Project: Your Living Garden

This project is being funded by Farming in Protected Landscapes

The aim of this project is to encourage gardeners to see their gardens as living breathing ecosystems rather than just a collection of plants.

As modern intensive agriculture makes much of our farmland inhospitable to wildlife, gardens take on an increasingly important role in preserving our invertebrate life. Insects perform numerous jobs in a garden, from pollinating flowers to cleaning up debris, much of which gardeners may be unaware of.

Poplar Hawk-Moth

We are creating 10 A5 size cards (folded A4 sheet to give 4 sides) covering the ten most common types of invertebrates found in gardens. Each card identifies the invertebrate in question, from butterflies to bees to beetles, explains the role they take in a garden, the benefits they bring and shows how to attract them and create the habitat in which they will thrive. The cards will be in full colour with lots of pictures of the different species in question.

Stripe-faced Drone Fly

Our Gardening for Wildlife booklet has proved very successful in reaching new audiences and from our original print run of 850 copies, distributed to every household in our three local villages, over 15,000 copies have now been printed and handed out, hence our decision to include it in the Your Living Garden project.

White-legged Millipede

In return for hosting a Your Living Garden stand, each garden centre will get a listing on our website, with information about what they do and how to find them, along with details of all the environmentally friendly products they sell. The garden centre will also receive a list of the plants we have recommended in the information cards.

Beautiful Demoiselle

The proposal is to unroll this project over a 3 year period, targeting eight South Devon garden centres each year. This will involve getting the garden centre to agree to have the information stand in their shop and keeping them supplied with booklets and information cards. We will undoubtedly learn what works best, both in encouraging garden centres to display the stand and what attracts and influences gardeners the most. We will then adapt the project to accommodate those lessons.

Orange Tip

As Sir David Attenborough said “It’s surely our responsibility to do everything within our power to create a planet that provides a home not just for us, but for all life on Earth.”

And as you make your garden you’re doing exactly that - creating an extraordinary habitat for some of our most useful, and most threatened, wildlife – invertebrates.

We’d be lost without them and they work hard to keep our flowers pollinated, our soil rich and our gardens clean. These cards will show you how to create the very best habitat for them where they will flourish. In return you will have the pleasure of a garden full of life and activity as they beaver away to keep your garden colourful and healthy.