Today we went to our lovely local garden centre and visited the reptile sanctuaries that they have made on an adjoining meadow to rehome slow worms that they are clearing off their land.

Inspired by these homes for wildlife, we were allowed to help ourselves from the Nursery’s rubbish pile and so we filled up the car with old bits of turf, decaying very old logs and bits and pieces of assorted rubble:

Incidentally, one of the logs had an interesting millipede nest in it.

These millipedes are probably all running round the car now because they were not on this log by the time we got back to the meadows!

Once back, down by the pond, we started with a dwarf conifer that had been growing in a wooden tub which has collapsed around it. We stacked the rotting logs around this central core:

We had already started to pull up some of these rushes that are doing rather too well in the pond:

We piled these harvested rushes around the logs to provide some variety in the pile:

And covered it all with the dried up turves.

Finally, we put some stones around to make to all a bit more solid

And there we have it. Such fun to do. Not sure how elegant it looks but we will probably go on adding to it for a while until it is more pleasing on the eye as well as hopefully providing excellent cover for anything that happens to want to use it.