Understanding our gardens and how they fit in.
Context is everything, each one of our gardens, whether large or small, is a part of the landscape which surrounds it.
We might be high on a windswept hill, where buzzards soar high overhead, the soil beneath our feet may well be thin and bone dry by mid summer.
Or low down in a flood prone valley, where the soil is heavy, slow to warm up in spring and where autumn morning mists spangle orb spider webs with diamonds.
In town or the middle of a housing development, surrounded by neighbour's’ walls and windows, it takes more thought to decide what our garden’s natural setting might have been. Without views of the landscape there are fewer immediate clues, but wherever our homes were built, our gardens were once pieces of land, within which, natural processes dictated which species of plants and wildlife made that place home.
Britain’s biodiversity is within the bottom 10% globally, since 1970 we have seen a 70% decline in our wildlife and yet together our gardens cover 433,000 square kilometres, enough to make a significant difference and help to counteract some of the huge habitat losses which have happened in the last 50 years.
We can replant native hedges along our boundaries to filter the wind and provide forage for insects and nesting sites for birds. We can replace those patches of lying water in dips and hollows with garden ponds for amphibians to spawn and birds to drink and bathe and if we have a lawn, we can let the grass grow. Treat our lawn as a traditional meadow and we’ll find that very soon it will be spangled with daisies, clover, birds foot trefoil and speedwell, so pretty for us and so valuable for insects to forage among. In those overwhelmingly built up spaces, we can make room for nature by planting species appropriate to the soil, aspect and location of our gardens and in doing so, kick start a process whereby nature will begin to recolonise and ecosystems re-establish themselves.
The ecosystems of our gardens are formed by the interactions of the species living in them with one another, and with the habitats we have for them to live in. For years gardeners have fought against these natural processes but now is the time to stop calling some plants ‘weeds’, stop using the word ‘pest’ and stop feeling that we need to be in control.
Now is the time to allow our gardens to be themselves, in other words to re-wild.
Rewilding means different things to different people and is different in different places, but in essence it requires the restoration of ecosystems to the point where nature is able to take care of itself. We need to be involved too, of course, we are part of the nature of our gardens.
For more on where to begin please visit Where to begin
For more about reconnecting with nature, regenerating and helping to restore it please visit Regenerate-reconnect-restore
For more on embracing the changes we need to make please visit Embracing change
For more on the principles of disturbance, dispersal and diversity please visit Disturbance, dispersal and diversity
For more on Wildlife please visit Wildlife
For the latest Blog please visit my Blog
