Wild flowers, pollinating native plants in urban Huddersfield garden

Natural Gardens

Share a square with wildlife

It's time to let the wild back into your life. Let your lawn grow long, turn your paving into poppy patches, learn to love those wildflowers and let your hedge spread its twiggy limbs.

Using What3Words as our guide, we're asking people to turn a 3 metre square of their garden into a gorgeous home for our native wildlife. And why stop at one? If you have squares to spare, the more habitat the better!

Native wild flowers and a wild pond in an urban Yorkshire garden

Pledge your square

The first thing to do is choose which bit of garden you're going to turn into thriving habitat.

You can then enter your details and a What3Words reference for your chosen patch into our pledge form below. If you're doing more than one square, you only need to use one What3Words reference to register your pledge.

You can use the What3Words website to find your reference (satellite view is helpful for this). Select the square of garden you're dedicating and you'll be given three words that represent that spot on the map. We won't share your What3Words location publicly, it just helps us understand where habitat is being created.

Once you've made your pledge, it's time to turn those squares into a wildlife haven!

92
Squares pledged so far

Three golden rules

You might have loads of ideas of the kind of habitat you want to create. There's plenty of superb guidance out there if you need it and we've listed some useful resources below. But following a few simple rules can make a big difference to how attractive your garden is to wildlife.

1
Let it grow

By resisting the urge to mow, trim or weed, you'll start to see wildlife finding its own way back. Let wildflowers sneak through the cracks in the paving to provide food for insects. Allow your lawn to grow long and you'll create shelter for bugs and mini-mammals. Let your trees, shrubs and hedges grow out to create ideal nesting or feeding sites for birds.

2
Go native

People have introduced lots of beautiful plants from exotic places into gardens, but they often come with a cost to our native wildlife. Plants that occur naturally in our country are likely to support far more of our wild species, so if you're doing any planting - choose home-grown native species as much as possible.

3
Be natural

Stick to the things mother nature supplies. Chemicals, plastics and other man-made materials tend to get into places they ought not to be and don't always break down properly, creating pollution. Let the soil, rain and invertebrates do their thing and watch your ecosystems thrive.