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Biodiversity Garden Design Basics
Stage 2
planning your layout and infrastructure

While realizing green designs gardeners can help save the world's biodiversity

What do you need to build in order to establish your ideal garden ?

Hopefully the chapter on the first stage of design basics has raised the questions you need to consider before designing and you've had plenty of time to think about what you want from your garden. You should also have taken measurements that are adequate to the type of designing you want and completed a simple plan laying out the given conditions and structures on your land.

On a new layer, on top of the pre existing givens of your land, begin to lay out your plans for intervention. For every need or problem, try to design multiple alternative solutions for a more resilient system. I outline several water sources below. You can do the same with your other needs.

Biodiversity 

To support biodiversity you will need to set aside some space where small wild animals can live undisturbed. You should ideally leave 50% of the land for biodiversity support. This is according to the famous biodiversity activist E.O. Wilson. You will also probably need to construct special habitats for your wildlife.

Native plants underpin nature's food pyramid, supporting native insects, the main diet of native birds. Exotics play a very peripheral role in sustaining food chains.

For great biodiversity you need to support the indigenous animals, great and small, and much will follow from that. The six needs of your wildlife are access, water, food, nesting, shelter and safety. The needs of your microbes are similar: water, food, shelter and safety.

Much wildlife is adapted to native plants and needs them for nourishment and survival. Thus the biodiversity on land rests on plants. Native plantings support more insect species than exotic plants acccording to Doug Tallamy, whose arguments for native plants are extremely persuasive. A great diversity of plants also supports more diverse microbiomes, on and within the plants and in the root zone.

Native plants are better adapted to your region and frequently require fewer inputs such as water and nutrients, and are thus tougher in your climate, leading to less work for yourself, the busy gardener. Perennials are the best for improving soil health, as their roots remain undisturbed. So the first areas to set aside are peaceful wild corners planted with native, mostle perennial vegetation.

Leonotis is a good nectar plant, buzzing with bees and visited by sunbirds.

Assure that wildlife moving on the ground can reach your garden, and are not blocked by fences or other structures.

Lay on water that is safe for them to reach, with gentle sloping edges so that small animals can get in and out without drowning. Many geckos drown in our open water barrels unless I leave a floating plastic lid on the surface. Shy, vulnerable animals will want water that they can enjoy without exposing themselves to danger.

Start to plan plantings that feed these creatures, from nectar providing pollinator gardens to berries for frugivorous animals, grass seeds for seed eaters and leafy plants for herbivores. Provide host plants for butterfly caterpillars, not just flowers for the butterflies. We'll go into greater depth in the section on making plant choices.

Provide microhabitats where the wildlife can shelter and nest, like overgrown vegetation, rock and wood piles, sand pits, mud or cob walls or banks, ponds surrounded by vegetation with rocky bottoms for hiding, dry walls, snug compost heaps, insect hotels, dried hollow plant stems left after flowering, and trees.

My first insect hotel

Plan where your habitats, and where areas such as forest, grassland, meadow and swamp would be situated. Integrate these with your water management system based on the water requirements of local examples of the type of forest, grassland and so on. Ideally these habitats should be based on vegetation types and species that are or were in the past found in your area, or suit your climate, to minimize your inputs and labour. Some regenerative projects go against the grain of nature, creating lush tropical forests in deserts. This would perhaps be fitting if the desert is man made, but if the habitat you are creating is totally unnatural, you will need to consider that all the unique life that was there, and had adapted to desert conditions, is going to be forced out. Total regeneration like this is not always in service of global biodiversity. You may check up the notions of global versus local biodiversity in Module 1 of the course which deals with definitions of biodiversity.

wood piles support wood boring insects, and beneficial assasin bugs

Wood piles feed the trees on perimeter with fungal soil.

Plan for providing sheltering vegetation against wind, noise and pollution. A surrounding hedge of diverse plants is a way of creating sanctuary and an integral part of the design in some garden movements like three zone permaculture. A sheltering hedge can also provide food for insects and fruit, insects and nesting for birds, food for humans, biomass and fuel.

For microbial diversity supply differing soil regimes. Not all areas need to be packed with organics and highly fertile. Keep some areas of stony, hard, sandy or bare soil and areas which are nutrient poor for your native flowering annuals and ground nesting insects.

In Fynbos areas rehabilitate your soil with successional plantings of native ground covers, bushes and then in the third year the fussy sensitive climax vegetation like proteas and ericas.

