How to rewild your garden in nine easy steps

Still I do sometimes feel sorry for poor old gardens. They’re constantly being set up to be knocked down, as if they’re all run by neurotics out spraying and clipping 24 hours a day. It’s not so. Most gardens are already scruffier than you’d imagine and what most ordinary gardeners need now is neither guilt-tripping into making gardens smarter, nor being told they’ve already wrecked the ecosystem, but to be helped, as they garden, to relax into that wilder aesthetic. Doesn’t that sound attractive?

Before anyone gets the idea that this wilder gardening is some easy life, I should say there will still be plenty of things to do, just different ones. There will still be (less) pruning and planting and sowing and mowing, the same interaction with plants that is so good for the body and soul. But there’ll also be a lively new interest in the flying, crawling, breeding, munching results of your rewilding.

And remember this. Every rewilded garden will be different from the next, because local conditions and wildlife differ, and the history of every garden soil differs, and the way you will use it differs. There is no perfect garden wilderness waiting to be found and anyway things will continue to change even as you rewild it. Ecology is flux.

It might seem odd but I’m going to say first, stop spending. Resist buying more stuff for the garden. Rewilded gardens don’t require consumption. Give up all the bags and bottles and hardware and plastic and furniture unless it’s absolutely vital to your nature conservation purposes. It’s surprisingly difficult to do.

Garden organically, of course, but more than that, stop importing things of any kind into the garden, even if it happens to be carefully-made well-sterilised bulk compost.

Isn’t it better to let the garden’s ecology settle down to become itself at last, and better still to become part of the chain of other gardens locally that form a greater habitat. For it is those greater habitats — wildlife corridors — which will serve best to attract rare wildlife which has been deprived of its natural home.

You may need to invest just a little at first of course. Fair enough. The right kit to let you mow long, the means to store water.

Identify your absolutely indispensable people spaces and people routes within the garden, so you are clear what other space is realistically free for wildlife use. An impenetrable or over-shaded garden will rarely be used and then neglected, which is no help to anything.

Expect to go on patiently maintaining your garden, however you subtly alter its species, so that the spaces remain ‘readable’ and attractive; chaos is never endearing. Since the planting can be expected to be woollier and less contrasting than traditional ornamental planting, perhaps a good number of bold clipped shapes (dense hedging is excellent wildlife habitat, whatever the species) will help define those people spaces.

Putting water (whence life began) into a garden marks a whole step change for wildlife, whether it’s a mere bird bath where small birds can drink, or a pool to be home to frogs, newts, water-boatmen and dragonflies.

Even boggy ground will be home to your vegetable garden’s army of pest-control creatures at different stages of their life-cycle. The point is to have variety of soil conditions wet to dry, and to extend that variety over place and season, so that all manner of life-cycles are catered for.

Absolute rewilders may wish to rip out non-native plants. It’s a thought. Another way of serving wildlife is to change over gradually toward garden plants which serve wildlife better (or to natives also, where suitable, because they usually host maximum wildlife): shrubs and perennials with single flowers and readily accessible pollen/nectar, plants rich in berries at different months, plants which flower at different seasons, plants which are home to locally rare insects.

Here’s a choice for instance: will you plant your favourite highly-bred large-flowered single garden rose, or a suckering little Scots rose, or a wild English dog rose? With care they can all have good hips though the highly-bred repeat flowerer offers a longer season of nectar, but the bushes are very different sizes. A rewilding gardener needs to make pragmatic choices.

It’s a gardener’s natural tendency to clear the jungle, to interfere; and yet a thriving ecology demands the full spectrum of habitat, from newly churned-up places to places undisturbed for years. A rewilding gardener has to try to offer that same variety as often as possible.

And so there will be places in the garden that are regularly disturbed or perhaps never disturbed, places wet in winter and dry in summer, or perhaps vice versa. Soil may be bare or thick with fallen leaves or mossy. What won’t happen is the soil surface be forked over every spring, breaking down fine surface roots and the fungal connections between plants.

There will be a mixed age range of plants, from annual grasses to old trees. If a tree is broken by a storm, it may be pruned back and regrown, pollarded perhaps rather than removed, a little haggard now but so what, to preserve the lichens which can only have developed on a trunk that age.

Specialised habitats are found everywhere from shaggy lawns through damp corners and dense shrubberies to the treetops, and it’s up to you simply to maximise these opportunities and let nature choose which to occupy, be it for fungi, insects, mammals, reptiles or birds.

So think about using your chosen plants to create these habitats at all levels, some with warmth and shelter from wind, or with safety from predators. Make allowance for wildlife corridors and habitats of which your garden is just a part; maybe you even need a gap in the fence for community hedgehogs?

Find out about local wildlife from keen gardening neighbours or the local Wildlife Trust so you can plant deliberately to encourage it. Identify which things are endangered specifically in your area and work up habitats which might encourage them. No point fishing in the dark for delightful creatures only expected 200 miles north. Learn which garden plants are tolerant of the wildlife which comes to settle in your garden (the web is brimming with information) whether that’s predatory insect, mammal or ‘weed’, and try to be tolerant of the damage. This is when an understanding of the big picture you have created, in its living detail as well as in principle, will make the change worthwhile rather than frustrating.

A rewilded garden can be lovely, romantic and totally useable, but if you like things super tidy it’s not for you: a rewilded garden is always going to be a richly textured mesh of interlocking habitats – scrubby hedge (hoggy) bottoms, great blocks of pond-side flag irises, slow worms basking under old carpet on the compost heap - and you will never get very far trying to rewild a Minimalist garden of rigid turf, steel and Verbena bonariensis.

