Creating Your Very Own Safari Garden - Part 2
Designing and setting up your small urban safari garden
In Part 2 of our 4 part series on ‘Creating Your Very Own Safari Garden’ we recommend using computer generated designs (see below) to visualise the chosen look of smaller, often urban or village gardens. Use our blueprint highlighting the overall structure and adapt it to fit the specifics of your garden. Then we give a series of design ideas for specific habitats that are the key to turning your smaller green space into a thriving LettsSafari garden.
The aim of the Safari Garden is making space for storing carbon, removing pollution, cleaning the water and providing a much needed home for your local, increasingly displaced wildlife. Equally important, it should be a space for you to enjoy living a little more ‘on the wild side’. Not everyone has a large country garden - so the designs and our approaches are generally appropriate for smaller urban, village or cottage gardens.
Our classic, overarching design for your rewilding safari garden can be seen below.
We start with the ideal scenario. It is for you to decide the proportion of wild grasses versus mowed lawns and where you would like to create paths and seating areas. Of course this all depends on the size, sun exposure and uses of your Safari garden. But the core principal is for you to install wild grasses, both normal garden grass left to naturally grow as well as ornamental, pollinating grasses such as the Split-Beard Bluestem, Broomsedge or Prairie Dropseed. These grasses can be surrounded by beds, shrubs, trees and more.
Around the centralised grasses (centred in your garden for optimal sun), we recommend adding beds with pollinating plants, wild shrubs and triangular groupings of smaller trees in the corners. Don’t forget flowering climbing plants for your fences, trees and walls. The birds and insects will love you for it and visit you regularly in such a bright, green and healthy future packed with colour and co-creatures.
But, getting more practical - you don’t need to limit yourself to wild grasses - you can also create a tidy mowed lawn running alongside an area of wild grasses - combining a minimalist approach with a bit of eco ‘shabby chic’! Some of our designs include a manicured, mini mowed lawn in the middle and strips of wild grasses with wildflowers around the outside - often bleeding into beds with plants, shrubs and small trees.
We recommend edges or corners with small trees.
Use a simple copse structure to include 3 trees planted in a triangle. In sunnier spaces and corners you will probably want to go for fruit trees. In shadier corners you could consider hardy flowering trees such as sweet chestnut, cherry or broadleaved trees such as small oak and beech. Don’t forget to plant under the trees - particularly small shrubs intertwined with pollinating plants such as foxglove and bluebells.
Pollinating plants will bring insects and butterflies.
Pack your garden with them and try to arrange it so you have different plants flowering at different times of the year. You could start the year with Himalayan Iris flowering in January and end with climbing ivy or small ivy shrub balls that flower in December. In between is entirely up to you! More natural, native or wild plants will likely do better.
For your shadier corners try to create an area with dense, layered wild scrub (shrub) and small, possibly evergreen trees. Add gorse and ferns to complete the year round structure. This corner will be great for storing carbon, cleaning the air and providing homes for wildlife. Ground nesting birds and mammals will love it.
Last of all, remember to save space for a small pond - it could be as little as a metal trash can lid upside down on the ground and dug in a little. Also, remember to build into one of your wilder corners a small log or rock pile. The bugs, birds and insects will rest and breed here.
We hope our computer generated designs will help you to start to create your very own LettsSafari garden and at a minimum will inspire you to make some changes. The future could be very different if we were all to wild our gardens. It starts with just a shovel and a pair of clippers. That and putting the mower away for a time.
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