My gardeningworld
Ray Mears
Adventurer and bushcraft guru Ray Mears is best known for eating insects and tracking foxes. Since 1994 he’s been presenting TV programmes including Extreme Survival (BBC2) and Wild Britain With Ray Mears (ITV). His latest mission is rewilding landscapes with urban biodiversity campaign, The Big Rewild. He lives with his wife and stepson in Sussex.
Your adventures take you to far-flung places like Australia, Thailand and, most recently, China – do you ever just put your feet up in the garden?
I have a garden but it’s quite wild. We have a very small piece of woodland – I don’t grow plants, I just manage a clearing in the woods. To try and grow flowers would be a fight against nature, to be honest. There is a lot of deer that come through and they eat everything. It’s better to work with nature rather than try to fight her.
Growing up in Surrey, what inspired you to learn bushcraft?
I was keen to stay out at night when I was a small boy, but I didn’t have any camping equipment. I got talking to a judo teacher at school who had served behind the lines in Burma during the Second World War and he said you don’t need any camping equipment – you need knowledge. Surrey woodland is actually very similar to rainforest – not the plants, of course, but the shade and light and insects. So it was really quite a good place to start.
Can we bring a bit of the wild into our own gardens?
There’s a feeling that rewilding is something that has to be done on a large scale. But just doing a small amount of rewilding – such as having a corner left to nature where nettles and brambles grow, and leaving ivy on trees to create habitat niches within the garden – can have a massive impact. A garden is more than just flowers: it’s about what lives there.
You’re also supporting the Orchard Project, which plants community orchards in urban areas. Tell us more?
Orchards are a very special type of woodland. It’s a great place to have a picnic or read a book on a sunny day. I’d encourage more people to go and enjoy orchards, and to plant one, even if it’s only one apple tree.
■ To learn about rewilding or to get involved in local rewilding with The Orchard Project, go to thebigrewild.co.uk Also see more on how to rewild your garden on p78