I did not expect a book about wildlife gardening to make me cry. This is extraordinary: the tale of a woman, a decked, concreted, crappy patch of wortI did not expect a book about wildlife gardening to make me cry. This is extraordinary: the tale of a woman, a decked, concreted, crappy patch of worthless city garden, and her mission to bring it back to life by attracting bees, birds, insects and wild plants. It's not the usual gardening writing when everyone plans stuff and has magic perfect soil and twenty acres and an unlimited budget. This is the kind of gardening you do when you're drunk, or you decide to randomly scatter seed like a rebel and then have no idea what you grew, with plants that die and mistakes and looking like a scratty mess. No spoilers but when a particular kind of bee finally arrived I basically broke down into sobs.
What's devastating, and not in a happy-cry way, is what this book tells us about the eradication of Britain's insects, and thus birds. The endless decking and concreting and planting of things that have no wildlife value, the fencing and cutting back and weedkiller, the destruction of life around us. It's a cry of rage and despair at what we're doing to our environment and most of us don't even know we're doing it.
I'm writing this looking at a huge mass of ivy on the back fence. There's a wren nesting in there, I'm pretty sure. Or it was, because yesterday next door paid a man with a petrol chainsaw to cut down all the ivy spilling over *their* stretch of back fence. It was messy, you see, and the fence must be neat, and to hell with the ivy, and the things it hides, the insects that feed the birds. Cut down the nettles, root up the weeds, pull up the plants the bees love, eliminate anything that isn't ordered, then sit back and wonder why you never see butterflies these days except cabbage whites, what a nuisance, better spray the brassicas with poison.
A polemic and a lament and a song of praise in one. Highly recommended. ...more
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