Soil building living mulches

Invasive elsewhere, edible Carpobrotus is a weed suppressing mulch at home. Tolerating exotic Australian scurvy weed, edible in a pinch, easy to remove.

Native dune spinach is another green carpet vegetable loved by bees. Sweet potato conserves moisture in a raised bed with onions and aubergine.

Water

Horizontals allow water to be slowed and dammed or infiltrated, and slow erosion. This is the secret behind contour ploughing, terracing, earth dams, berms, swales, check dams and the large walled fields which have regenerated vast areas in India. If you have a shortage rather than a plenitude of water, what adjustments to your land would hold water so that it did not just run off, finding the easiest route downhill and carrying your topsoil with it ?

Hollows can hold water and earth lined ones can allow water to infiltrate. Pits in the ground are used in many arid regions to catch water either directly around plants or in areas where they can trap runoff. Examples of successful design for water scarce areas are from Brad Lancaster, a water harvester known in permaculture who lives in Tucson, Arizona, the Phiris from Zimbabwe, famous for hydrating landscapes with the use of water collecting pits and horizontal bands of stone planted with grass, and the traditional Zai pits, well known in African Agroforestry, in which food plants are grown in pockets in the ground.

Top: rainwater stored in tanks above and below ground, sand dam and earth pit. Bottom: greywater fed to worm barrel, tree pits and grow bed.

Based on the observations of how water behaves on your property, where can you most conveniently collect water in the ground or ponds or situate areas for more thirsty plants ? Where can you dam up and how will you infiltrate natural collection of rain water in the ground to hydrate the soil or create wetter areas ?

Where can you best collect rain water from the roof and other hard surfaces like driveways and roads ? Which surfaces will suffice for your needs ? Calculate what they can deliver. Times the area in m2 by your rainfall figures converted from mm to meters to give you a volume, per month, or per year, depending what you want to know.

Calculate the capacity of the tanks you need, based on daily water useage, times the number of days of your yearly longest dry spell.

Where can you place your tanks ? They are less likely to have algal growth in deep permanent shade. How will you shade your tanks, with cladding, paint or plants ?

How can you prevent mosquitoes getting access and breeding in your stored water ?

A friend's well appointed food garden with an enviable sixteen cubic meters of rain water tanks. Placed high, these gravity feed into the vegetable grow beds.

Where can you most conveniently lay irrigation lines and what areas with what type of planting will they serve ? Do you want automation of your irrigation ? If yes, then a drip system on a timer could be installed, if the water is very clean and doesn't block the system.

Where is the grey water supply and where could it be led to ? Where and how could grey water be most conveniently utilized for which types of planting ?

Can you provide water habitat in the garden that has safe water access for your wildlife ? One needs gradual rather than steep surrounds giving insects and other animals a chance to climb out of the water so that they don't drown.

Soil

To grow crops you will need to build healthy soil. I will elaborate further in a separate module on soil. Briefly what is working for me in my climate is essentially veganic, as I get by without using animal manures, not from large herbivores anyway. I build fertility by adding organics regularly, such as compost with biochar, and hay mulches. I keep the soil covered, preferably with living plants, use no till and do whatever I can to save water. To keep my beds moist I line them with plastic, building buried hugel beets inside the plastic shell. I don't like the plastic, but the improvements to fertility have been great compared to growing in the ground, where all the carbonaceous additions to the soil just oxidize and disappear rapidly. Lining the beds to keep in the moisture seems to make them more fertile year on year, as the beds seem to be getting better with time. Adding water seems to supply the magic in our climate. In other climates such as the flood plains of coastal China, it may be necessary to get rid of water, and channel it away.

Maintain a diversity of soil and irrigation regimes

A garden design can be this simple, but seldom is. This diagram is a sketch of how nutrient cycling and water provision can work through three different soil regimes:

unirrigated dryland high fungal soil, high carbon shelter hedge

dryland low nutrient native flower garden

high nutrient, nitrogen and bacteria rich grow beds.

The three soil regimes allow much greater biodiversity, not just because different plants thrive in low and high nutrient areas, but because there are two different natural 'habitats', forest and meadow, in which many native plants can feature and last but not least, a similar plan allows the garden to be 50 to 75% given over to native plants and low human interference, which is the closest one can get to 'wild' in most urban settings. I hope that E.O. Wilson would approve. Another add on, the 'wild' zones all benefit the food growing zones and thus human needs can be served without compromising too much 'wild' space.

