The House on Stilts is the very model of a small wildlife garden. A palm tree is home to dormice who use it like a penthouse flat, and the pond has housed all sorts from moorhens and ducks, to dragonfly larvae, a water rail that returns each winter and, once, an extremely large grass snake. During the day, the trees are alive with songbirds, and by night bats swoop through the space.
You may also like:
- Why Will Tomson prefers a messy garden
- How to attract wildlife to your garden
- Wildlife-friendly container display
- How to plant a wildlife garden
- Should wildlife conscious gardeners own cats?
What is surprising is that it is as far as you can get from the dyed- in-the-wool image you might expect of a space dedicated to wildlife. The garden, like the house, is dedicated to impeccable modernist style. The house was originally built as a holiday home in the 1960s, but by the time Paula and Iain Davies bought it in the late 1990s, its western red cedar cladding was covered in plastic paint and trellising. “We had dreamt about restoring a modernist house and here it was,” says Paula.
In brief:
- What Wildlife garden with water at its heart, by the coast.
- Where Carmarthenshire.
- Size One third of an acre.
- Soil Sandy clay, neutral to acid.
- Climate Temperate.
- Hardiness zone USDA 9a.
When sculpting out the pond, the naturally clay soil puddled in the rain, negating the need for a liner and creating a perfect wildlife pool with gently sloping edges
There was just one problem. Although surrounded by breathtakingly beautiful estuary landscape, looking out onto rolling green hills and the sea beyond, the house had just a slither of a garden. From the front it looked out over marshland, and to the back a steep bank of brambles that the couple didn’t own. Ten years later, they secured that bank of brambles, bought from the farmer next door, to give them a third of an acre with which to create a garden. “We wanted our son, Max, to have a somewhere wild to play, and to have a childhood like we had: climbing trees, discovering wildflowers and frogspawn, and damming streams,” says Paula
The water is home to an abundance of wildlife, from frogs and snakes to dipping swallows.
Luckily, at the bottom of their bank of brambles was a spring. They got a man with a digger in to clear the site, but leave as many of the trees as possible – an old elder and the goat willows that signified all the water moving through the site. They sculpted out a pond, and as we were wondering what to do about a liner, it rained and filled up,” says Paula.
The naturally clay soil beneath puddled into a perfect wildlife pond, with gentle sloping edges. A stream now runs out of the pond into the farmer’s ditch that eventually runs out to the marsh, and the pond takes rainwater from the roof of the house.
We wanted our son, Max, to have a somewhere wild to play, and to have a childhood like we had: climbing trees, discovering wildflowers and frogspawn, and damming streams,
Around the edge of the plot, they planted a native hedge of 500 bareroot plants of blackthorn, hawthorn, guelder and dog rose, and added a few more trees – birches and six oaks – to give the garden “height and some bones”. The idea, initially, was just to make it look as though they’d gently tamed nature. They sowed a wildflower meadow “that looked lovely for the first year because it was predominately annuals” but quickly became dominated by ox-eye daisies and grass – their damp, fertile soil was just too rich. They had a rethink, stripped the meadow back by hand and replanted it back up with a mixture of herbaceous plants and wildflowers.
The garden has a backbone of ferns and in early summer a ripple of cow parsley threads through it, followed by daisies. There are waves of colour to attract pollinators, and many water-loving plants such as rodgersias and valerian dotted along the pond’s edge. In between all the froth and structure there are numerous log piles for insect and reptile habitats.
The water is home to an abundance of wildlife, from frogs and snakes to dipping swallows. It may have taken a little while for the pond to settle, but now any midges or mosquitos are dealt with by birds during the day and bats at night.
The colour palette is designed to blend with the wider landscape, but deep in the garden corners of dramatic colour from dogwoods, Liquidambar and Sorbus ‘Amber Flame’ reveal themselves in later seasonal highlights. There’s a neat working corner with timbered veg beds and hidden compost heaps behind a bamboo hedge.
The house is all windows, and because it sits on stilts, it has a unique view onto the garden. Every window is filled and framed by landscape, and the wildlife is as happy to peer in as the humans are to peer out. “If we had dreams of turning it into Fallingwater [the modernist house in Pennsylvania by architect Frank Lloyd Wright, which is surrounded by water], it’s actually just evolved into a giant bird hide,” says Paula. But it does mean, whatever the weather and in every season, wherever you stand, you’re immersed in nature.
And what a glorious, calming experience that is, proving that even in a relatively small space, you can make a rich home for all, both human and the more-than-human alike.
8 key plants for wildlife
Useful information
Address House On Stilts, Ferryside, Carmarthenshire SA17 5TN. Open For NGS on 18 May, 1-5pm, and by arrangement 25 May – 22 June. Follow @houseonstilts_wales on Instagram for details. Admission £5.