THE ENVIRONMENT
Garden designer and botanist Jack Wallington sees nature beginning to heal itself
Beavers are my reason to feel optimistic about 2021. The UK’s native beavers were driven to extinction in the 16th century through hunting and habitat loss. But they’re back. Thanks to reintroductions by conservationists from mainland Europe, numbers are on the rise. Their dams slow rivers and streams to naturally help prevent flooding. Despite everything this year has thrown at us, it’s heartening people didn’t lose sight of nature and the threats animals, insects and plants face from global warming and habitat destruction. Quite the opposite, lockdown forced us to see our gardens, parks and countryside in a new claustrophobic light. As if Mother Nature were holding our heads to the window shouting “look”. Everyone is spending more time outside seeking nature. Plant sales have gone stratospheric. If the world’s scientists can produce vaccines in less than a year, I am filled with hope that we will rewind climate change and bring other species back from the brink with science and global collaboration. It’s the year we, like beavers, build dams against the tide of extinctions we’re about to cause.
Gardener Sarah Raven will be revelling in far-flung flowers
The political hierarchy might just be moving the environment up from the bottom of its agenda, which gives me hope for 2021. I’m longing to botanise again, maybe in the Outer Hebrides, to revel in the machair flowers, and that makes me feel very cheerful.
Gardening writer Ken Thompson believes rewilding will prove its worth next year
The fashionable view is that the natural world is in deep trouble. But across much of Europe, as humans retreat to towns and cities, wildlife is reclaiming the vacated space. In 1995, there were fewer than 60 brown bears in the Cantabrian Mountains; now there are more than 300. In the Pyrenees, there were just five in 1995; today there are more than 50. Since the turn of the century, wolves have recolonised Germany, Denmark, the Netherlands and – in 2018 – Belgium. They would be here too, but for the English Channel. Once we take our foot off its neck, nature is more resilient than we realise.