Trimmed organics from the shelter hedge and the flowering pollinator zone, as well as food waste from the house can be continually fed to the high fertility grow beds. I've found that browns rot at different speeds so I've called them fast and slow. It is likely due to the size of the particles. This way nutrients are extracted from the zones in which one wants low nutrients because most native flowering plants do better in low nutrient zones where there is less competition from rampant vegetative growth. This is especially true of Fynbos.

Rain water harvested off the road and neighbouring flat garage roofs can provide enough water in a dry climate. Even gray water can suffice for that, depending on your useage and its nature. The neighbours have offered me their water and I appreciate it. They are not into gardening, but I hope to convert them one day, especially as it could multiply the biodiversity supporting habitat in the neighbourhood. The water off the roof can be kept in tall tanks and the water off the road and paving in underground tanks. Sand tanks are holes in the ground, lined with waterproof medium and then refilled again. Pure sand generally has a 50% water capacity in the gaps between the grains. Other soils like clay wouldn't work well. 

Cycling Carbon, Nitrogen and water into the grow beds should take care of the bulk of the high input needs of food plants, which are generally not evolved to live in a dry hot climate like ours with ancient leached sandy soils.   

Some other space and structure needs

For growing food you will need space and time based on your needs. A new sensation on youtube, Alik Pelman in the Galilee region, claims to be entirely self sufficient and only spends 8 hours a month on providing himself with food off 750 m2. I found his labour saving strategy to be based on providing most of his calories from climate adapted or indigenous plants, mainly carob, wheat, fava beans and olives. These are all dry land crops in his climate zone and he only irrigates his vegetables which he says only provide a small amount of his calories, and most of the work, but a greater portion of micro and phytonutrients. I can't imitate this project without more land, but the nugget I took away from it is that using climate adapted and indigenous plants really cuts labour. This was my experience when my garden was 100% native in the beginning, before I started growing annual food crops from other regions of the world, and fruitlessly trying to be self sufficient. I am planning on returning to about 80% native to cut my labour and support biodiversity. 

Regarding my need for food growing space, I find roughly 4m2 per person for 5 types of leafy greens and 3 types of climbing spinach plants suffice. For green beans I need at least 10 vines per person, ideally more, and for root vegetables a substantial amount of space, unless you perfect container grown potatoes and other hacks. Really experienced and skilled olericulturists achieve wonders in small urban spaces, like the cat mom garden diaries. My fruit and berries come from about 8 cherry tomato vines, native hedge plants and one guava tree, and their space is all used for multiple purposes. It is a little monotonous, but there is enough fruit in season. I would plant perhaps 6-12 more fruiting plants and take care that the harvests are distributed over the year. I also need to plant hundreds of onions to self cater and they are not co-operating and I'm going for plan B which is to forget about bulbing onions and plant Egyptian walking onions and Japanese bunching onions so that we can at least have fresh onion greens. I have two large rosemary bushes, a tub of savory, native sage, about 10 pots of basil, and 3 pots of mint. This is more than sufficient to have some herbs with all meals, but for demanding tastes I would at the very least double the variety. I do this on 120 m2 of garden.

Raised beds made by a friend out of recycled roof sheets that are waterproof and fed with soil building inputs.

With this small allowance of space you can have a daily dose of life extending health promoting phytonutrients, even if your full diet is not covered. To be totally self sufficient, and grow your own fats, carbohydrates and proteins, spices herbs and medicines in sufficient quantities you will need much more space. I have heard that an acre per person is the minimum, but that is with animals which use a lot of space compared to plant food. I've heard estimates as low as 20 m2 per person for vegetables, but it really depends on what you eat and how much of it. I've found that my 12 m2 of grow beds is not ideal for 3 people and would want to squeeze in double that.

When growing food, I've found that the soil may not be very suitable. Food plants, unless native to the land can be much, much more demanding than indigenous flora. In that case plan for enough beds containing artificially enhanced soil, be it in contained raised beds, or in ground beds with a lot of added biomass and manure. However, don't enhance all your soil, keep a large area as is, maintain differing soil microclimates and native plantings.

You can contain and hide piles of organics, compost and wormbins with a rustic fence.

