How to attract amphibians to your garden

An established and accepted tenet of wildlife gardening, and therefore of designing biodiverse gardens, is that to encourge in more wildlife you should add a pond.

This is certainly the easiest way to add a water source - although to maximise the wildlife benefits of water in the garden, and the biodiversity that it holds, ephermeral pools and bog gardens are also incredibly important if you can include space for them.

When it comes to nature and water in a garden the life you will see first are the invertebrates. It is astonishing how rapidly life will inhabit a pond - flying beetles, pond skaters and diving beetles, can arrive within a week.

For the purposes of this blog though I want to talk about amphibians. In the UK this means the Common Toad, the Common Frog, the Great Crested Newt, or the Smooth Newt - or if your lucky the rarer Palmate newt or Natterjack Toad. They can arrive in the first year of a new pond and, like hedgehogs, they will eat pest insects and invertebrates like slugs and snails. A thriving amphibian population therefore needs a healthy garden in which to live - from simple interventions we have discussed before such as complex and layered plantings, no pesticides being used (and certainly not slug pellets), and a certain relaxation of garden tidiness.

The metamorphosis of amphibians is what fascinates us from our youngest memories and this is part of the joy of having them present in your garden. Watching the spawned eggs change to tadpoles and the tadpoles become tiny replicas of their parents is a priviledge to see every year. Don’t import spawn or tadpoles into your garden though as this can introduce new fungal diseases and decimate your local amphibian population.

Although this requires water to happen though an amphibian does not just need a pond. Indeed, although newts are mostly aquatic, frogs and toads spend much of the year out of water - especially in autumn and winter. You therefore need to provide for them at these times. Sheltered places for them include log piles, below pots and other garden detritus, under hedge bottoms and compost heaps, and also below loose paving and drain covers.

All parts of the amazing web of life should be seen in your garden. Too often we just want pollinators (due to the exceptional marketing of their benefits in recent years, combined with our new found knowledge that the bees populations are rappidly declining (probably due to pesticides and their residues)). Or we may want to encourage birds (the British do love their birds - and sadly this is probably because they represent a remnant of biodiversity not yet lost - estimates suggest we are in the bottom 10% of countrioes globally for the loss of our biodiversity since the industrial revolution). This though is too short sighted. We should encourage as much wildlife into our gardens as possible - allowing our gardens to become a sanctuary for nature…and for the people who give that nature space.