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Review: The Urban Wildlife Gardener

A practical, simple book for new wildlife gardeners.

Are you a reasonably new gardener who wants to attract wildlife to their plot? If so, this is the book for you. The Urban Wildlife Gardener is the latest in a stream of books about helping birds, bees, butterflies and lovely little creatures like hedgehogs thrive in our back gardens. It is a pretty book, but it’s not much use if you’ve been gardening along organic principles with wildlife in mind for a few years.

urban wildlife gardener

This sounds like an obvious criticism, and perhaps it is. But I opened this book hoping to find out really nitty gritty stuff like which plants I could use to help different sorts of bee (for instance, the Lamb’s Tongue, or Stachys byzantina, has hairy leaves which carder bees use), and good plant lists for year-round feed. The plant lists in this book are pretty short.

urban wildlife gardener

But, all that said, I have more friends who would really benefit from this book than I do friends who know all the advice in it already. It is an extremely well-ordered, practical book which teaches the sound principles of good wildlife gardening and talks the reader through not just planting for wildlife, but how to have a healthy plot that you don’t need to use pesticides and fungicides on.

urban wildlife gardener 5

There is advice on companion planting and a very clever page that advises you to grow a nettle patch, not just because it is good for wildlife, but because it means you can make your own organic nettle feed. It makes wildlife gardening seem efficient and clever, rather than a bit hippy.

urban wildlife gardener

And there is good, sound practical advice on food and shelter for a range of different types of wildlife too:

urban wildlife gardener

urban wildlife gardener

And I did read the section on beekeeping with a great deal of interest. It’s something I’ve been thinking about for a while, though I do need to work out where the quietest and least disturbed part of my garden is.

urban wildlife gardener

So would I give this to a friend for Christmas, for instance? Well, yes, but I’d pick one of my many friends who worries about the environment and has just started gardening, rather than a real enthusiast. I think that’s who this book is aimed at, and it fulfils those aims very well indeed.

The Urban Wildlife Gardener by Emma Hardy is £14.99 from Cico Books.

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