An Ecosystem Approach to Gardening
An ecosystem is a community of living organisms and their physical environment interacting together. This can be as something as big as a nature reserve or as small as a garden.
While it might be tempting to think about how we can encourage just one or two ‘attractive’ species (e.g. butterflies) into our gardens, we would advise against this. Instead, we want to encourage you to think bigger in terms of how your garden works as an ecosystem.
An ecosystem is made up of all the living things in one place, plus how they interact with each other and their physical environment. If we focus too narrowly on just helping one thing, we tend to miss the mark.
For example, if we want a garden full of butterflies, it will take more than just having some attractive flowers there!
Yes, adult butterflies do require good sources of nectar from flowers. However, there is much more to their lifecycle than just the adult stage. We need to have the specific plants, called larval food plants, which the adult butterflies will choose to lay their eggs on. Once the eggs hatch, these plants will be eaten by the caterpillars. Some butterflies are actually very particular about what they eat during their larval stage, and will only use one particular species of plant – if they cannot find the plant, they will not breed. Most butterflies also require a place to hide and become dormant over the wintertime, before they reappear in the Spring. While some stay on their larval food plant, others require another place such as tussocky grass, other specific trees/plants or even log piles to overwinter in so they can complete their lifecycle.
So, as you can see – if we want a garden full of butterflies, we need to think bigger than just adding flowers. We need to take an ecosystem approach to gardening. Instead of focusing on helping just one or two species, we need to start to think about our gardens as small ecosystems, and see what we can do to improve them as a whole. This means supporting a much wider variety of insect life by having the right plants and also habitat types within our gardens.
The good news is, when we start to think bigger, we improve things for much more than one species!
Example of taking an ecosystem approach to gardening – a wildlife pond.