GARDENING WITH NATURE
ECO ACTIVE BLOG
​SUSTAINABILITY IN ACTION


​​ON THE WILD SIDE

Making a case for letting the wild in to all garden spaces and working with and not against nature in our own back yards.
AUTHOR
Janet Hammerton
2020


PHOTOGRAPHY
Beth Haynes
2020

GARDENING WITH NATURE
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​My childhood was spent in plant- diverse locations on field trips to places where nature flourished, where wild flowers spread in riotous colour, and where insects buzzed and crept and bounced. Perhaps not surprising when both my parents were Botanists.
​The sights and sounds of these forays into wildness became so embedded in my consciousness that as an adult I instantly respond to wild spaces with joy, I feel my body relax and my breath ease. I feel I must speak the word “hello” to the landscape as if addressing an old friend. Faced with the onward march of tarmac and astro-turf in suburban gardens I feel a sense of dismay, and fear of the alienation from nature that is represented by this paving over of life and soil.

I am an Outdoor Environmental Educator and I share my passion for the natural world with children at the biodiverse 55 acre site of the Sustainability Centre where I am Education Manager and I am committed to making the case for biodiversity, regeneration and natural resilience. Re-wilding of our landscapes is something that I would like to encourage and by welcoming school children to wild spaces I hope to help children to have access to some flavour of the outdoor country childhood that I had in 1960s in rural Hampshire.

I have lived for 30 years on a 2.5 acre plot of land under a Beech Hanger in an AONB within the South Downs National Park and I want to make a case for letting the wild in to all garden spaces and working with and not against nature in our own back yards.
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​Let It Be Wild

​This semi wild Beech Hanger space where I live is at its best in spring and early summer when the native wild-flowers and the trees provide variety. All the pictures in this blog are taken in our garden space during this period. By late summer the tree shade limits most blooms. The essence of the space is “Let it Be Wild” but not too wild.

Generations of families tend to view gardens differently. Although my family never fully agreed on how far we would go on the pathway to a wild space we have achieved a biodiverse mix between a formal garden and an untamed wild wood with blurred edges and margins.
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Our experience highlights the constant argument we all face as to how much human intervention is desirable or how much is required. This argument applies to gardens, to farms, to re-wilding projects, to no dig gardening, to the re-introduction of top predators in National Parks and to farming sea kelp in the oceans. How much intervention is appropriate? How much interaction will be right?
​I feel I must speak the word “hello” to the landscape as if addressing an old friend.  
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A Garden of Compromise

​The lawn is a glorious meadow in May and then meadow islands in June and July benefitting bees. Our flowerbeds are a sea of Forget me nots in early summer but have Roses, Phlox and Honeysuckle amongst other plants in June. Bugle and Primrose are welcome along with many other wildflowers such as Cowslip, Birds Foot Trefoil, Ox Eye Daisy and Green Alkanet and these proliferate as colouring and as a source of food for bees. It is generally agreed in the family that some sort of stewardship is desirable but that native, seasonal and wild elements are to be given ample room in our garden too. We need to help our pollinators.

I am inspired to learn more about the re-wilding project at the Kneppe Estate in Sussex and I am interested in hearing about the re-wilding projects happening around the globe, beaver introductions, benefits of re-introduction of wolves, re-introduction of storks, but I know that for most people with just a small patch of garden it is difficult to see how their own small space can be attractive and wild as well as functional as a social space in a small area.

​Observe and Interact

Garden design programmes are sometimes inspirational as more gardeners embrace the idea of having mini - wild flower meadow or a small pond and a bug house hotel, but actually just taking the time to observe on your own is a really good start. The permaculture principle “Observe and Interact” is a good one to begin with. After that look at some of the other permaculture principles and apply those too if you can. Try to work WITH nature as far as you can in your own space. This could be a window box, back yard, front yard, container garden, or a miniature pond. The key is to work within the situation you have got and work with the native species you can manage because it will be easier and more beneficial to honour the native plants.

I once longed to have sheep to graze our grass and re - create a chalk downland here beneath the tree line but instead we keep raking, strimming and mowing to keep back the wood. This compromise that we have come to by trial and error and botanical knowledge shows the possibilities for gentle re-wilding. This is a defiantly diverse nature space. We have “Let in the Wild edges” “Valued the Margins” between wood and garden and done our best to let nature guide the limit of our ambitions.
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We Live With Nature

​Ours is a North East facing garden, in shadow from about 4.30pm in summer and about 2pm in winter. It sits under (and includes) a steep Beech Hanger and has mature Copper Beech at its lowest boundary. When we arrived it was almost entirely unfenced and we had deer in the garden daily. The land is on chalk and rabbits have made warrens at the woodland edge and in the old flower beds. For many people buying a property these statements would all be negatives BUT we are undaunted because we want to live with nature and we love the size of the space and sloping land.
Diverse landscapes are resilient landscapes however large or small.
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Creatures Close To My Door

​Each winter on the 31st January we send in our results to the RSPB Big Garden Birdwatch and record mammals, reptiles and birds. It is an extraordinary privilege to be able to record multiple sightings of badgers, foxes, Roe deer, slow worms, bats, toads, garden, parkland and woodland birds. Our bat survey revealed that we have at least 7 different species of bats on the property and we are lucky to have birds such as Gold crests, Green and Lesser Spotted Woodpecker, Nuthatch, Jay, Buzzards and Red Kite among the many different birds we see in the garden itself. We even had a siting of a Dormouse some years ago in the coppiced area of the wood. It is worth every loss of a Rose bush, every lost vegetable and fruit bush, and every single lost sunny terrace evening to me to be able to live with these wild creatures and plants so close to my back door.