Plan how you will compost all your organics and allow space for it. Perhaps plan to screen the area, as there may be a lot of untidy piles of organic material and buckets of manure around the compost heap. In an attempt to reduce the labour of processing organics, as I'm totally overwhelmed, and to give me more space, I'm hoping to phase out compost heaps in my garden, and use sheet composting instead.

Consider the large amount of pruning which may be needed in a mature but small garden, and where you are going to store and process it all. Think about what plants will produce the most prunings such as hedges, large trees and rampant climbers and where and how you will store and process this biomass. Yard waste has become a problem for me in my small garden. The permaculture principle 6, to produce no waste, demands recycling all the biomass from my garden.

However, one small thing speaks against it. The proliferation of mice means that you can't sow directly without protection. The boosted number of nectar robbing carpenter bees can lead to declines in some plants, and the enormous number of wood beetles may lead to domestic infestations.

My solutions to total recycling of biomass have been burning, extensive use of dead hedges, leaving some brush piles and buried hugel beets. Reducing the size of the waste is a problem yet to be solved. The energetic use of a machete gives me arthritis in my wrist. The dinky little shredder I could afford was next to useless, jammed up continually and  blunt after two sessions. If you can get your yard waste small enough, nearly anything can serve as a good mulch and protect your soil from erosion by rain, sterilization by the sun, and give a host of other mulch related benefits. Distributed over the garden you may have plenty of space for tucking away chips and unprocessed material.

These items also need a home or you'll be falling over them or looking for them.

Provide space for storage of garden equipment, dustbins, rain tanks, worm bins, compost heaps, large areas for mulch and organics, brush and wood piles, plastic containers and bags for garden work etc.

Don't forget plotting access paths to all areas of the garden especially where frequent work is needed, or you need to harvest, or would like to walk or sit.

In a small garden you can really maximize the use of vertical space. You may have more wall area than horizontal gardening space. Don't waste it.

Determine in which areas you will have climbing plants and build trellises for them before planting. It sounds obvious but in a small space it can get awkward digging foundations and placing poles in amongst established plants after they have grown.

Bamboo trellis. A wild vine, cut back in winter, shades windows in summer.

Determine how you will net your nursery, grow beds and fruit trees easily and design appropriate structures. So far I've only netted cabbages and pears, and I've a huge problem with worms in my guavas most years. Most other food plants seem to be more resistant.

Regarding the 50% or more 'wild' component of the garden, I've found that many useful indigenous plants are hard to come by and I raise my own. If you will need to grow your own perennials and seedlings, set aside sufficient area for your nursery, it can be larger than you'd think. Think about the ideal situation for a nursery or greenhouse and if it can enhance other aspects of life, providing warmth for the house and extended food growing. If you're busy you may need to lay on automated irrigation to make sure you don't lose plants. Some take years to germinate or grow to plantable size, necessitating more space. I use about 10% of the garden for nursery and its too little. I've also had so much heartbreak due ot lost plants without irrigation and with a busy, distracting life.

For any other needs such as outdoor cooking, keeping animals, sport and relaxation, set aside areas. 

Some other general principles to consider

Think about all the niches and microclimates your garden creates with variations in sunlight, exposure, soil, slope and hydration.

Try to use what is already there. Use a naturally damp area for a wetland rather than creating one elsewhere. Use the protection of trees that are already there if possible. Try to synchronize your different areas with the given conditions to remove natural friction and ultimtely wasted labour.

George, my mother's handyman, is very skilled at building deadhedges. Here used for raised beds, when larger and thornier they serve as traditional predator proof cattle pens.

Think about how convenient the location of your different areas of use are. Do you have the right things near to each other ? Is access to the frequently visited areas the easiest ? Permaculture is big on this and they call the different areas of use zones 1-5, from the homestead outwards.

Can one area serve multiple purposes ? Do the outputs of one area serve as inputs to another ? Can pumpkins grow up and shade your hen house in the summer's heat ? This was one of the most beautiful multipurpose options I've seen in real life. But there are always better things on youtube of course.

Think about your working garden zones and areas creating closed loop systems from waste to production, using your greywater to grow food, cooking with your garden's wood output, putting the ash in your compost to add nutrients, using the heat of the fire to warm your home and bath water, heating your greenhouse or water with the heat of the compost processs, using chickens to weed, pest proof and fertilize an area before planting, feeding chickens on kitchen scraps, using fish and vegetables in productive cyclical water based growing systems. There are a lot of good ideas along these lines in permaculture practice and aquaponics and related methods.

