Rewilding is all the rage, but is it the panacea it promises to be? Liz Potter provides some easy tips to get the wild-and-woolly look, without weeds taking over
Rewilding has become a hot topic in recent years. Put simply, it’s the large-scale restoration of landscapes for the benefit of wildlife. Influential voices from the conservation world have called on us to offer up our own gardens for rewilding too, turning our manicured lawns into mini meadows, and adopting an organic, chemical-free approach. They argue that, taken together, our gardens represent almost 30% of the UK’s total landmass (521,872 hectares/1.2m football pitches), and at community level, our re-wilded gardens could create important wildlife corridors – a lifeline between fragmented woodlands, meadows and other wild habitat.
There have been hard-hitting headlines about biodiversity loss, too. British insect populations are down 64% since 2004 and last summer’s record-breaking drought was devastating to caterpillars, including the small tortoiseshell, peacock and brimstone.
January’s Big Garden Birdwatch noted that sparrows, song thrushes and skylarks are all down again this year. It all prompts the question: are we doing enough for wildlife?
“Our gardens don’t exist in isolation,” says Tom Massey, garden designer and author of The Resilient Garden. “They’re part of the wider, green, interconnected landscape.
“Also, there’s a perception that gardens are just for human enjoyment, but it’s vital that we take joy in sharing them with nature. The sounds of birdsong and other wildlife have been proven to have a positive mental health effect on humans. It’s important not to exclude nature from our lives.
“A lot of the available information about gardening is very human-centric – there’s this desire to be ‘tidy’ and control nature, yet there’s something very evocative about a wild garden.”
Alan Titchmarsh argues there’s nothing wrong with tidiness. “The well-cultivated, well-tended garden is being disparaged,” he writes in The Gardener’s Almanac. “A well-managed border, which looks beautiful, will be awash with animal life – every bit as much as the weedy old bit of ground that’s just been left.”
The tidiness spectrum
If gardens exist on a tidiness spectrum, the unkempt rewilded plot lies at one end, while the pristine outdoor room, with its plastic lawn, lies at the other. The traditional ‘English garden’ (clipped box hedges and lawn stripes) lies somewhere in the middle – or at least it used to. Ther
