The Ealing Biodiversity Awards for Gardens and Green Spaces is back for 2025! The award organisers, ActforEaling, Cultivating Ealing and Ealing Council, invited last year’s winners to share their invaluable gardening tips. These to inspire more local residents to join the rapidly growing biodiverse gardening community in Ealing.
Anyone considering this modern approach to gardening will learn a lot from local experts.
What are the simplest ways start boosting biodiversity?
If you are just beginning your biodiversity journey, our local champions ha a brilliant array of gardening tips and ideas to get anyone going:
- “Let it go! Let it go!” – ditch the idea of neatness and straight lines
- Create a wild area, just stop mowing and weeding and see what happens
- Provide suitable accommodation for nature e.g. wood piles, bird boxes
- Plant for pollinators, whether growing lavender in a pot, a rosemary planter or a dedicated wildflower patch. They all provide vital food and nutrients for these vital mini-beasts
- Include water, so creatures can drink and bathe – create a pond or just a shallow dish of water
- Plant native species of different heights and plant throughout the seasons
- Look up permaculture principles, use perennials that don’t need to be grown and planted each year
- Grow food but be prepared to share a bit with your garden inhabitants
Where do you go for biodiversity advice?
Winners had all sorts of recommendations for finding tips, from their allotment WhatsApp group to specific websites like Kew, the RHS and London Wildlife Trust, the RSPB’s Connect with Nature campaign and the Woodland Trust. Other media like Gardeners’ World and the FT Weekend House & Home were highlights.
Instagram accounts like those of Kate Bradbury, Dave Goulson and Mary Reynolds also come highly recommended.
For brilliant advice that is also local, it doesn’t get much better than the Ealing Wildlife Group Facebook group and newsletter.
What biodiversity features would you recommend?
Brilliant teachers recommended that schools get pupils busy developing practical skills, “We made bird feeders, bugs hotel and planted various bee friendly plants as bee hotels.”
When it comes to practical gardening tips, this winner had some brilliant ideas, “Bee friendly plants mean more bees and better pollinating. Build a water collection feature to make it easier to water. By creating a water feature your garden will benefit from a wider range of insects and frogs for better pest control (frogs will eat your slugs). “
Another wise gardener had these recommendations, “Provide as many different microhabitats as possible. So don’t just cut all your lawn all at once. Build log and rubble piles with hidey holes for various creatures. Never use any chemicals. Relax your attitude on so called “weeds”. A weed is a plant in the wrong place. Allow native plants to grow, to build resilient ecosystems, including beneficial insects which will control our pest species. “
What is your ultimate dream for your green space?
Winners were all asked, if they had no limits, what green space ideas would the like to develop? There were some fascinating ideas that came out, a lot around developing more water related features including water harvesting systems like water butts and ponds, developing a rain garden and creating more wetland areas in the borough such as bogs and marshes.
Reducing paved areas was another idea mentioned. Greening Ealing’s grey is certainly an admirable ambition that would benefit the entire borough as this would bring more shade, reduce excess temperatures and combat excess water run-off and flooding. Local residents can choose not to pave their front gardens by embracing more modern driveway ideas.
Planting more mature trees was a wonderful ambition mentioned by one winner. This is certainly something Ealing has ambition for by planting 50,000 trees by 2026. The Green School Network has been actively supporting schools to benefit from free trees being planted in their grounds. If your local school has space for some trees, please invite them to apply for the 2025 Free Trees for Schools campaign.
Making the most of Ealing’s roofs was a great suggestion from one winner who would love to create a living roof. Imagine if just a fraction of local roofs were transformed to be part of the borough’s green space!
The deadline for entries to categories 1-3 of the Ealing Biodiversity Awards for Gardens and Green Spaces 2025 is 23:59 on 30 June 2025. The deadline for entries to the Schools category is 23:59 on 23 May and for the Allotments category 23:59 on 9 June.
Discover more by visiting the competition webpages.