Recycling

Think about using recycled materials, but be careful of wasted space due to hoarding materials, which seems to be endemic with 'permies', self included. Broken bricks make lovely paving, and so does urbanite, or old shattered concrete. A bit of moss and weeds in the cracks and they look noble. Old steel office shelves make good vertical green houses and are easily wrapped in clear plastic, shade net or bird net. My raised beds were made from recycled bricks. Others were made from the large wooden surrounds of a child's bunk bed or a broken wardrobe turned on its back and filled with soil. Others were made from old bath tubs or from nests of woven sticks lined with thick plastic drop sheets and old carpeting. Dead or woven hedges can act as screens and trellises, as can bamboo and other straight branches. They don't look messy to me, rather more like rural cottagey or what some disdainfully call 'rustic'. The dead hedges are time consuming, taking a day or two each, and have cost more in labour than some conventional raised bed materials. I do not like growing in car tyres and plastic bottles but whatever can be repurposed stays out of the landfill.

Paving the garden's working areas with recycled bricks and concrete shatter or urbanite.

Regenerative principles

Some guiding principles you may be interested in are the 12 principles of permaculture and the principles of regenerative agriculture. The classic five principles of regenerative agriculture deal with physical management of land, and they are reducing disturbance such as tillage or chemical inputs, keeping the soil covered, keeping living roots in the ground for as long as possible, planting diverse crops for maximum biodiversity, and integrating animals. To this one can add another two socially regenerative principles, to consider context and support  relationships. I like these because they can be interpreted on behalf of biodiversity as I touch on below. 

Avoid Disturbance

To empashize the biodiversity angle in these principles, I would add that avoiding disturbance could include avoiding the disruption of existing ecosystems. This is in addition to the obvious point that poisons and artificial fertilizers greatly diminish the diversity of insect and soil organisms. Tilling has a negative effect on soil structure and soil life. Using perennials rather than annuals causes less disturbance due to digging.

Keep soil covered

Keeping the soil covered means that the natural soil microbiome is not blasted by UV rays, heat and dessication, and its diversity is maintained. One can use any poison free, dry organic material to mulch the soil, even cardboard, but living plants are the best, because of the next principle, keeping living roots in the ground as long as possible.

Keep living roots in the soil as long as possible

Photosynthesizing plants feed the life in the soil with their root exudates, and these are, I've heard, better at creating microbial diversity in the soil than the best organic concoctions made by fermentation and other means. To cover the soil you can use carpets of edible plants, native plants and even edible native plants. Even in our area where the presence of native vegetables is reputed to be terribly low, there are plants that can serve this purpose. In addition they boost invertebrate biodiversity just from the fact of being natives.

Diverse planting

Plant diversity supports soil microbe diversity and this supports fertility. In addition plant diversity, as said, if it includes natives, supports insect diversity which is the foundation of much other diversity higher up the food chain.

Integrate animals

Animals can make a contribution to fertility and in permaculture they swear by the ability of chickens to remove weeds and weed seeds, dig over and prepare soil for growing food. Many people believe that good vegetable growth is only possible with manure. This would seem to exclude veganic gardeners, but their soil can also benefit from animals such as earthworms. Biodiversity can benefit from us managing or accepting and not killing the naturally occurring animals in the garden from ants to snails, lizzards, bees and assassin bugs. They are all multi taskers.

Picture diagram of seven regenerative gardening principles

The last two regenerative principles can be interpreted as social or biodiversity conscious principles.

Support relationships

Supporting relationships would not only involve integrating your practice with education, collaboration or service in your human community, but supporting and not disrupting the relationships in nature. It comes back to not interfering with or disturbing natural relationships in existing ecosystems. In order not to be disruptive to these, careful thought and observation are needed before acting in the garden. As my urban garden is really degraded in terms of native vegetation, I avoid vegetative disturbance mainly by not weeding (smile) until I have something truly better to replace the weeds. There are many benefits to this avoidance in terms of soil health, lushness, water saving, insect life, and labour free food and medicine for humans. I've also propagated and planted a number of native plants I know support local insects such as Chrysanthemoides monolifera and Tetragonia decumbens. 

Consider context

Considering context can mean considering your resources and planning around them. In support of biodiveresty it would include planting sensibly for your climate, finding out more about the potential natural vegetation of your area and including as much of that as possible.

