in the garden

hospitable habitat Make your garden a richer, more vibrant place by opening its gates to your wild neighbors and providing shelter, water, and food.
By Judith Phillips Photography by Charles Mann

Does the seasonal entertainment in your garden include the arching dives of mating hummingbirds, dozens of baby quail scurrying after their parents, or mockingbirds mimicking your telephone ring tone? Great satisfaction comes from playing host to an ongoing garden party. Everyone benefits. Wildlife gain shelter, water, and food; plants are pollinated and seeds dispersed; and we deepen our connection to the natural world. Gardens designed as habitat need not differ in appearance from gardens that are less eco-friendly. It’s the content, the mix of plants and how they are arranged and maintained, that makes a garden attractive to us and to the wildlife we want to support.

Luckily we seem to share many design preferences. We all like having layers of canopy: a high ceiling over some spaces, more intimate cover in smaller spaces so we feel sheltered but not crowded. Trees give us a sense of awe and permanence and much needed shade, while wildlife use their tiers for roosting, hunting, mating, and nesting. Different species will occupy different niches, so the more diverse the garden, the more wildlife is drawn to it. In the valley, cottonwoods are the ultimate wild condo, housing whoever is in the neighborhood, from raptors to lizards. In the foothills, pines, junipers, and oaks are the anchor plants, teeming with life. In the desert, persistent drought reduces canopy height to one-seed juniper, desert willow, and honey mesquite in or near arroyos and soaptree yucca on drier ground. Water-wise gardeners can expand their oasis with fragrant ash, netleaf hackberry, and live oak; clusters of taller and medium-size shrubs for screening and to separate and fill various spaces; and grasses and wildflowers in open areas to add layers to the landscape.

In addition to variety in the height and density of plants, consistent sources of water and food are key to successful habitats. We enjoy fountains in the garden for their sound and the sense of cooling that they provide. A small pond or birdbath—even as little as a few quarts of open water—may be the only source available consistently and will do more to attract wildlife than any other feature. Being a good host, you want to keep the libations flowing. Add a salad bar and the wildlife equivalent of finger food and the party rocks. The plant mix should include nectar-rich flowers such as desert willow, agave, hummingbird mints, gayfeather, salvias, and penstemons for hummingbirds, butterflies, orioles, and an occasional bat. Give songbirds a healthy heart diet with large oil- or nutrient-rich seeds such as pine nuts, acorns, saltbushes, and sunflower seeds, including desert mule’s ears and chocolate flower and evening primrose with seeds rich in omega fatty acids. Chaffy seeds such as most of the grasses, many wildflowers, and some shrub seeds and fleshy fruits such as juniper berries, jujubes, rose hips, sand cherries, Mexican elderberry, hackberries, Utah serviceberries, and barberries round out the menu. As with any garden project, the better adapted habitat plants are to the site, the more productive they will be. Although wildlife is opportunistic, they will prefer familiar native food sources that are already part of their diet. A diet filled with processed sugar is no better for hummingbirds than it is for us, so offer them wildflowers with nectar-filled tubular flowers.

Just as the finest ornamental gardens offer seasonal displays of color and texture, the best habitats are productive as much of the year as possible. Some birds will glean the produce right off the stems, while ground feeders such as thrashers and towhees will wait until the crop ripens and falls at their feet. In fact, if you feed your pets outdoors, you will know when the towhees have returned for the season because the kibble will be scattered all around the bowl as the birds do what they are adapted to, scratching around for whatever nature or you provide. If there is Indian ricegrass in your garden, blue grosbeaks are likely to arrive just as its seeds begin to ripen and vanish just as soon as they’ve exhausted the supply.

Maintenance of wildlife habitats differs from that of conventional gardens in the timing of cleanup chores. As you learn who lives where, what they eat and when, you know when to mow the prairie in early spring before nesting season. You delay removing seed heads in the rest of the garden until after the harvest in summer and autumn, and you weed out volunteer seedlings from under favorite roosting places.

