Gardening your rewilded patch
Small-scale rewilding is gardening, whatever the naysayers tell you. And right now it’s high maintenance season in my little rewilded strip, so I’m spending as much time there as anywhere else in the garden.
It used to be, back when we first began talking about letting lawns grow long, that all you had to do with your rewilded patch was cut it back once a year, usually late August. But the thinking on this topic has become a lot more sophisticated since then.
The thing is, there is a tension between managing your rewilded patch for insect biodiversity; and managing it for wildflower biodiversity.
If you were to manage your rewilded patch solely for the sake of the insects you wouldn’t cut it back at all: you’d let all the flower stems collapse naturally at the end of the season in one big glorious undisturbed mess of hollow stems packed with hibernating ladybirds.
But research has shown that if you simply let your rewilded patch go, without gardening it at all, plant biodiversity falls like a stone. The whole thing reverts to scrub, usually with a single dominant plant species: middlingly useful habitat for (some) insects, but with many fewer, and less diverse wildflowers. And even if insects are your main thing and you don’t really care much about flowers, this matters: some (usually rarer and more in need of protection) insects depend on very specific wildflowers for survival, so lower diversity of wildflowers ultimately means lower diversity of insects, too.
Besides, wildflowers are on the brink of extinction too, clinging on to the edges of nature as their delicately balanced habitats fall to the plough, or the bulldozer, or the nitrate fertiliser bottle. They need a safe refuge every bit as much as all those limelight-grabbing moths, bees and butterflies. And we just can’t plant most of these delicate little wildlings in a conventional gardening kind of way, as anyone who’s tried to introduce wild orchids to the garden from seed or plug plants will know. We have to just create the right habitat so that when they happen along they’ll make themselves at home – and that’s why well-gardened rewilded patches are so very important.
I manage my rewilded strip for wildflower diversity: happily, the same methods also make it a bit more creature-friendly too. It’s a year-round task, so here’s a kind of “what to do this season” list, starting with the big cut back – which you should be doing right now.
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