The Walled Garden at Knepp Castle in West Sussex, reimagined to a plan by Tom Stuart-Smith, is transforming how we think about gardening
WORDS JODIE JONES PHOTOGRAPHS RICHARD BLOOM
There is a whiff of existential angst blowing through the gardening world, highlighted by the heated debates that rage every time some iteration of a wild garden wins Gold at Chelsea. What plants should we be growing in our rapidly changing climate? And how can we balance the gardener’s urge to create a stimulating and beautiful space with our responsibilities to the planet, and all the creatures that share it with us?
Four years ago, proto-rewilders Isabella Tree and Charlie Burrell set out to find their own solution at Knepp, the 3,500-acre Sussex farm they famously withdrew from conventional land management more than 20 years ago. As the wider estate exploded with a sky-rocketing diversity of plants and wildlife, the couple gradually became aware that their private walled garden, which continued to be managed with traditional formality, was looking increasingly incongruous. So they approached Tom Stuart-Smith with a conundrum – how do you rewild a garden?
Set within 19th-century walls, the Knepp Castle garden had already been through a number of changes over the years, but when Tom and his team were called in they found a plot of just over an acre, divided by a wall, to create an ornamental kitchen garden with raised beds and grass paths, and a simple swimming pool garden with a large croquet lawn. In comparison with the exuberance of the rewilded land, it was decidedly lacking in diversity.
Out in the wider estate, native plant communities had been allowed to regenerate the former farmland naturally over a period of years, with the help of keystone animal species including Tamworth pigs and Exmoor ponies, which roughed up the ground and munched back emerging scrub. Within the garden walls, a different approach was going to be required, since this ‘rewilded’ space had to be attractive to humans as well as producing congenial habitats for wildlife. Ironically, this called for careful planning, and the keystone species that Tom brought in to help effect the change were big beasts of the horticultural and ecological world – plant ecologists James Hitchmough and Mick Crawley, and organic herb expert Jekka McVicar.
Their collective goal was to increase biodiversity in all its forms – both flora and fauna – but to do this, they first needed to create a much wider range of habitats. In what is now the Rewilded Garden, the existing neat lawn and topsoil were scraped aside and mi
