How wild is wild in the context of the average garden? And should we all be gardening differently to encourage more wildlife? Ken Thompson looks into the role gardens play as habitats for creatures great and small
ILLUSTRATION JILL CALDER
As you can’t fail to have noticed, rewilding is everywhere. But what exactly does it mean for gardeners? One problem is the word itself, which is so elastic that it can mean almost anything, depending on whom you talk to. If you could eavesdrop on ecologists arguing about rewilding, you might find them debating the pros and cons of reintroducing carnivores such as wolves and lynx to the UK – in other words, not a conversation of any great interest to the average gardener.
A common thread in any discussion of rewilding is an increase in wildness, although ‘wild’ itself is another word that no two people can agree on. It’s perhaps better, because it’s more concrete, to talk about the withdrawal of human influence. In short, more human influence equals less wildness. But in a gardening context, what doesn’t look at all wild to you and me can look surprisingly wild to the wildlife itself.
Into the woods
Any impartial observer would surely agree that the average garden is the product of some fairly intensive human effort. Few things are less wild than a herbaceous border, and it is thought that the result of the complete withdrawal of human influence from a garden would, before very long, be a wood. Indeed, one definition of gardening could be the maintenance of a state of permanent succession, constantly countering the tendency of progression towards a climax woodland.
Even the ‘wild’ habitats created by some gardeners, such as wildflower meadows, are very far from being truly wild. Real agricultural meadows are the product of decades or even centuries of human management, and the creation and maintenance of a garden meadow requires just as much effort as any other part of the garden. If this effort is withdrawn, a meadow would rapidly succumb to invasion by trees and shrubs.
The garden habitat
Ecologist Jennifer Owen spent 30 years monitoring the wildlife of her suburban garden in Leicester, starting in 1972, and it remains to this day one of the very few gardens for which we have even a partially complete wildlife inventory.
Two things stand out from Owen’s study. One is the astonishing biodiversity her garden supported – whether we look at butterflies, hoverflies, bees or ladybirds, somewhere between a fifth and half of all the species known to occur in the UK turned up at least once. The other notable finding is that all this happened without an
