With their mix of yellow, brown and crimson, goldfinches are strong candidates for the most beautiful of all our songbirds, and in the wild they feed largely on thistledown. Householders who use modern bird mixes invariably succeed in bringing a range of attractive species to their gardens, some of which are rising in population nationally, almost certainly as a direct result of widespread, regular feeding.Lesser-spotted woodpeckers, for example, have learned to take peanuts from feeders, and now their striking flash of black, white and scarlet is an increasingly familiar sight outside many windows; nuthatches, delightful blue-grey woodpecker relatives, have learned to do the same. It’s so successful because it works.Bird foods today are specialised high-energy feeds such as sunflower seeds, which are immensely more effective at attracting birds than the scraps of bacon and bread people used to leave out on their bird tables. The next best thing to get results is birdseed.Food for wild birds has become very big business in Britain: it’s a market worth more than £180m a year and rising, with some people predicting that within a decade the market will be worth more than £500m annually, on a par with sales of dog and cat food. (My sister-in-law’s boyfriend, a TV producer who lives in Notting Hill, took some of our tadpoles and successfully raised them.

I said to him: “What did you use for water?” He said: “Evian.”)BIRDSSo a pond is a great start for a wildlife garden, a place with all sorts of dramas of its own going on. The main one is having too many tadpoles in your tank (I feel another proverb coming on). You need to keep changing the water – use pond water because it has tiny goodies on which they feed – but even if you do, they can suddenly hit a crisis point where too much oxygen has been used up and they start rapidly dying off Don’t use tap water because it has too much chlorine in it. So to try and save it we take it out of the pond to rear ourselves, in a tank.We’ve got better at it There are many pitfalls. Only about 25 per cent of ponds in the London area have newts, so you’re lucky, really Don’t think of this as a poor frog pond Think of it as a fantastic newt pond.”We did We do.

But every spring, a few frogs still get back to us, do the writhing bit, and leave us some spawn. When they arrived in our pond, from God knows where, the tadpoles disappeared. We were delighted to see the newts – they are attractive beasts, especially in the breeding season when the male has a crest and a bright orange belly dotted with black spots – but mourned our lost frogs, until we consulted a pond consultant, who told us: “Look. A bit like The Orcs in Lord of the Rings.Newts – common newts (Triturus vulgaris) in our case – have much to be said for them, but are unfortunately greedily partial to frogspawn and tadpoles. One morning I counted more than 70 individual frogs, all at it; I almost felt I was intruding.They produced gallons of frogspawn which turned into into sleek, fat, handsome tadpoles, which in turn underwent the metamorphosis into sleek fat handsome frogs.But it wasn’t to last On the march towards us were the newts, make that The Newts.

A male would grab a female and copulate with her, but then two or three other males would come and clamber over the conjoined couple to try and get their own thing going, and the whole lot of them would cling together in a ball for hours, unless they fell off, and this was going on all over the place You didn’t know where to look. Talk about Hollywood Babylon! It was like the swimming pool orgy at Errol Flynn’s Beverley Hills mansion, only wilder. It shouldn’t be too deep, because toddlers can drown in six inches of water; when we inherited ours from the previous house owner it was 4ft deep in the middle, and we had it made much shallower.When we took it over it was a sensational frog pond, full of common frogs, (Rana temporaria) Their mating in early March was an eye-popping spectacle. This has given us two amphibian species (quite wild), at least half a dozen insect species, three wildflower species and – for a garden our size – a remarkable bird.Most gardening firms will install a pond for you, or you can do it yourself: essentially, all you need do is dig out a hole and install a liner, the best ones being made of PVC. There should be at least one gently sloping side for things to crawl in and out. I live with my wife and two children in a medium-sized Victorian terraced house in south-west London, with a smallish back garden 45ft long and 20ft wide, at the end of which is a pond about the size of a large circular dining table. If you put away some of the pesticides, leave some of your grass unmown and refrain from dead-heading all your flowers, it can make a surprising difference.The best thing about wildlife gardening, though, is how easy it is to get started.

Any area of planted ground, however small, is already a habitat for many creatures – you can get kestrels, even ducks, nesting in window boxes – and if you have a lawn, blackbirds, thrushes and starlings will hunt worms on it. It has been justly said that any garden is a nature reserve waiting to happen. So what does make it happen?POND LIFEWithout any doubt, a pond, even a small one, immediately makes an enormous difference, giving the garden a quite different dimension, and at once extending the range of creatures you are likely to encounter Here, my own experience may be instructive. Wildlife gardening is more about facilitating nature, about allowing (and indeed encouraging) certain things to happen naturally.The two are perfectly compatible, although for the wildlife to flourish, sometimes it is better that a bit of control, a bit of that straining after horticultural neatness, plenty and perfection, be set aside. It is the difference between classicism and romanticism, between authority and freedom.As I see it, gardening in its traditional sense is about control – about training plants to grow in a certain way at a certain place and time, with the aim of providing beauty, or a harvest In essence, it’s about dominating nature. In Britain, a small cramped country in which the wildlife of the wider countryside has taken a terrible battering in the last 50 years from the intensification of farming, it is both especially valuable and especially possible. There are 15 million gardens in this country, with a total area greater than three-quarters of a million acres, which exceeds the extent of all the UK’s national nature reserves put together.Wildlife gardening is different from gardening pure and simple, however.