Nesting materials are another seasonal consideration. Goldfinches are known to delay nesting until thistle down is available, but kingbirds and orioles will unravel shade cloth and even rake the dander from the backs of easygoing German shepherds when the urge is upon them. Wildlife habitat and pet-friendly spaces are not mutually exclusive, but some planning and oversight are needed. Putting a bell on your cat’s collar is useless as a deterrent. Even if they’d let you drape them in bling, any self-respecting feline will learn to stalk soundlessly. Grow bird-attracting plants such as hummingbird trumpet, red yucca, or cherry sage away from walls or other features that can conceal or support predators. Maintain open space around water features or provide escape shelter—high tree branches or prickly shrubs—where birds can quickly take refuge when necessary. And for your own equanimity, place plants such as female New Mexico olive or fruiting mulberries where inky blue bird droppings won’t stain your patio furniture.

Protecting your newest transplants or small pets from wildlife is both a design and management issue best addressed with both hardware and a sense of humor. Good fences make good neighbors, keeping coyotes out of pet domain and deer away from prized garden plants. Foliage and twigs are also part of some wildlife diets. Leafcutter bees, rabbits, and deer can cause varying degrees of damage. If you’ve ever watched the bees cut notches from leaves, returning to the same plant repeatedly and making Swiss cheese of the foliage, and later you unearthed the pencil-thick tubes of overlapping leaf pieces, each segment enclosing a nascent bee, you may dismiss the temporary disfiguring of the plant as fair price for a glimpse of this natural engineering marvel.

Broad-spectrum insecticides are as likely to kill off beneficial insects as pests, so limit pesticide use to biological controls, and use them only as a last resort. Insects are a major source of nutrients that nature provides free of charge. A garden of plants that are ecologically appropriate will develop a balance of beneficial insects, amphibians, reptiles, and birds that effectively control populations of many species we consider pests. Once plants are well-rooted, most natives will even recover from foraging rabbits, but deer damage can be harder to temper. Wildlife repellents offer varying degrees of efficacy. Some have the sulfurous smell of spoiled eggs and are best used in peripheral areas where you aren’t repelled more than the deer; others such as Ropel are nontoxic bittering agents that work best sprayed on plants early in the season, when growth is soft and tender. Once heat makes sap naturally bitter, these agents are much less effective.

The game of balancing observation and intervention is ongoing and at times a bit frustrating, but there are huge rewards for hospitality. I know people who don’t use their hot tub for a few months each spring so they can watch a wildcat raise her litter under the deck just outside the sliding glass door of their dining room. Another very generous friend has planted many seedlings twice this year because a skunk surveys her garden and digs up any new transplants overnight. Is this skunk a design critic, a closet gardener who hasn’t quite mastered the craft? Curious minds want to know how this little garden drama will play out—and the only way to find out is to watch, wait, and replant. My cat once took over a roadrunner nest after the chicks fledged, only to be ousted by the roadrunner when she was ready to lay more eggs. Western box turtles canvass our potting benches when we’re transplanting to feast on any snails we find. And this spring I caught a quail with row cover in his beak, standing sentinel for the rest of the covey feasting on seeds planted in the pots underneath. Such are the dues paid for living in a wild kingdom.

After 40 years of protection, golden eagles are rebounding from near extinction, yet the Audubon Society recently released data showing a large decline in some of the most common species of songbirds in the United States. All across the country there has been a drop, 40 to 87 percent fewer meadowlarks, jays, sparrows, shrikes, and other familiar birds in the past 20 years. New Mexico’s numbers have not declined as precipitously as they have in places with more extensive urban areas or in agribusiness centers. In most places populations have not yet declined enough to be a direct threat to the survival of species, so there is time to reverse the loss and maintain a good life for all, whether they make their living on two or four legs or on a pair of wings. Your garden will be a richer, more vibrant place when you open its gates as habitat.

A widely acknowledged expert and author on regionally appropriate gardening, Judith Phillips has designed more than 900 residential gardens, collaborates on design teams for public landscape projects, and teaches a native and xeric plant class at the University of New Mexico.