I’m the David Bowie of garden design

After a decade as a non-metaphorical voice crying in the wilderness, I’m beginning to get some respect, as Stormzy might call it, for my one-acre wildlife garden.

Neighbours are asking to be shown round and there is a real possibility that the Guardian may be interested in a feature on it.

It deserves greater recognition, but the problem of photographing it is the real one. It looks nice only in early summer – before the growth spurt – and late autumn, when I have clipped the hedges and some form of structure emerges out of the green inferno.

I think the guest who described me as ‘the David Bowie of garden design’ (with reference to my garden’s regular style reinvention) was joking but the comment fell on fertile ground. My sense of mission and self-importance as a pioneer garden-rewilder grew faster than you could say leylandii.

What neighbours don’t understand is that my sort of rewilding is not just about letting natural processes take over. It might look that way to the untrained eye, but to get that William Robinson/ Gertrude Jekyll-meets-the-outback look has required vast expenditure of human toil. This is a handmade garden and no power tools or biocides have been used.

Like all cottage-gardeners, I view myself as a horticultural activist. We like genetic diversity, not only because we are instinctively reacting against monoculture – nature abhors monopolies – but also because if you plant one of everything, the chances are that some will succeed, even if others fail. A portfolio of plants will spread the risk.

Inevitably this policy has embraced choices that, on a superficial level, could be regarded as perverse. For example, I have planted an American black walnut which furnishes foodstuffs for the field voles although it’s an inedible crop for humans. Barberry bushes on the perimeter were chosen out of spite because they host rust fungus, a grave danger to wheat growers. I also planted sea buckthorn because hunter gatherers used to gather the vile-tasting berries – a more potent source of vitamin C than rosehips – long before gastropubs served them in a posset.

I planted danewort only last year, after reading in Gertrude Jekyll that you should be wary of introducing it, as its thong-like roots will march unbidden through your garden soil. These I use because they are an even more thuggish plant than nettles.

About 20 years into my stewardship, my role as God was subverted when self-seeding saplings began magically appearing. This was a sign that my plot was, in a Rupert Sheldrake way, sentient. Aware that the days of pesticide-drenching were over, the land could resume the work that nature intended it to do, ie supply oxygen.

James Lovelock himself, who was driven out of Wiltshire by intensive farming, lived to regret the effort he had put into his tree plantation when he realised nature would have done the work for him.

And ever since I watched Terra, a Netflix documentary with a voice-over by Vanessa Paradis (who should gain a lifetime achievement award for mispronunciation), my toil has been energised by a sense of woke solidarity with the community of land workers around the globe.

These sturdy folk scratch a living from the earth without the benefit of Western knowhow or the pharmacopoeia of pesticides that have led us into our current agricultural impasse. Moreover, as Mary points out, they do so without the luxury I myself enjoy to drive to Lidl once a week to supplement my ‘hobby harvest’.

‘I married an artist,’ she grumbles. ‘Not a land worker.’ ‘For richer, for poorer,’ I grin. I had the opportunity at the Wealden Lit Fest to put a question to the goddess of rewilding, Isabella Tree. ‘Is there a difference between rewilding and neglect?’ The question went unasked because I knew that the answer was yes.

In theory, giant ruminants, like back-bred auroch or bison, would be used to open up forest clearings. And lynx and wolves would predate deer. But of course in real life they don’t.

I persuaded a Shropshire landowner to rewild a secret valley on his estate. But I never intended for him to lose the path through it to brambles. ‘Without the path,’ I pointed out, ‘you won’t be able to get in to see the rewilded area.’

He was irritated, as I was myself, that I had revealed a contradiction at the heart of the rewilding debate.

I turn to Oxford University’s Professor Dieter Helm, independent chair of the Natural Capital Committee, whose Green and Prosperous Land has dealt a blow to us romantics by reminding us of the Rewilding Fallacy: ‘The fashion for rewilding is best seen as just another form of eco-engineering, a switch from one manmade landscape to another. Wild, as a concept, has lost its practical meaning even if its cultural power remains.’

As he also wrote, ‘The transition and end state of the wilding would not necessarily live up to our sense of beauty Indeed it is integral to rewilding that the landscapes we have come to love would gradually disappear.’

He has a point. Hay meadows would not exist in a rewilding context. The thought of the Lake District without sheep and shepherds has horrified Penrith MP Rory Stewart.

The prospect of being put on the spot by an interviewer from the Guardian has caused me to do some soul-searching and to conclude that I am a rewilder lite. I want to relinquish some control but not all.

Like Marxism, rewilding is a nice idea but doesn’t take account of human nature.