Gardening for Songbirds, by Nicola Oakey
June 24 2026, Monthly Speaker
Our numbers were down because of the latest heatwave, but ironically The Hermitage was pleasantly cool!
It was a fascinating talk by Nicola Oakey on one of the hottest days of the year when she offered a unique insight into organising a garden at the RHS Chelsea Flower Show.
Garden designer Nicola took us through her impressive design the Songbird Survival Garden for the 2025 Chelsea show.
It was organised in conjunction with a little-known charity Songbird Survival which funds vital research on the severe decline of songbirds in the UK.
Nicola admitted that she always gardens for songbirds (half of the world’s birds are songbirds) and had some top tips for plants to choose to benefit these welcome visitors, all of them in her Chelsea garden.
Some of them are thorny plants used for hedging, such as hawthorn and briar (so cats can’t get through), yew hedges for shelter, sunflowers, berries and teasels for food and leaf litter for insects which the birds rely for food.
Nicola said many of the insects we don’t like as gardeners are favoured by songbirds such as aphids.
One of the most interesting facts came out of research by Songbird Survival related to the flea treatment for cats and dogs which is applied using a pipette. Did you know that farmers are banned from using this poisonous substance? Tiny amounts of this flea treatment have been found in songbird nests. The cats and dogs brush past plants and the birds come into contact with it in our gardens.
She highlighted the type of birds who flourish by eating food from the hanging feeders we put in our gardens. Blue tits and great tits are common on these feeders but willow tits (which have seen a 94% reduction in numbers since the 1960s) are shy and less acrobatic so don’t get to these feeders. The answer is to put food such as mealworms on the ground.
Nicola’s garden featured trees Crataegus persimilis Prunifolia which provides spring flowers for insects, berries and thorny branches. There was also a ‘dead hedge’ made up of wood, small branches, garden cuttings and sunflower heads, a log wall, a circular shallow pond sheltered by shrubs and artwork featuring the songbirds.
For the Chelsea show, she admitted it was ‘a dream come true’ to have been invited, but was not easy work. She applied for funding 20 months before the show, all for an 8×6 metre plot.
Exhibitors are given ten days to build their gardens and she used 1,000 plants, surprisingly all kept in pots. The plants are packed in tightly and the rim of the pots are often cut away and extra compost packed in. The reason is for easier packing away and what would you do with 1,000 pots during the show?!
The cost of the garden was £74,000 and Nicola was lucky to secure money from Project Giving Back which finished funding last year. The main avenue gardens cost £250,000.
After the show the garden was moved to a site near a community centre in Hull and a gardening group has been set up to look after it. It has transformed a space in a socially deprived area.
Nicola worked for TV gardener Adam Frost before setting out on her own as a designer and is based in Oakham.