The first flowers of spring are beginning to bloom and with them insects appear as if by magic.
The drone of bees, not heard for months, is once more part of our gardens’ soundscape. The birds sing out to defend territory and find a mate, the next generation relies on them finding a safe place to nest and the ability to find enough food to raise a brood.
The more we become involved with the lives of the creatures with which we share our gardens, the more we learn about the relationships between the plants and animals in the wider landscape and how our own individual gardens fit into the bigger picture.
As biodiversity losses continue, rewilding has become a term we’ve all heard of, but how many of us understand what it means and how it can relate to our own gardens?
There’s a very good book called ‘Rewilding’ by Paul Jepson and Cain Blythe which explains the concept really clearly and after I’d read it one phrase stayed with me. Rewilding is ...‘the planned practise of restoring trophic complexity and natural dynamics to set ecosystems on a trajectory to recovery.’
As gardeners we’re unfamiliar with the technical terms, but we can see the basics of trophic complexity in our gardens every day. The top predators in my garden are the sparrowhawk and tawny owl, they prey on the smaller birds, mice, frogs etc which eat insects, caterpillars, beetles and worms which in turn will have munched on the plants.
Holes and jagged edges of leaves in our borders are not a cause for alarm, they are evidence of a functioning ecosystem where the sun’s energy is transformed by plants into the fabric of their stems, leaves and seeds which are then eaten by animals to build their own bodies and the bodies of the larger animals which in turn feed on them.
The average garden might not be particularly complex but we can improve that by allowing them to be more naturally dynamic. By watching and learning, accepting the fact that we don’t always know best, if plants want to pop up where we didn’t plant them, it means that they prefer it there. If the perfectly striped lawn of our imagination bears no relationship to our own grassy patch in which the dandelions and daisies flourish, rejoice in them, they feed the insects which the birds depend on.
There is a wilder way to garden, we just need to let it happen.
