Why a Small Town Garden Punches Above Its Weight

Britain's gardens cover more ground than all our nature reserves put together, and the plots that matter most are often the smallest. A town garden — a courtyard, a balcony of pots, a postage stamp behind a terrace — sits in a landscape where nectar is scarce and green routes are chopped up by streets, fences and car parks. Fill that gap and you become a stepping stone: a service station for bees and butterflies moving between parks, railway embankments and allotments.

You do not need an acre. A well-planted three metres by three metres can keep a bumblebee colony busy from March to October, and it will look better for it. The trick is to think like a forager rather than a flower arranger.

Plant in Drifts, Not Dots

The commonest mistake in wildlife planting is dotting one of everything around the border. A bee works by scent and sight, and she will sail straight past a lone bloom she cannot see a patch of. Plant in drifts — five, seven, nine of the same variety together — and you create a beacon she can spot from the far end of the street.

• Group by colour and kind: a block of catmint, then a block of lavender, then a block of sedum.
• Repeat the drift: echo the same planting at the other end of the garden to double the signal.
• Use pots as drifts: three identical pots of agastache lined up on a patio work just as well as a border.
• Resist the row: a drift is a generous mass, not a military line.

If space allows only one container, make it a big one. A single 40cm pot of catmint will outperform six small pots every summer, and it needs less watering too.

Flowers That Earn Their Keep

Choose single, open flowers where the nectar and pollen sit within reach. Doubles, pom-poms and fussy modern varieties may look splendid but offer insects almost nothing. Aim for a sequence rather than a June glut, because queen bumblebees are hunting in early spring and again in autumn.

• Early spring: crocus, hellebore, pussy willow for pollen, and a few dandelions left in the lawn.
• Late spring: comfrey, borage, chives, alliums, wallflowers.
• Early summer: catmint, salvia, lavender, hardy cranesbill, foxgloves.
• Midsummer: oregano, marjoram, hyssop, verbena, purple loosestrife, single dahlias, echinacea.
• Late summer and autumn: sedum, asters, helenium, rudbeckia — and ivy, which is one of the best late nectar sources we have.

Butterflies also need somewhere to lay. A pot of stinging nettles in a corner will raise peacocks, small tortoiseshells and commas; birds-foot trefoil feeds common blues, nasturtium and honesty suit large and small whites, and holly or ivy keeps the holly blue in business.

A Shallow Dish and a Damp Patch

Bees need water as much as nectar, but they drown easily in a birdbath. Sink a saucer or shallow dish to ground level, fill it with pebbles, marbles or broken crocks, and top up until the stones break the surface so insects can land and drink safely. Refresh it every day or two in warm spells — stagnant water grows algae and attracts mosquitoes.

Butterflies take minerals from damp ground, so leave a small patch of bare, open soil and keep it moist through summer. A trickle from a watering can each evening is enough, and males of several species will gather there to drink.

Skip the Spray

Nothing undoes good planting faster than a bottle of bug spray. Broad-spectrum insecticides cannot tell a greenfly from a lacewing, a ladybird larva or a solitary bee, and slug pellets are readily eaten by hedgehogs and birds. Weedkillers strip out the wildflowers insects rely on when cultivated plants are between flushes.

Learn to tolerate a little damage instead. A colony of aphids on the roses brings in hoverflies and blue tits within a fortnight, and a chewed leaf or two is a fair price for a garden that hums. Grow nasturtiums and calendula as sacrificial plants and let the predators do the work.

Leave a Corner Untidy

Wildlife needs shelter and nesting sites as much as food, and both are usually found in the bits we are tempted to tidy. Pile logs and prunings in a shady corner, let a patch of grass grow long until late summer, and leave fallen leaves where they land so ground beetles and hibernating queens have somewhere to overwinter.

• Bee hotel: fix it to a south-facing wall at least a metre off the ground, and keep it dry.
• Tube sizes: 6mm to 10mm holes suit red mason bees and leafcutters; block any that are too wide for the residents.
• Cleaning: don't scrub it out — replace worn tubes every couple of years instead.

Do your main tidy-up in late spring rather than autumn, and you will let everything that slept through the winter emerge first. Then sit back with a cup of tea and count the visitors. Within a season, a modest town plot can become one of the busiest wildlife corridors on the street.