What is everyone talking about this week: Rewilding starts in your own back garden — even in the city
If you were to string all of Britain's gardens together, they would cover a space larger than Devon. That's why we need to rewild them.
Ask people about rewilding and they tend to picture country estates: the grounds of a great house, agricultural land, open moorland. ‘Successful rewilding projects need scale,’ says landscape designer Adam Hunt. Rarely, therefore, do we consider cities.
Yet these are leading the way in biodiversity recovery — and may continue to do so. Sir David Attenborough explores this in a recent BBC documentary, Wild London, as he follows animals across the capital, from peregrine falcons nesting atop the Houses of Parliament to leopard slugs and their oddly mesmeric copulation. Our royal history means that large swathes of parkland were set aside for hunting and, to this day, keep London looking green. The main takeaway, however, is to do with our gardens: rewilding, more often than not, starts in our own backyard.
This was the idea at the heart of the inaugural Wilding Gardens conference, held last week at the University of Manchester. ‘We want this to be about the joy of seeing a dragonfly above your pond in Bristol,’ says panellist Lulu Urquhart, who won Best in Show at the RHS Chelsea Flower Show in 2022, together with Adam, for a garden built around a beaver dam. Britain’s gardens amount to roughly two million acres of land — 1.2 times the size of Devon. According to Adam, we ought to understand these not as secluded ecosystems, but as components of a larger network in which birds, insects and even larger mammals move freely.
Hedgehogs may safely snuffle: London is proof that even small gardens can help wildlife.
Back to London, which has more gardens per square mile than any other capital. The city has already become a hotspot for ‘hedgehog highways’, with garden owners putting holes in their fences to allow the creatures to travel from one to another, to mate. Since 2000, their numbers have declined faster in the country than in the city; now, there are urban areas where their numbers even seem to be increasing.
Nonetheless, Britain remains among the three most biodiversity-depleted countries in Europe. The other two are Ireland and Malta, fellow islands where individualism (read: nimbyism) tends to take hold. If an Englishman’s home is his castle, the garden too often is his moat: a barrier between him and the natural world and a shelter from true wilderness. When I told a fellow Londoner about hedgehog highways, his face quickly turned sour: what if these unwittingly made life easier for rats?
Yet Nature has a way of keeping itself in check, Lulu notes. Look after the fox, or even the serpent (there are plenty slithering around Regent's Park), and they’ll keep the rats’ numbers down.