Each summer I watch a variety of insects darting and hovering and teetering on stems and we grudgingly accept their ingress into our buildings. Last year we had Buff tailed bumble bees in our weather boarding recesses, giving way to honey bees and finally (we thought sadly) to wasps. This year the honey bees are in one house and the Buff tailed bumble bees in the attic of the gatehouse. We have Hornets and Ant hills, Maybugs and Moths (including a Hummingbird hawk-moth last year from the Yellow Bedstraw and Cleavers plants on the boundary). We have lots of orchids in the meadow and have discovered a lone Bee Orchid here for the first time this year.
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​Re-wilding

Wherever a little re-wilding occurs there are inconveniences to be acknowledged. Mammals include rats so we carefully manage our compost and scrutinise the house foundations to manage this less than welcome addition to the home. Hornets in the attics is also an unnerving co-habitation (and not helpful for the bees either as they nest nearby).

Every Autumn leaves shedding on such a grand scale choke the pathways and rot on the lawn if not raked over. The regeneration of Ash, Beech, Hazel and Oak would preclude any open meadow if it were left undisturbed without mowing or grazing. But if you leave some space totally wild there will be huge benefits for wildlife. It is a juggling act to favour some, and not all, wildlife and still preserve the magic of a garden. Bramble is taking hold in the coppiced area of the woodland which is not a comfortable addition to this area where the Daffodils have a bright and sunny show in Spring. Nettle has its place but perhaps not proliferating around the picnic table whereas orchids in the lawn are favoured plants and carefully staked out and mowed around.

Welcome Some Shade

I am very worried by the urge to cut down or pollard garden trees. I suggest not to just rush into a new home and cut everything down. I would live with the plot a while, look for the joys of the patch of shade, see what inhabits the tree, the bird and insect life, maybe value the lichens on an old tree. (We have lichens on our Old Wild Cherry and we also have mosses in abundance in our grassed areas and plenty of fungi in the woods). There are benefits in shaded areas too.

Ask yourself what is native to your area and use that to inform your choices of plants as they will be happiest and grow best in your soil. Think about what pets you keep. (We know that we really sadly lost some of our slow worms one year to a young Border Collie). There are many reasons why not everything will turn out to be a success. I would love to see glow worms here again as we did 30 years ago but they have been lost here as in so many other places in Britain.

It Takes Time

You don't need to be an expert. I have learned over a long period of time what does and does not work so I would think of going back to that Permaculture principle again “Observe and Interact”. We become experts by this process. It takes time but it is enjoyable. It is how as humans we learned what crops would grow, which foods we could eat which medicines we could use. But be aware of poisonous plants especially if you have small children and pets because experimentation needs be backed up by some knowledge. I was lucky to have a font of knowledge in my household so I didn’t for example forage unwisely or pick up hairy caterpillars until I knew what they were.
Protecting and re-creating healthy natural eco systems worldwide will give us a much greater resilience in the face of climate change and environmental damage and pollution.
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​Garden With Wildlife

We made the decision that this would be a garden with wildlife, without pesticides or artificial fertilisers and so our compromise is not growing much food as it would be outside our capacity to manage all these aims with the resources we have. We make our own compost, run the place as a small garden park and apply a fair amount of human intervention in order to keep the garden separate from the wood.

This year we have planted veg and salad from seed. Mum at 88 years old is bent double weeding and gathering sticks, sweeping and raking almost every day of the year. The wood above though is left to go totally wild and we have Badger footage throughout a full Spring, Summer and Autumn year period as the family group came down close to the house at the base of the wood. Native Bluebells are beginning to establish themselves at the top of the wood spreading from the Copse above the boundary and we have several Spindle trees from seed coming through naturally too.

In the heat and relentless sun of the past couple of summers and in these periods of drought, with climate change ensuring this is a likely pattern for the years to come, I am overjoyed to sit here in dappled shade on our lush green meadow in the semi cool with 3 natural wells in the chalk for watering. This is resilience. Not every garden should be south facing, not every patch devoid of trees. Diverse landscapes are resilient landscapes however large or small.

If You Are Inspired

So if you feel inspired to re-wild a large space, create and maintain a small garden full of nature, dig in a pond or grow food organically then there are lots of books to help you get started. I have given the titles of some of the books that I have enjoyed recently below. I think we really need to do this type of work now. We need to turn back the tide from paving and decking and over mown burnt grass roots to a more natural environment where nature can thrive. Doing this is not dependant on having large acreages of land because bee corridors can be created in towns and cities using gardens plus roof top spaces, green walls and allotments.

I believe that protecting and re-creating healthy natural eco systems worldwide will give us a much greater resilience in the face of climate change and environmental damage and pollution. All of which we are facing with more and more urgency both now and in the coming decades.

​RECOMMENDED READING 

Meadowland -The Private Life of an English Field.
By John Lewis-Stempel
Published by Doubleday 2014

Weeds - How vagabond plants gate crashed
civilisation and changed the way we think about nature.
By Richard Mabey
Published by Profile Books 2010

Wilding - The return of nature to a British farm.
By Isabella Tree
Published by Picador 2018

Wildwood - A Journey Through Trees
By Roger Deakin
Published by Penguin Books 2014

A Buzz in the Meadow
By Dave Goulson
Published by Jonathan Cape 2014

Permaculture Magazine
​www.permaculture.co.uk
​AUTHOR
Janet Hammerton
2020

PHOTOGRAPHY
Beth Haynes
2020