An ecological exploration of the secret stuff that goes on in your garden, right under your nose – and how to support it!
The way we as gardeners think about our plots and the wider environment is shifting fast. Historically, well for at least the last two hundred years, there has been an apparent chemical solution to virtually every garden problem. Got chafer grubs on your lawn? Then poison them with Imidacloprid! Got a soil borne fungal disease? Then kill it with Dazomet! But thankfully, due to a change in thinking, along with government policy, gardeners are approaching their patch in a different way. After all, our gardens are nothing more than components of the wider eco-web that is the lifeblood of our planet.
For this new series in GYO magazine, I’m going to focus on just that – the eco-web and how with delicate intervention we can encourage and support it, while improving our gardens and growing. There is a whole world of secret stuff going on in your garden which you likely haven’t seen, such as the million vital organisms in every teaspoon of soil, the flying insects you can’t even see as they quietly manage your aphid problems or the plants which secretly do complex mathematics through the night! All of these extraordinary and largely unseen things are part of the ecology of our gardens and the wider eco-web.
So, let's start at the beginning! What’s ecology and the eco-web? Well, according to the OED, ecology is ‘a biological system composed of all the organisms found in a particular physical environment, interacting with it and with each other’. In other words, it’s essentially everything in our environment and how all those things work together. And the term eco-web focuses on the cyclical nature of our environment – the sun feeds plants, plants feed animals, other animals eat those animals, animals die and feed the soil, soil organisms turn this to nutrition for plants and fungi, specialist fungi extend the root-reach of plants, etc… it’s just one big, glorious cycle, which of course involves water, energy and nutrient movement, too. So, in this series I will explore just how these secret cycles work in your garden and how your interventions or lack of intervention can support them. It’s all about working more closely with and understanding the nature going on right under your nose in order to take advantage of it and in turn feed back into the cycle of ecology.
Providing habitat
Your choices can literally make a world of difference. Habitat loss and species extinction are threatening the eco-web of the planet as a whole but gardens
