Team Wilder wildlife garden allotment 2024 Joanna in Fishponds

Name: Joanna Pengilley
Category: Individual garden - allotment
Area: Fishponds, Bristol

Joanna's allotment was a finalist in the wildlife gardening compettion 2024!

Tell us what you or your group love about your garden 
Jo: I love everything about my allotment/garden! It is my sanctuary, my home from home, my learning zone, and where I go to work hard, or relax in nature. I love growing both food and flowers as well as fruit but I get the most pleasure from sharing it with all the wildlife. It thrills me to be able to see frogspawn in the pond and watch the blue tits building their nest and franticly feeding their chicks. The song thrushes sing all evening. A real delight! I love to be able to find new creatures and identify them and work out what conditions I could provide for them. I just love having a place where I can escape the city and truly connect with nature.

What makes your garden wildlife friendly?
Jo: I have lots of diverse habitats for wildlife and lots of corners and areas which are wild. I have a large wildlife 'hotel' from an old pizza oven, corners with tiles and pine cones stuffed in, a few bug boxes and 4 bird nesting boxes. I am organic 'no dig' and totally chemical free which means my soil has been improving since 2016.
I also have 2 large 'dead hedges' and an living edible hedge. The area next to mine is covered in nettles which is great for the butterflies!

I have been growing lots of pollinating flowers from seed, primarily UK native species and wild flowers such as toadflax. Many of the flowers are night scented to attract the moths and bats of the night. I am very lucky to border the magnificent Eastville Park so there is a valley of trees around the plot which is amazing for visiting species. On my plot I have a cherry, 2 greengage, a plum and 3 apple trees as well as hazel that I have been coppicing for the past few years to utilise in my gardening.

There is an oak and a hawthorn in a large swathe of brambles just outside the plot perimeter which all provide great nesting and feeding habitat. I do feed the birds through the winter and have a dish of water out in the summer on a bird table which I clean weekly. In a few shady corners I have log piles which provide amazing habitat for all kinds of creatures, which is where I saw the stag beetles.

The Team Wilder Community Ecologist visited Joanna and loved her allotment!:

Joannas’ allotment is a riot of variety, focussed on food growing in harmony with nature, with wellbeing and care thread through the entire space. The amount of time Joanna has spent on the space is reflective in the maturity of the wildlife features.

A mix of native trees and unusual vegetables create a wealth of fooding opportunities for native invertebrates, and the brambles that surround the side perimeter provide excellent habitat.

The presence of a wildlife pond, lots of rotting wood and willow coppice offer lots of larval habitats and hibernacula for amphibians. 

Jo shared advice about her pond: "Having a pond is the best - It really does attract lots of wildlife in. Some come to drink and some for food/habitat. I have tried to add rocks and logs as cover around my pond, like a hibernaculum, for the frogs to live in, as well as plants and flowers. In the pond I have various oxygenating plants such as water forget me not, and water mint as well as flag iris and a pond lilly."

More about ponds
Chemical-free food growing