Is my garden wildlife friendly? Here's how to tell

It's one of the most rewarding questions a gardener can ask. A wildlife friendly garden isn't about letting everything run to seed or giving up control. It's about making a series of small, deliberate choices, water, planting, shelter, a way in and out, that together turn an ordinary plot into somewhere birds, bees, butterflies and hedgehogs actually want to live. This scorecard walks through the ten things that matter most, and tells you honestly how your garden is doing.

Answer the questions above and you'll get a score out of 100, a sense of where your garden sits, and a short list of the changes that would make the biggest difference for you specifically. No lectures, just the easy wins first.

The simple changes that matter most

If you're wondering how to make your garden more wildlife friendly, a few things carry far more weight than the rest. Water comes first: even a sunken bowl or a small container pond will draw in life within days. Then there's the humble gap in the fence, the hedgehog highway that lets these roaming animals move between gardens rather than being trapped in one. Hedgehogs are the creature people most want to help, and a 13cm hole costs nothing.

After that, it's about food and shelter across the whole year. Flowers that bloom from late winter to late autumn keep pollinators fed. Seed heads and hollow stems left standing over winter shelter insects and feed finches. A log pile, a compost heap and a native hedge each become a habitat in their own right. And leaving the pesticides and slug pellets in the shed lets the garden find its own balance, where predators keep the pests in check for free.

Why wildlife gardening and good design go together

There's a myth that a wildlife garden has to look messy. It doesn't. The most nature-rich gardens are often the most beautiful, because dense, layered, year-round planting is exactly what both wildlife and good garden design are built on. A thoughtfully designed garden works with the ecology of its site rather than against it, and the result feels alive in a way a paved, sprayed, over-tidied space never can.

That's the real point of asking whether your garden is wildlife friendly: not to score points, but to build a space that gives something back, to you and to the creatures you share it with. Run the scorecard, pick off a few of the easy wins, and watch how quickly the garden answers.