Gardening for wetlands
Making a wetland in your garden or community space can be easy, inexpensive, and brings many benefits to people and wildlife. It creates habitat that's needed now more than ever.
Why add a wetland to your garden?
You don’t need a huge garden or even diggable ground to make a wetland.
Making a mini pond out of an old sink, metal tub, or a container under your drainpipe all make a difference and help increase biodiversity.
With 83% of freshwater species in decline worldwide*, creating more wetlands on both a small and large scale is vitally important.
A pond provides endless fascination to garden visitors of all ages with its cast of comic, dazzling or intriguing creatures, such as water boatmen, dragonflies, frogs and newts.
Ideas and tips for wetland gardening
It's not just good habitat for wildlife
Adding a wetland to a garden is a tried, tested and proven stress-buster too: a place to wind down, think, lose worries and find calm.
In areas at risk of flooding, garden wetlands have the added benefit of slowing down and reducing the run-off of heavy rains into drains. If everyone added a small wetland to their garden, this would help reduce the pressure on our rivers and floodplains.
For gardeners, a wetland means a greater variety of attractive native plants can be grown. These plants then attract mini-beasts which pollinate fruit, flowers and vegetables, and bring in other helpful pest-controllers, like birds and hedgehogs.
* 2018 WWF Living Planet Report