Is a tended garden bad for wildlife?
If you like your garden to look neat and well-tended, does that make it incompatible with wildlife? The reality is that plant-rich borders are often excellent for pollinators and a clipped lawn is still a feeding ground for blackbirds and starlings.
Tidiness isn’t a problem as much as sterility. If every weed is removed from the lawn, every outbreak of pest dealt with by a chemical spray, every leaf and twig sucked up and disposed of, that’s when wildlife loses out. Perhaps the biggest issue is when large parts of a garden are given over to gravel, paving and decking, which are all dead surfaces for wildlife. But a gardener who fills their plot with plants, builds beautiful ponds and habitat features, composts any dead matter and avoids chemicals where possible, will have created a home
for all sorts of wildlife as well as looking the ‘bees’ knees’. Part of the rewilding ethos is just letting natural processes happen, whatever those might be. It can mean resisting the overwhelming urge to step in when you see a ‘problem’. There are opportunities in every garden to ‘let things be’ that you might ordinarily try to fix. Take, for example, when a plant fails to establish – our tendency is to stress out about the cause and try to ‘put things right’. The alternative is to relax and accept that, for whatever reason, the garden just wasn’t right for that species. Instead of trying to alter the soil or adjust the growing conditions, just calmly move on and soon you’ll find a plant that truly loves your garden.
Or, how about the weeds that grow up through the gaps in the paving or gravel? Your instinct might be to grub them out (for now), but how about embracing the fact that nature wants to grow there and use that to your advantage by planting thyme or Erigeron karvinskianus in the gaps, or scattering Californian poppy seeds in the gravel? ✿