Gardening with
Wildlife in Mind

Ponds

• The easiest wildlife habitat to create in a garden – and one of the most valuable - is a pond.
• Make sure your garden pond has gently sloping edges: hedgehogs can easily drown if they can’t escape from water.
• Garden ponds provide an ideal haven for frogs.
• There are 25,000 garden ponds in Sheffield!
• Frogs, toads and slow-worms eat slugs – so do hedgehogs.
• Fish eat frog tadpoles: if you want frogs, avoid fish in your pond.
• Toads can survive in ponds with fish: fish find them distasteful.
• Smooth and palmate newt larvae will survive with fish - if there is plenty of aquatic weed cover.
• No room for a pond? Provide a birdbath!
• Why not make a rockery from the earth displaced when you dig your pond?
• Try to avoid filling your pond with tap water – why not divert water from your roof instead?
• Tap water can be enriched with nutrients and may make your pond thick with algae. Run-off from garden fertilisers is most often the cause of algal blooms.
• Even a very small pond can attract much wildlife.
• Clear out your pond in stages – not all at once.
• Site your pond where it gets maximum sunlight and least leaf litter.
• The more different depths you can get in your pond, the greater its value to wildlife.
• Sticklebacks and other fish will eliminate great crested newts from your pond.
• Make sure your pond has a good variety of native pond plants - marginal, submerged, and floating.
• Look at your pond at night with a torch to see species that normally hide away in the day. But be careful not to tread on newts coming out of the pond!
• Remove surplus aquatic weed and leaves from your pond to avoid frogs asphyxiating during frosty weather.
• Keep part of your pond free of ice for part of each day during the winter.
• Natural ponds often dry down in late summer in the wild, when sheep and cattle eat the fen vegetation. An autumn cut replicates this, benefits low fen species, and makes the pond tidier over winter.
• A shallow edge to a pond gives warmer water: better for tadpole development.
• A fenny margin to your pond provides pupating habitat for water beetles.
• Don’t worry if your pond level drops in the summer. The 'draw down zone' is also a good wildlife habitat.
• A soil-filled margin around the edge of the pool will disguise ugly liners as water levels fall.
• Don’t have grass along the margin of a pool if you want to avoid creeping grasses and clovers invading your marginal plant areas.
• Add a touch of the spectacular! Scatter common spotted and marsh orchid seed in your marginal plant containers. They may flower within 5-6 years.
• Don’t worry if your frogs get overcrowded. Removing spawn simply reduces competition and can result in even more frogs in the long term.
• Try not to disperse frogs and spawn from your garden: it can help spread amphibian diseases.
• Over time, large newt populations may build up, reducing the size of your frog population.
• Get permission from a friendly land-owner and collect aquatic weeds from wild ponds or ditches, especially where these are about to be cleared.
• Rootless cuttings of native aquatic plants can establish very easily.
• Avoid non-native water plants, especially, Crassula helmsii, Azolla filiculoides, Hydrocotyle ranunculoides and Myriophyllum aquaticum. These may be sold under a variety of English names in garden centres.
• New ponds often get clogged with algae in the first year. Don't panic!
• Aquatic plants will out compete algae in new ponds after a year or so.
• Water crowfoot is a colourful early oygenator that competes with algae for nutrient. It needs a part of the pond that dries down in summer to maintain itself from seedlings.
• Try not to remove algae from ponds in early summer - it can contain newt eggs and larvae.
• Don't plant reeds or reedmace (bulrushes) in a small garden pond - they are very invasive.
• Good colourful pond plants include marsh marigold, purple loosestrife, lesser spearwort, water mint, ragged-robin, water avens and pond sedges.
• Avoid adding duckweed to a new pond. It can completely cover the surface.
• Allow mosses to grow over a marginal planting basket. Over time, they make it look like an attractive natural hummock, rather than an artificial feature.
• Baskets for marginal pond plants make an excellent sowing medium for marsh orchid seed.
• Two ponds are better than one! A deeper one with fish, and a shallower one for wildlife can give you the best of both worlds.
• Frogs like to spawn in shallow water. Make sure your pond has a shallow sunny margin.
• Ground cover around a pond provides shelter for young amphibians.
• Great crested newts lay eggs on plants with broad leaves - water mint, water forget-me-not, curled pondweed, water soldier, etc.
• A carefully constructed concrete pond can be more robust than one with a liner and looks less unsightly than an exposed black liner when the water gets low.
• Try to keep trees from shading your garden pond. They make them cold and add unwanted leaves in the autumn.
• The many species of British pond weed (like those in the Potamogeton, Ceratophylum and Ranunculus families) provide a wider variety of interesting aquatic plants than the restricted range on sale at garden centres.
• Organic barley straw can help to keep your pond free of algae.
• When buying water plants, check the pots for unwanted passengers like water fern (Azolla filiculoides) and New Zealand Pigmyweed (Crassula helmsii).
• Slabs around a pond can provide hibernation sites for newts.
• The best way to keep a pond oxygenated and free of weed is to fill it with native pond plants.
• Create a bog garden at the same time as you dig your pond and you will double its wildlife value.
• Rainwater contains far fewer nutrients than tap water. Top up your pond from rainwater collected in water butts.
• Some leaf litter in a pond is important for litter invertebrates like water hoglice, or the rare southern damselfly.
• When clearing out plants from a pond, leave them to drain by the side to allow the animals living on them to crawl back into the pond.
• Never remove more than a quarter of pond vegetation in any single year.
• You don’t need to provide food for tadpoles – they feed on algae and other materials occurring naturally in your pond.
• If you turn part of your lawn into a pond, use the turfs to make a grassy bank in the sun – an ideal spot for basking slow-worms.