Donnachadh McCarthy: The Home Ecologist

It was a beautiful sunny morning and I was enjoying a cup of tea on bank holiday weekend in my back-garden. This is a peaceful oasis of greenery in the middle of the city, for which I am immensely grateful.

Then they started. Drill, drill, drill! Pneumatic drills had sprung into action – and the noise was not coming from the road, but from over the hedge at the bottom of the garden. When I went down to see what was happening, I discovered that yet another of my neighbours had succumbed to the barbaric practice of putting in wooden decking over their formerly natural green garden. It seems that if we're not concreting over our front gardens, we're busily extending the house over what remains of the greenery in our back gardens. A recent survey by Natural England found that 47 per cent of front gardens in the North-west had already been concreted over, so domestic green space is indeed decreasing.

This all, of course, comes at a price for nature. Suburban gardens had become a vital refuge for wildlife following the wanton destruction of our rural hedgerows over the past few decades. Now this refuge is disappearing fast.

The latest government list of threatened wildlife species has more than doubled in ten years, from 600 to more than 1,200. Even garden favourites such as hedgehogs and sparrows are under threat. If the earth is concreted, decked or covered in gravel, its value for nature is destroyed as the plants, worms and insects that birds and small mammals depend upon for their food supply are duly banished.

It is no use if the BBC prides itself on its nature programmes, if at the same time it has endless "makeover" programmes advocating that gardens should become outdoor rooms.

I recently asked a landscape architect friend what proportion of his time was spent actually landscaping gardens. His reply shocked me. He said that in the seven years that he'd been in the trade, he had not been asked once to put in a real garden. Instead, all of his business was in putting in patios and decking.

The irony is that the alternative to decking costs almost nothing and gives endless pleasure. Wildlife gardening is easy and cheap. Installing a pond, buying some bird and bat boxes or sowing some wild-flower seeds are all things that cost little compared to the thousands of pounds being asked for these designer "outdoor rooms".

Leaving some wood to rot in shaded corners or leaving a section to grow wild all help to nurture nature in your garden. The rewards of seeing a robin or wren flitting from branch to branch, and if you are really lucky a hedgehog taking up residence, are enormously rewarding.

Easy-to-follow information on how to make your garden wildlife friendly is available from various websites, including the following: www.wildlifetrusts.org; www.bats.org.uk; and www. britishhedgehogs.org.

So ignore the destructive siren calls of the makeover fashionistas and instead nurture Mother Nature in your garden. I promise you that you will not regret it – especially when the next bank holiday comes around and you sit sipping tea and savouring the beautiful sights and sounds of nature instead.

Donnachadh McCarthy works as a home and business eco-auditor and is author of 'Saving The Planet Without Costing The Earth'. www.3acorns.co.uk

d.mccarthy@independent.co.uk

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