The green spaces of our towns and gardens bring nature into our daily lives, brightening our mornings with birdsong and the busy buzzing of bees. Together, the UK's gardens are larger than all of our National Nature Reserves combined, making them as important for wildlife as they are for our own wellbeing.
Water-logged and thick with reeds and robust tall-herbs or tussocky sedges, fens are evocative reminders of the extensive wet wildlands that once covered far more of the lowlands than they do today.
Enormous flocks of geese, ducks and swans swirl down from wide skies to drop onto the flat, open expanses of flooded grazing marshes in winter. In spring, lapwing tumble overhead and the soft, damp ground speckled with cuckooflowers provides excellent habitat for waders probing for prey in the damp soil. By summer, when the ground is drier, some marshes are cut for hay or silage, but the ditches remain wet and come alive with dragonflies and other insects.
Heathlands form some of the wildest landscapes in the lowlands, where agriculture and development jostle for space, containing and limiting natural processes. Once considered as waste land of little value, lowland heathland is now appreciated and protected for its unique wildlife and austere beauty.
These wild, open landscapes stretch over large areas and are most often found in uplands. Although slow to awaken in spring, by late summer heathland can be an eye-catching purple haze of heather.
Lakes come in many forms: some are splendid and clear, while others are more reminiscent of a murky swamp. Each lake is strongly influenced by the underlying lakebed and the surrounding landscape, and collectively, lakes support a huge variety of animal and plant life.
Most arable fields are large, featureless monocultures devoid of wildlife, but here and there are smaller fields and tucked away corners that are farmed less intensively, or are managed specifically with wildlife in mind.
