Make wildlife at home

Winter is a key time to help wildlife. Monty shares his experience of welcoming wildlife into his garden, whether it's feeding a multitude of birds or choosing not to tidy up borders in the winter

I get huge pleasure from watching the birds at Longmeadow. I put out food by the kitchen window and love how this becomes incorporated into the daily rounds of chaffinches, tits, robins, blackbirds, thrushes and occasional blackcaps. But nothing I grow gives me as much pleasure as the arrival of the house martins and swallows in April, and their presence throughout summer. The house martins nest above our bedroom window and their chittering wakes me at dawn.

I lie watching their incredible aeronautical display as the parents and assistant adults swoop and wheel to the nests tucked under the eaves. By the time they're feeding their third brood, there can be scores of birds cutting arcs that interweave within millimetres of each other.

The swallows nest in our sheds and fly lower, faster and more direct - Spitfires to the house martins' Hurricane. They start to thin out around the middle of September until one morning I find that they've all disappeared, leaving the sky and garden empty. It's an annual bereavement only made tolerable by the incredible heart lurch when the first exhausted bird comes bobbing back in the middle of April. The garden is as full of birds as plants and I relish this, both for their presence and the benefits they bring to the garden.

Healthy habitats

Every garden has some birds, but some have more than others, and the longer that I garden, the more I am made aware that the number of birds in your garden is as good a measure of its health as anything else. If a garden can attract and support lots of bird life, it must also be rich in the insects and seeds that they need to sustain them, which in turn implies a rich and varied ecology in your own backyard. In other words, birds are a barometer of everything that we do right in our gardens.