Ellie's Wellies - Organic Gardening

Ellie's Wellies - Organic Gardening Organic Wildlife Gardener, making and maintaining wildlife-friendly, beautiful outdoor spaces. Writer for Plantlife: saving wild plants 🌱

Botany nerd, horticulturally obsessed and passionate about protecting our non-human neighbours 🦉🐛🕷️🐝🦔🐦‍⬛🐞🦡. We watch, listen, read, breathe and live all things gardening, ecology and the environment. We have our own podcast too! https://www.facebook.com/thewildlifegardenpodcast

Last week I was away on my annual pilgrimage to the Falmouth International Sea Shanty Festival. For 11 years I've donned...
18/06/2026

Last week I was away on my annual pilgrimage to the Falmouth International Sea Shanty Festival.

For 11 years I've donned a crochet beard with my fellow piratical Bearded Ladies (the most famous shanty group you've never heard sing).

But this year, I wanted more adventure. So I decided to cycle a large chunk of the journey there.

So off I trotted across Dartmoor, from Exeter-Plymouth on a solo 2 day mission. Despite the 38mph headwinds, I got to see some awesome flora and fauna up on and around the moors 🌱🐎.

Then I picked up my long term bike buddy Michelle Cooper and we cycled over 3 days from Plymouth to Falmouth ❤️.

Powered by fizzing Cornish hedges, cream teas, seafront bivvi spots and learning that we don't know how to tie any useful knots.

And who else to bump into while wearing a beard, but my hero . I am still in shock that this happened!

Now it's time to crack on with my gardens 💪.

Yesterday I stumbled on this stunner, I assume freshly emerged judging from its pristine wings ✨.This is the Scarlet Tig...
17/06/2026

Yesterday I stumbled on this stunner, I assume freshly emerged judging from its pristine wings ✨.

This is the Scarlet Tiger Moth (Callimorpha dominula). I I have nothing to add but just PHWOAR 🤤.

The caterpillar of this beaut got fat on Alkanet, but if you don't want a garden full of this very vigorous-to-spread plant, swap it out for Common Comfrey (go for the variety bocking 14 to avoid a garden full of it!), or H**p Agrimony.

Older caterpillars will also go for Common Nettle, Bramble, Honeysuckle, Meadowsweet and sallows, so get planting and embrace thy holey leaf.

You can see the moths flying in May to June and, both day and night ❤️.

16/06/2026

I am pretty much obsessed with the phenomena that is , and in how we can reverse it.

This is where plants are just green foil, or a theatrical backdrop to our lives, borne out of the fact that we have evolved with them around us. We take them for granted. And as we become ever more urban and disconnected from their value to us, we dismiss them.

How many of us know a nice street when we see one, but can't explicitly put our finger on the fact that it's nice because it has plants on it?

We then spend a fortune on eredicating them with pesticides, because we've forgotten this value.

I believe that people want to know, and value would return with knowledge. So why not make plants in our public spaces an explicit thing? Why not map and label them as we do our human-made monuments?

Hurrah for Flowers! Hurrah for Fridays!Here's this week's installment.Heaps going on, lots of natives intermingled wit...
05/06/2026

Hurrah for Flowers! Hurrah for Fridays!

Here's this week's installment.

Heaps going on, lots of natives intermingled with non natives; variety is the spice of life ❤️

I see this a lot so I think it's worth putting it out into the world...Greenhouses are not good storage facilities. They...
04/06/2026

I see this a lot so I think it's worth putting it out into the world...

Greenhouses are not good storage facilities. They may be dry, but they're literally designed to be as light and hot as possible ☀️🔥.

Please stop storing chemicals (I mean stop this entirely obviously, go organic 😎!), petrol(😱), plant food and plastic in them 🙂.

Your reusable compost bags, builders bags and pots will all last a helluva lot longer if they're kept in the dark when you're not using them. And then you also reduce the risk of them turning into microplastics that are impossible to get out of the environment.

Share far and wide!

I was delighted to have been asked along to a clients moth trap reveal a few days ago...Here's what had been using his b...
03/06/2026

I was delighted to have been asked along to a clients moth trap reveal a few days ago...

Here's what had been using his beautiful, wild garden while he was sleeping....

More compost bin completion ✨I think my tally of compost bin construction or reinstating lies around the 30 mark.That's ...
02/06/2026

More compost bin completion ✨

I think my tally of compost bin construction or reinstating lies around the 30 mark.

That's 30 living, breathing engines of biodiversity, and hundreds of fewer trips to the garden centre to buy compost.

I lovesssssss it ❤️🤎🍂🪱

02/06/2026

Letting nature do it's own gardening...

The term garden maintenance always annoyed me. As soon as you say that's what you do, you see the flicker of disappointment in people's eyes.

'Just a gardener' is a term I've heard, when people realise you're not a glamorous 'garden designer' or "exciting" 'landscape gardener'.

But those of us who do this are so much more. Curators, encouragers, propagators, pathologists, ecologists, garden rangers (a term I was beaten to coining by 👌) and there's of course always a big dose of designing in what we do daily.

A garden is alive, it's not a picture that needs touching up and preserving in aspic. It's forever changing, and it takes real knowledge to facilitate that change, for us and for the wildlife ❤️.

Bank holidays are made for:Botany, Besties, Beaches and Beasties 🧡❤️💚Times have been a little rough mentally for me rece...
29/05/2026

Bank holidays are made for:

Botany, Besties, Beaches and Beasties 🧡❤️💚

Times have been a little rough mentally for me recently. So getting out into the wilds with a good friend was all sorts of amazing 🌻.

And who to meet on the coastal path than a fellow .loveplants employee! Lovely Lucy was waving the botanical flag in her branded fleece, so I just had to say hello 🌱.

and I just hope that the captain of the nearby tanker didn't have their telescope out when we had a cheeky early morning skinny dip 🙃.

Enjoy this and may all your gardens be flourishing right now 💚

29/05/2026

For some unknown reason my biz posts have been cross posted over to my personal page...

Hopefully normal gardening biz will resume on here from today 🙃🤷🤦🌻

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