Interested in adding a more naturalistic touch to your landscaping? Want to attract more wildlife to your garden? Or maybe you want to make your yard a little more environmentally-friendly? Some might hesitate to add some local flora and fauna thinking it might look more overgrown than purposeful, but there are artful ways to incorporate the following elements without your house looking like something out of Jumanji.
How do you landscape to attract wildlife?
The basics of landscaping for wildlife involves some things you may remember from science class. To attract animals, you need:
- Food
- Water
- Places to hide, rest and nest
Additionally, prior to making any plans, you’ll need to do a bit of research on what plant life is native to your area in order to best appeal to the wildlife.
Food
Plants will supply nectar, seeds, nuts, fruits, berries, foliage and pollen to animals and insects. With such a wide range of plant life to choose from, a good way to narrow down what to get is deciding on what kind of critters you want to attract. For anything you can’t provide, you can always install a feeder with the appropriate food.
Water
Obviously, water is just as important as food. Adding a water feature can be as simple as a bird bath to something more labor-intensive like a pond. If you’re able to build a pond, this opens up the opportunity for even more plants to choose from and have a wider array of wildlife to draw in.
Places to Hide, Rest and Nest
Animals tend to avoid open spaces because it leaves them exposed to predators and the weather. To make your yard more appealing, use plants with differing heights to provide both more variety to wildlife and the eye. For example, if you have a lot of space to work with, you would plant canopy trees, then medium-sized trees and tall shrubs, smaller shrubs, tall grasses, and finish with ground covers. In a smaller yard, you can use plants that take up less space, as well as using something like a trellis to grow climbing plants like vines or honeysuckle.
Rock walls, tree stumps or logs, and nesting boxes all work as non-plant shelter options.
Rethink Your Lawn
Along with attracting beauty, there’s other benefits to adding some of these elements to your yard. The traditional lush green 2.5 inch is, while pleasing to look at in its uniformity, is actually detrimental to the environment for multiple reasons:
- they use up a huge amount of water
- the lack of usable habitat leaves more and more wildlife without shelter and food
- the chemicals used to fertilize grass and kill weeds contaminates both our water sources and the air, releasing extremely harmful greenhouse gases
Need more incentive? If you replace your typical lawn grass with native grasses, you can actually get a tax exemption for it.
This is just a very broad overview of this subject. The more research you do, the more ideas you’ll find, and you might learn more about the area you live in the process. Soon, you’ll see your backyard buzzing with life.
