Back in Victorian days, it was considered quite fancy for gardeners to build something they called a stumpery.
It's a pile of dead stumps and logs, often stacked roots-up, arranged in a shady damp corner and left to rot on purpose. The Victorians built them to show off ferns, but they also turn out to be some of the best wildlife habitat you can make.
The first one went up in 1856 at Biddulph Grange in England, where a gardener took the stumps left from clearing land and stacked them ten feet high along a sunken path. The fern craze was at its peak, and the rotting wood made perfect planting pockets. King Charles has a famous modern stumpery at Highgrove built from sweet chestnut roots.
What the Victorians treated as decoration, nature treated as a feast. As the wood breaks down it feeds fungi, mosses, and beetles, including stag beetles whose grubs live in deadwood for years. Toads, salamanders, and small mammals move into the damp gaps. A single rotting log can support an astonishing variety of life.
To build one: find a shaded corner, stack stumps and logs with the roots facing up and out, leave plenty of gaps, and tuck ferns and moss around the base. Then walk away and let it rot.
You make a sculpture out of dead trees, and everything in the yard moves in.