When the rewilded garden by Urquhart & Hunt won ‘Best in Show’ at RHS Chelsea in 2002, it triggered a debate about whether rewilding could be called gardening at all.
Traditional gardeners thought it looked messy and unkempt. If you just let your garden ‘go’, it will be full of weeds. Surely that can lead to invasive plants swamping your carefully chosen flowers and a wild west of pests and diseases?
There can be problems with allowing nature to take over. If your garden gets dominated by one kind of weed, such as brambles, then the wildlife that relies on other plants will lose a food and habitat source. That is not good for biodiversity or wildlife in general.
But a rewilded garden doesn’t mean a totally neglected garden. In The Book of Wilding by Isabella Tree, she compares some pruning and mowing to herbivores munching on trees, shrubs and meadows in the wild.
And if you are gardening with environmental difficulties, then a rewilding approach is worth thinking about. Instead of trying to make plants grow somewhere that is say, hot and dry or cold and wet, you can simply see what arrives and what thrives.
So I enjoyed visiting the re-wilded garden of environmental activist and film-maker Serena Schellenberg. Her garden floods often, which makes traditional gardening difficult.
She describes herself as an inexperienced gardener, but says that this way of gardening has given her confidence.
What is re-wilding a garden?
A rewilded garden is different from a wildlife-friendly garden. In the Book of Wilding, Isabella Tree shows three different gardens. One is a traditional garden with a fence and trimmed hedge, mown lawn and neat borders. It has garden lighting and tools like leaf blowers and petrol mowers are used.
The second is a wildlife friendly garden. It’s pesticide-free and mown less frequently. The fences have been replaced with hedges, which offer more habitat for wildlife and help improve air quality. There are piles of wood and areas of longer grass. The gardeners have added a pond and changed the lighting to LED fairy lights to minimise the disruption to night creatures.
A rewilded garden goes one step further. The hedges are trimmed less frequently, allowing flowers and berries. Fallen fruit is left to rot and ivy is allowed to scramble over fences, buildings or walls. Lawns or sections of lawn are completely wild, with self-seeded weeds, flowers and shrubs. And almost all the lawn grass is allowed to grow, with paths and pavers through it.
A rewilded garden is part of its wider landscape. Whether you live in a town or the countryside, have small holes in hedges and fences to allow creatures to roam.
Whether you want a wildlife friendly or a rewilded garden, the first step is to stop using pesticides or weedkillers.
Rewilding garden priorities
- No pesticides, fertilisers or herbicides
- Avoid artificial lighting at night
- Don’t use power tools unless you really have to (it may not be practical to do everything by hand)
- Allow hedges, trees and shrubs to flower and fruit, prune less often, maintaining them for safety.
- Allow grass to grow over the summer months, cutting paths and pavers through it
- Leave dead trees, fallen branches, logs and stumps (unless there’s a safety issue).
- Clear away invasive weeds by hand (check Government advice for lists of invasive plants in your area).
- Only plant plants that are suitable for your area and conditions. This often means ‘native plants’, depending on where you live.
- Look for plants that actively help your wildlife – don’t forget night-flying pollinators.
- Unless there’s a safety issue, don’t tidy up or clear away.
Serena’s rewilded garden
When Serena moved in, the property hadn’t been lived in for around a year. It had been mainly mown lawns and trees, with fences around some ponds. She’s removed the fences and allowed the lawns to turn into meadow.
The first complication was that this is a flood area. And it floods frequently – several times a winter.
So a conventional approach to gardening wasn’t really an option. A traditional herbaceous border is unlikely to survive repeated flooding.
However, grasslands do and there are a number of trees and bushes that are resilient enough for such treatment.
Rewilding garden ideas…
Start with the plants. Native plants are always best in rewilded gardens, but if non-native plants are growing happily without being invasive, then they have a role, too.
In this post on gardening for biodiversity the RHS’s Senior Wildlife Specialist Helen Bostock says that the RHS has carried out research to see how much native plants benefit wildlife in the UK. They found that native plants do support the highest percentage of insects and pollinators, but that many non-native plants also offer benefits. ‘And there’s not much difference between the two.’
It is worth saying that this balance between the value of native and non-native will be different in other countries. But in the UK, linked by ancient trade and migration routes to Europe, Africa and Asia, the wildlife has often adapted to a wide range of plants.
Serena’s garden majors on grasses and trees because that’s what grows well in her garden. She’s planted trees – an orchard and some silver birch, all native varieties. But she hasn’t done any other planting.
She mows paths through the grass, allowing wildflowers, weeds and grasses to flourish on either side. ‘Mowing paths means it looks a little bit groomed. And by having the paths round the land, it keeps visitors on the path, leaving all the grasses and the wilder parts of the garden without being trodden on. It encourages wildlife.’
Add focal points and places to sit
There’s a minimum amount of hard landscaping in a rewilded garden. Serena hasn’t added any.
However, she takes great pleasure in the seating areas around the garden. These also add some structure and focal points.
There are several plain wooden benches, and also a vintage table and chairs. Place them where you can enjoy the sunset, a particular view or just see the garden at a different angle.
‘Ruins’ could be attractive in a rewilded garden. At Great Comp Garden in Kent, the owner had to dig out lots of stone and rock to create borders. He then turned them into ‘garden ruins.’
They provide focal points, seating and even create an area of micro-climate. They could be very beautiful.
Another type of ‘garden ornament’ that would work well with the rewilding principles is a ‘stumpery’ or an area where tree stumps and logs are arranged and planted up.
Weeds and invasive plants in a rewilded garden
Rewilding a garden doesn’t mean completely neglecting it. If a plant is invasive, you will have to pull it out.
Serena has Himalayan balsam in the pond. It’s on the list of invasive non-native plants for the UK, which means you can’t plant it or allow it to grow in the wild. Serena pulls it out regularly by hand.
She also clear brambles sometimes as too many could suffocate other useful plants. If one plant is swamping another, you can cut it back. That still fits into rewilding. You are mimicking the action of a grazing herd of deer or bison, who munch the vegetation, cutting it back so other plants can flourish.
But although weeds are usually more vigorous than ornamental garden plants, they often co-exist well, with plants emerging to suit different types of weather. Amanda Mannering who has a beautiful mini meadow lawn says that each year their meadow lawn has different dominant flowers.
And Serena says that one of the joys of a rewilded garden is discovering that new grasses and wildflowers have popped up, apparently from nowhere.
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