Spring is one of my favourite times of the year. The days are growing longer, the sun feels so much warmer, and new life seems to be bursting through everywhere you look. It's the perfect time to get out into the garden.

No matter the size of your outdoor space, it can be a haven for wildlife, providing valuable habitat and connectivity through urban areas for a wide variety of species. There is always something more we can do for nature on our patch, which is why we’d love to see even more people doing more for wildlife this year, and our Wildlife Garden Award 2024 is open, so what are you waiting for? 

Last month I transformed a shady corner of my garden into a vibrant and attractive stumpery. Stumperies are brilliant for providing much needed places for wildlife such as frogs, newts, mice, pollinating insects, and other invertebrates to live in your garden. 

This corner of my garden has always been my woodland edge. Shaded by the house and overhung by a large self-set cotoneaster, ferns and lily of the valley flourish, old logs provide a place for fungi to thrive and invertebrates to hide, and wood mice are often seen scurrying amongst the undergrowth. I relocated a compost bin from this area which created lots of room for more plants, but the heavy clay soil in this area was often saturated with water in the winter and baked solid in the summer. Then I had an idea!

Inspired by one of my favourite gardens I created a stumpery by gradually building the ground level into a low mound using a mixture of homemade compost and soil. I used logs that I had lying around the garden and some new timber cut from a leylandii hedge to create the stumpery features.

Finally, I planted my stumpery up with a variety of additional ferns, hellebores, snowdrops, cyclamen, fritillary, and miniature daffodils to provide early season food for pollinators. When these plants grow and spread my stumpery will provide plenty of places for our resident mice and frogs to hide, an excellent habitat for invertebrates, and ample foraging for the hedgehogs. The lily of the valley will continue to flourish in the shade of the cotoneaster, and the abundance of dead wood under the hedge provides shelter for a variety of species.

Transforming your back yard into a wildlife haven is great, but it’s even better if you can join up with your neighbours to create wonderful wildlife corridors through the heart of your community.

Wildlife Gardening Award winners Kippax Wildlife Corridor did just that. They are a neighbourhood committed to providing local hedgehogs and other wildlife a safe space to breed and thrive. They came together to turn a strip of land along the back of their houses into a ‘green corridor’ and have created a wildlife garden in their allotment car park with a native hedge, trees, shrubs, wildflowers, and lots more.

Their allotment itself features 5 ponds, in addition to lots more wildlife-friendly features, and their patch is now a haven for hedgehogs, frogs, birds, butterflies, and bees; and the group have noticed numbers increasing dramatically since they started. 

Our Wildlife Gardening Award is not just open to private residential gardens - we’ve received lots of applications from community gardens, allotments, schools, NHS sites, and much more.  

One such Wildlife Gardening Award recipient is Grow with Case. Their four allotment plots are used to grow a wide variety of cut flowers, fruits, and vegetables, and around one third of their plots are set aside for wildlife. Bug houses, bird boxes, wildflowers patches, a pond, and a hibernaculum all provide valuable habitat for insects, birds, and amphibians.

So, if you were one of the 380 fabulous gardens who received an award in 2023, will you be inspired to tick off more actions this year? Or will you challenge your neighbours to do more for wildlife too? 

Our WGA 2024 is open for applications, so whether you are new to gardening or and experienced horticulturalist we'd love to receive your applications. To receive your award simply complete our form online by selecting all the actions you take to help wildlife in your garden.

Apply now