The wilder way
It had to happen some time, I suppose. This year has seen the perhaps inevitable backlash against rewilding in gardens, with opponents seeing it as somehow anti-gardening. Leaving your grass to grow long and learning to love your weeds is just letting it all go and giving up gardening altogether, so the argument goes.
Leading the fight back is Alan Titchmarsh, who earlier this year railed against ‘ill-considered’ garden rewilding. He warns of ‘catastrophic’ consequences for biodiversity; and gardens depleted of botanical richness. He was echoing the thoughts of Monty Don, who has said rewilding in gardens bothers him: for him, it means “not interfering, not having the hand of man on it at all”. The antithesis of gardening, in other words.
Well: they are both right that ‘rewilding’ as a term is slightly unhelpful and prone to misinterpretation when applied to gardens, as it’s really an ecological concept used for big-sky landscapes, not little cosy back gardens. But they both betray a fundamental misunderstanding of what rewilding - in the garden sense of the word - actually means in practice.
It is not low maintenance: it is not hands off. Done well, it massively increases biodiversity, through the increased number of wildflowers, the undisturbed habitat it provides for insects, and the extra food it gives to birds and bats (seedheads, and those increased insect numbers).
I agree, ornamental plants can provide these benefits too - but it is not an either-or. Just because you have ‘rewilded’ part of your garden doesn’t mean you can’t grow as many posh flowers, vegetables and the rest, as neatly as you like, in another part of the garden. Nobody is asking you to somehow give up gardening just because you’re rewilding: in fact in my experience, you do more, not less gardening if you rewild.
And besides, wildflowers also badly need space to grow, and protection - so why shouldn’t you grow them in your garden, too? Most can’t be cultivated - wild orchids come up if they feel like it and are allowed to, and are fiendishly difficult to sow or grow in a traditional ‘gardening’ way. So there is room for both: you can also ‘rewild’ without it being obvious you’ve rewilded your garden at all.
So given all this, I thought I would try and set the record straight. What follows is an adaptation of an article I wrote for Gardeners’ World magazine last year: it’s a little simplified, perhaps, but I think gets to the heart of what we really mean by rewilding when we’re talking about it in a garden context. I hope it helps add some much-needed clarity to the debate.
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