Wildlife Garden

The horticultural media are these days full of wildlife-friendly ideas and the idea of the garden being a habitat as well as a tapestry or an artist’s canvas is gaining broad-spectrum acceptance. No gardening organisation has a spectrum broader than the RHS whose weight is firmly behind this colourful volume. Its main preoccupation is to list and illustrate all kinds of wildlife-encouraging garden activity. We can put in a little pond, build habitat piles, plant encouraging flowers, shrubs and trees, build houses for birds, bees and butterflies, ladybirds, toads and worms, and, importantly, observe the results. Readers without gardens, though marginalised, are not forgotten; plenty can be done with window boxes, tubs and patio-pots.

I don’t know who the photogenically youthful Martyn Cox is, but he has been assisted by the usual DK team of editors, designers and photographers as well as the collective insight of the RHS. The result is that occasional opportunities are fumbled rather than taken cleanly – ‘pristeen’ isn’t how most people spell it and a paragraph about bats is illustrated by an excellent photograph of an Eyed Hawk-Moth (shown larger than the bat on the facing page) but overall this is a soundly-based, upbeat and encouraging introduction to wildlife gardening. Woolworths may have left the High Street but pick-and-mix lives on in this pleasant posy of projects.