Shaping areas of the garden

You can use traditional landscaping design techniques for laying out the areas of your garden. All this is possible without negatively impacting biodiversity if you work carefully around the existing ecosystems in your garden.

You might incorporate geometric shapes in the layout of paved areas and verticals, create garden rooms and vistas, frame garden doorways with pots or bowers, or paths with trellises or rows of planting, use symmetry and asymmetry, balance of small and large, one and many, contrasts and focal points using sculpture, water features or feature plants. Perspectives can be opened through flowing sinuous edges or straight lines. Interesting vistas, or lines of sight were created by Baroque master gardeners, and they even had mystic significance at the time.

Planting plans

Planning the placement of individual plants one should for the best results, choose the right context and plant companions. One can also bring in artistic considerations, like the old favorites, the varying of height and colour, form and texture, designing with different leaf forms and sculptural plants, and contrasts of many kinds. Making everything contrast with it neighbour in every way can fail. I've seen some designers overdo this to ill effect, and some work it with delicacy. I would avoid too much overstated contrast if it is artificial looking. I feel rhythm or repetition, some dilution or limitation in the selection of what elements contrast, a little thread of monotony, holds things together and creates harmony. 

However, the one thing I've seen being really counterproductive for biodiversity is mass planting and displays of sheets of colour. Diverse planting in an area is good for the soil, so avoid creating flowering monocultures, and mix it up in your beds.

overlapping grids look natural

In the direction of more natural plantings, you can see my own invention of overlapping grids with different orientation and scale, above. Piet Oudolf the Dutch landscaper is a great artist with natural planting, and his designs are like paintings in terms of the skilled use of repetition, contrast and geometry. In painting they used to say the best way to learn was to copy the masters and add your own touches to test the envelope of 'rules'. I did a study combining several of his designs with my own interpretations. This study was done with the aim of analyzing and trying to understand what is going on with his planting geometry.

What I could deduce was that there is a lot more species diversity, even more than I was able to capture. This contrasts with teachings in landscape design which exort 'when in doubt, repeat', or 'plant in masses for maximum effect'. There is great diversity both in the species of plants in the larger clumps and in the way the scattering of isolated plants are arranged to give a random, but naturally grouped effect. I believe some grouping of the plants is needed in clumps and scatters in order for the design to have structure and not shatter into the white noise of utter heterogeneity. Yet he stays away from the great monocultural swathes which speak more strongly of the hand of designer and a desire for botanical pomp.

But there are large gestures. There is strong geometry in the hard landscaping which contrasts with the organic 'chaos'. It is as if the hand made line frames the naturally generated, just as the waves of neatly clipped hedges frame his 'wild' garden. There are clearly demarcated zones in the garden in which the clumps have a different scale. The clumps are roundish and not elongated along the walk ways, which one might tend to do if wanting to create the 'sweeps' in old school bed planting. 

Based on the models and adhering to less repetition, in my study only two of the big species clumps are repeated around most of the garden, in three of the zones. Each zone also has slightly different plants although the 'repeaters' are the same, and there are some subnotes of repetition between just two zones, and in the small things. Oudolf speaks of planting isolated plants into a 'matrix'. This may be a matrix of the repeating species, or a matrix of similar shapes, as there is so little repetition of species. My study is far more repetitious. 

Humbly studying the masters is very useful

Probing into the underlying geometries of Piet Oudolf's designs also taught me something important, that the particular plants chosen are as, if not more, important... of course.  

Through using interesting forms and a move away from classic nursery plants, he surprises one with unfamiliar plant shapes and applications. He was an accomplished nurseryman and plant collector first before becoming a designer. He loved perennials and dead winter foliage. The right place to elaborate on his skill in choosing plants may be in a forthcoming module on aquiring plant knowledge in which I could analyze his plant choices and juxtapositions.

If one bears in mind that the main point of a biodiversity garden is to support biodiversity, human aspirations, taste and needs should not harm this goal. Very often if you just leave it alone, the garden will be beautiful, and very often nature is a better designer than we are.

Concluding

I hope this has helped with ideas about plotting the areas of your garden and the infrastructure to build. You can plot the area plan onto the map of your garden thus far, using a different layer of tracing paper. This is so as not to spoil the original, and allowing you to make as many versions of the area plan as you need.

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