Amateur Gardening

Make your garden ground-dweller friendly

While damsels dazzle and butterflies breeze stunningly through the garden, it can be easy to overlook the less colourful, smaller, less-sightly invertebrates at ground level. But they are no less beneficial to your micro-ecosystem.

Invertebrates actually make a larger contribution to garden biodiversity than any other group of ‘micro-fauna’. An average garden could be home to 2,000 different species, living in trees and flowers, in soil, compost heaps and buildings.

But away from the more visible, ‘trapeze artist’ spiders and honeybee ‘highways’, down at the base of plants in bed and borders ground-dwelling invertebrates are working just as hard.

Let’s look at some of these under-feet heroes

Hidden in garden soil and leaf litter, you might

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