How and Why to Make a Wildlife Garden - Talk

On Thursday 8 September 2016, one of the UK's leading environmentalists and award-winning writer and broadcaster, Professor Chris Baines, will be giving a free lecture about the importance of wildlife gardens as an urban habitat and giving some practical tips about how to turn your garden into a haven for wildlife.

The lecture is at 6.30pm at Holland Park Ecology Centre.

Chris will be signing copies of a new, redesigned and updated edition of his seminal 1985 book, 'How to Make a Wildlife Garden', published by the Royal Horticultural Society. The RHS Companion to Wildlife Gardening is freshly illustrated and highlights the changes in garden wildlife over the past 30 years. It incorporates the latest research, updates and best practice and addresses a wide range of controversial conservation issues. It includes advice about which plants to choose for bees, birds and butterflies, how to construct the ideal wildlife pond, where to position nesting boxes and how to enjoy wildlife in any size of outdoor space.

As The Telegraph wrote in August 2016, “Today it’s a notion we take for granted, but scroll back to television perennial Gardeners’ World in 1979: you’ll find two new gardens being made side by side – a deadly dull family plot, and the first TV wildlife garden, a gem that hasn’t dated one jot.”

Baines said, “You have to remember that at the time, any wildlife that appeared in the garden was seen as either pest, disease or weed. They were still trapping bullfinches in orchards… When I was studying horticulture at Wye, my chemistry tutor was proud to have been part of the team that invented DDT.”