grazed grassland, and garden patchworks of hedges and shrubs creates edge-zones, like the species-rich interface between woodlands and grasslands at the edge of a wood.
Compost heaps and wood piles represent the deep detritus layer in woodlands, and multi-species hedges can bring some of the diversity of deciduous woodland into a small space. Garden ponds can be as species-rich as similar sized countryside ponds, while rockeries and gravel mimic screes and coastal habitats.
Even the veggie patch, heavily disturbed every year, is a model for old fashioned cereal fields before intensive weedkillers removed most of our beautiful cornfield flowers.
This wonderful mix of mini-habitats, that resemble the semi-natural habitats to which our wildlife is already adapted, is one reason why gardens hold so many species.
We have several resources on garden habitats for wildlife.
There are two sections here:
We have several "How-to" practical guides covering creating habitats: