Urquhart & Hunt discuss the popularity of rewilding and how you can achieve it in your garden
Lulu Urquhart and Adam Hunt of Urquhart & Hunt won Best in Show and Gold at last year’s RHS Chelsea Flower Show and were named Homes & Gardens’ Garden Designer of the Year 2022. This month, they discuss the increasing popularity of rewilding
REWILDING is being discussed everywhere right now, and it is incredible how it has gone from being a rather niche and unknown idea 10 to 15 years ago, to now being widely known and successful in practice. It seems to us that the reason for its popularity is that it conveys a message of hope and wonder at the capacity of nature to recover through rewilding.
Simply put, wildlife’s natural rhythms create healthier, more biodiverse habitats and we all benefit from this. Following on from our show garden at Chelsea last year, which portrayed a landscape rewilded by the activities of beavers, we have had many people asking us the question: ‘how do I rewild my garden?’ This is a hard question to answer because strictly speaking, rewilding is about letting nature take care of itself, enabling natural processes to repair damaged ecosystems and restore degraded landscapes.
The process is largely carried out by keystone species such as beavers, boar and bison (to name a few) whose activities affect plant communities, creating dynamic and floral-rich landscapes that then have a beneficial effect on the myriad of species that live within them. Furthermore, predators like lynx, wolves and birds of prey create multiple predatory niches within which smaller fauna can flourish. Clearly it is not possible or even desirable to have large wild animals such as the above in the average garden.
True rewilding requires a macro approach and generally, the larger the area in which they have to live and roam, the better. For us, working at a garden scale, a more pertinent question is: how are we inspired by what we observe in the rewilding process, and how can we use it to inform the design decisions we make when creating a garden or landscape? In this sense, we are the keystone species, creating dynamic change and special niches through the process of gardening.
Most of the clients we work with these days want more wildlife in their gardens, and talking to other practitioners in our profession, this seems to be an industry-wide occurrence. People are worried about the decline of nature that they see all around them and so it seems that ecological restoration is now a key parameter for our design work, alongside function, aesthetics and beauty.
There is no single answer as to how to encourage wildlife into a garden because every piece of land is unique, but as with all horticulture, the process requires study, attention and long-term ambition. Despite some of the negative press that
