Looking at the garden below my window you might think it was a bit ragged in places for while we have a lawn with shrubs and flowers around, the rest has been low maintenance and allowed to return to nature - or go to seed. In December we ploughed the patch of meadow so as to give flowers other than Bermuda Buttercup a chance, in one corner is a pond which we pretty much leave alone, and an almond still lies where it fell a couple of years ago - a kind of delicatessen for birds and insects and perhaps the odd grass snake. We try to leave well alone, but that is not to say there is no design. We decided that one function of the garden was to encourage different animals and plants to live here, as well as to grow fruit and to provide leisure space for humans. Now and then we intervene to improve the habitats.
Barn owls fly nightly from their nest-box for a third consecutive year.
Soon we must thin some of the pines that were planted fifteen years ago, and we would like to take out the eucalyptus trees that consume so much water and soil nutrients, not to mention shedding the odd bough when they still look healthy. The trend to eco-friendly gardening has been growing fast in the UK these last few years. Needless to say there are the fanatics who take things to extremes, but increasingly more and more people are finding that there is space in their garden for birdboxes, planting a native tree, or for leaving some of the grass to become a flower meadow. But its wildlife potential had been missed. George Reiss is Temporary Warden of the A Rocha Trust's Field Studies Centre at Cruzinha near Mexilhoeira Grande.