Like us, those many lives in those many new habitats have to sleep or even hibernate sometime, so your new garden won’t give such an easy 365 sequence of colourful entertainment as you might get from hard-working traditional garden plants, happy to bloom from January to November. It’ll be different, quieter, greener. But it will also be fascinating.

Sue Mabberley cultivated an idyllic wild garden at her home in Nant-y-Bedd with her husband Ian, to her left above. Stephen Anderton, standing behind her, finds she has used a light touch

Wales’s favourite garden is as close as possible to nature

Sue Mabberley’s house at Nant-y-Bedd is an ex-forestry worker’s cottage in the upper reaches of the Grwyne Fawr valley, in the Black Mountains. It might sound idyllic and it has even been voted Wales’s favourite garden under the National Garden Scheme, but it has been hard-won from the dead forest floor below Norway spruce trees and from the semi-industrial junkyard that was the forestry station. Yet today it is about as wild as gardens get. Mabberley has been quietly rewilding it for years.

After her career in the Forestry Commission, National Parks and Natural Resources Wales, she and her husband Ian now look after Nant-y-Bedd full time, living the serious good life — everything home-grown and organic, chickens, natural swimming pond — and all through quiet, unfussy determination.

Do you call it rewilding?
“Well it’s a useful tag for letting nature have a bit more freedom,” she says, freely admitting that if as a gardener you rewild the flora, the fauna will follow. “The flora is the bottom of the food chain”, she says, “that’s where you have to start.”

Would she say she has that different, wild aesthetic? “I try to make something as near as possible to nature,” she replies, “but which also gives pleasure. I want softness and only minimal control, but also the spontaneity of nature. Actually, spontaneity introduces softness.”

How did you introduce water?
“There are two ponds as well as the stream for which the house is named (Nant-y-Bedd means “stream of the grave” and there’s a Bronze Age burial at the top of the hill). The little upper pond is sheeted in watercress and spearwort so its depths are safe and dark for deeper pond life.

“The lower pond is a new natural swimming pond, 2m deep at one end but grading to nothing among water-filtration plants at the other so amphibious creatures and unlucky hedgehogs can climb in and out.

The garden was voted Wales’s favourite under the National Garden Scheme

NANT-Y-BEDD

“By contrast you can see clear to the bottom of this pond and it’s a glassy arena for skaters, diving beetles, damsel and dragonflies. The odd daytime bat will swoop down from the Christmas trees to drink the chemical-free water.”

What did you plant?
“You should be asking where! There were parts of the ground already riddled with ground elder, so we just planted into it — oriental poppies, hardy geraniums, tall alliums, Lysimachia ‘Firecracker’ — they all compete and look fine together. We have self-sown wildflowers among the ‘proper’ flowers — the ‘National Collection of Weeds’, as someone said!

“We’ve concentrated on plants for bees — marjoram, late asters, great willowherb, which is also good for the elephant hawk-moth which we occasionally see. Hummingbird hawk-moth caterpillars eat the lady’s bedstraw which grows in all our ‘meadowy bits’. There are early-season flowers like the little yellow comfrey Symphytum grandiflorum, out now, and late ones like ivy which flowers in October/November. We grew plants from the seed of the local nettle-leaved bell-flower, Campanula urticifolia, which is pretty uncommon now, and spread them around in the garden.”

Obviously a wild garden still has to be maintained, however discreetly. How do you decide when to intervene?

“You have to be pragmatic, because it’s still a garden. So, for instance, when it comes to cutting down perennials in spring, whatever they’re doing for wildlife, if I can’t bear to look at them, I do it.

“We keep plenty of dead wood around for fungi and beetles, standing or, if it’s fallen, stacked. There’s the Welsh clearwing moth that lives on big old dying birches which is seen around locally and we hope we might tempt them along.”

The garden has two ponds as well as a stream that gives it its Welsh name

NANT-Y-BEDD

How do you manage your mowing?
“We mow the bits of lawn and grass paths about once a fortnight. They’re full of selfheal and hawkweeds, which we give time to seed.”

More recently the Mabberleys bought a bracken-riddled meadow, which they asked the Monmouthshire Meadows Group to survey for them to identify the existing flora. Then having mown the dead bracken and carted it off, they sowed a wildflower mix from a local wildflower reserve. Mown bracken is used as a mulch, except when it is known to contain bindweed seed.

Have you invested in machinery and materials to make the project work?
Mabberley has no time for non-vital machinery and hates the noise of it. “But a shredder is good for turning prunings into wood chips to surface paths or mulch beds, or reducing prunings ready for composting. But leaf-blowers — honestly!” She is dead set against the non-vital import or export of anything onto the premises. Nothing rottable passes the gate. Only a bit of horse muck ever enters. “Can you imagine! People — intelligent gardeners — scrape off good topsoil to create ‘low fertility conditions’ for clever gardening. It makes me want to spit!”

Ian looks after the land full time with his wife

NANT-Y-BEDD

What did you build?
“Lots of gap-riddled dry stone walls, which now look ancient and mossy, covered in ferns and lichen. They’re full of mice and snails and beetles.

“We wanted a vegetable patch, so we have raised beds and also a potager where flowers can self-seed among the veg. Foxgloves and parsnips flowering among the onions looked wonderful. And I liked the mix of Good King Henry, angelica, sweet rocket and the white radish Munchen Bier.

“We planted native hedges, made from self-sown seedlings found in the garden — thorn, hazel, field maple and dog rose. And we always make ‘habitat piles’, heaps of stuff not fit to compost, like couch grass roots and too-rampant weed seedheads, which can be left somewhere out of sight.”

Does all this sound like a mess? The funny thing is it doesn’t look like one. It’s actually a very liveable, loveable proper garden — just very alive.