Garden ecology

This chapter discusses plants and gardens from an ecological perspective. Garden function is dependent on food webs and element cycling on local and global scales. Ecosystem diversity is strongly affected by past events such as ice ages. It also depends on grazing animals, pests and diseases, which prevent individual plant species from becoming overwhelmingly dominant. The chapter also discusses habitat creation i.e., methods of recreating flowery grassland and woodland. The basic principles are to keep coarse vegetation under control and make sure that plenty of light reaches the ground in spring. The drivers for diversity of garden plants are various. Good fruit flavour will attract birds that distribute seeds. Attractive flowers are better pollinated. All plants are to some extent habitat specialists. The balance of nature is dependent on plant diversity but many natural systems are unstable.