As a Citizen Scientist

Following on from my previous post, which mentioned the Granny's Bonnet flowers and bees in my garden, today I'll expand a little more on my wildlife garden observations.

A wildlife garden is not something that merely happens and grows how it pleases, without any gardening work involved. If that were the case, my garden would be so overgrown, I'd never be able to get out the door and stretch out to sunbathe! My wildlife garden takes a lot of work to cultivate in the right ways to promote healthy plants, insects, birds, biodiversity and great oxygen! This includes both the hard physical labour of cutting, scything, clipping, uprooting, tending and cultivating as well as researching species, habitat and what encourages a healthy environment. My research takes places all the time and assists me in three main ways:

1 It helps me to garden in environmentally friendly and sustainable ways, including not creating noise or air pollution

2 It means I can design my wildlife garden in a biodiverse, environmentally healthy and conducive way, especially for flora, fauna, insects and birds (and for foxes who are accepted as urban wildlife). Designing a wildlife garden is similar to landscaping in the sense that it involves using certain gardening techniques and shaping hedges and the layout as well as designating certain patches to a particular type or types of fauna. The difference is that, unlike landscaping, designing a wildlife garden means I need to prioritise environmental needs and help my garden to grow naturally rather than artificially. For instance, rather than planting a flower seed then waiting and hoping it grows, I create the correct conditions that flower seeds, often imported in from birds, can embed themselves and grow where they have chosen to grow naturally. I then try to support the cultivation of those plants and flowers over others, e.g. climbers and weeds.

3 I do observational work, including gathering raw data, observational notes, photos and videos to record all the species and findings I encounter in my wildlife garden. So when I say I am fascinated and sometimes surprised by what I observe in my garden, I mean, for instance, that I discover that flowers, such as the Granny's Bonnet, have begun to grow somewhere naturally rather than because I planted it. As a Citizen Scientist, I will then take notes about it, record it and research information about it and learn how to cultivate it. This raw data gathering about nature in my wildlife garden is part of my Citizen Scientist Project on my wildlife garden which I am developing to provide scientists with observational data on how a wildlife garden can take shape.