Rewilding in the garden

My mum bought me this book for my birthday because she thought the front cover looked interesting.  I agreed and thought I'd get round to reading it at some point, then somebody on a Facebook gardening group mentioned it as a book everybody should read. I had heard of a 'rewilding' movement in conservation but hadn't really make the connection. We went away for a couple of days over the May bank holiday, camping in a beautiful field on the Wales/Herefordshire border and it seemed the perfect place to read it.

Time for tea

I absolutely loved it. It was one of those books that I could reread as soon as I'd finished it. It makes perfect sense to me- the cul-de-sac that modern agriculture has found itself in; the increasingly urban attitude to 'nature'; the reduction of nutrients in conventionally grown foods and most of all, the increasing paucity of  our ecosystems.
I found the whole premise so exciting I could relay the whole book at length, but in essence the author and her husband own a large estate (complete with castle and deer park once landscaped by Humphrey Repton) which was losing money at an alarming rate whilst conventionally farming it at the end of the last century. A series of  events led to them letting nature take over. Working with Frans Vera, who has helped create a reserve in the Netherlands they introduced large herbivores, mostly missing from our countryside in a natural sense.
The Burrell's (Knepp's owners) brought in herds of red and fallow deer, Exmoor ponies (an ancient breed) and in a compromise because of English law and an awareness that local dog walkers using the estate's public footpaths would find bison or Heck cattle (the nearest we have to the now-extinct aurochs) rather intimidating, long horn cattle and Tamworth pigs instead of wild boar. Vera's  Oostvaardersplassen has been heavily critcised because of a perception of cruelty to the grazing herds and whereas the truth I think is not quite what the newspaper articles would have you believe, the Knepp project did undertake to administer veterinary attention where necessary and to humanely destroy any suffering animals, in line with modern sensibilities.
What happened took everybody by surprise. Invertebrate species that haven't been seen for decades reappeared, rare bird species were seen and other small vertebrates moved in. The speed with with they recolonised was unexpected, as was the habitat that many of them chose. What is becoming apparent from Knepp,  Oostvaardersplassen and other similar projects is that we don't know from observation what animal and bird species prefer, we only know what they are making do with because we've made everywhere else so inhospitable for them.

A rare purple emperor butterfly, previously unrecorded at Knepp and now home to the largest UK colony

There has been a lot of opposition, partly because it looks messy and neglected and somewhere in our tidy English psyche we have an image of a managed Victorian bucolic idyll as our idea of the countryside hand in hand with a post-war paranoia of not being able to feed ourselves and that letting land lie unused is in some way immoral. Actually, we can feed ourselves, the world can feed more people than currently exist, it's food waste that's the issue but that's another subject.

A number of people also object because they believe the ultimate logical goal of rewilding must be reintroducing wolves or at least a lynx and that induces immediate panic. Britain is possibly the only country in the world where pretty much the worst things nature can throw at you is nettle rash or a wasp (yellow jacket) sting. We do have a few European hornets but they still only rank at about 2.5 on the Schmidt sting pain index. We have one venomous snake but that is rare and isn't fatal to humans. The thought of an apex predator is not something the public can easily accept. Reintroducing beavers- which the far more densely populated European continent can live alongside- sent people into a tail spin, convinced that they'll destroy river fishing and flood farm land.
 Rewilding can and should mean a more resilient ecosystem that retains water for dry periods, can hold more water in times of flooding, cleans and stores excess nitrogen from farm run off and acts as a carbon sink as well as attracting and retaining a more diverse and denser amount of flora and fauna. Sounds like a no-brainer to me.


My initial response was that I want to buy a donkey, a cow and a pig for the garden immediately, and preferably a beaver too though it might not be that impressed with my small pond.

Apparently the neighbours will object, but it has made me think about how small you can go. I'm not going to find breeding nightingales but how much difference can I make? Isabella Tree quotes David Quammen in The Song of the Dodo as saying that the ecosystem is like a Persian carpet. 'Cut it into lots of tiny squares, and you get not tiny carpets, but a lot of useless scraps of material fraying at the edges'. The current crisis is clearly our ecosystem(s) unravelling. And yet. There is also mention in the book of wildlife corridors with rewilded land connected to more rewilded land. If I provide a habitat and then my neighbours do the same and then maybe a local landowner could be persuaded to follow suit...
Happily one of the last chapters in the book is on rewilding the soil and we can all do that. Provide habitat for earth dwelling invertebrates in our own small patches.
I'd already come to the decision that gardening for invertebrates and insects was the way to go- if I squash the aphids on my rose what will ladybirds eat? If I feed every slug and snail I find to the chickens then I'll never attract thrushes, hedgehogs, frogs or toads into my garden because they'll have no food. I will still grow annual vegetables and will have a lower tolerance for slugs around them, but most plants can withstand an amount of nibbling and there need to be some pests to attract the welcome predators in the first place.

A meme doing the rounds on Facebook. It has a point.

At the same time I was reading this book, I read this blog post by Anni Kelsey. She grows in polycultures and is leaving them increasingly to form their own mini ecosystems whilst intervening less and less.

'For me this means understanding first in my head and then in my heart that my garden needs to be created and to function as a mini ecosystem; that is nested within larger neighbouring ecosystems and ultimately that it is inextricably linked to every other place on the planet.  And for this to be the case my garden has to find a dynamic balance between all the living beings that live in it or that visit it – a balance of which I am part.  And that means re-evaluating what I can see happening in front of me.  I am pledged to do the minimum in the garden and to learn by experience as I let nature get on with finding the way forward.  Amongst other things this means that I don’t take any action at all to guard against or to remove any living beings, whether they are considered to be ‘pests’ or not.  And this is one of the points where the conventional gardening mind can start to go into panic mode.'

She cited lily beetles as an example, which is an interesting one in the UK. Lily beetles are a recent, accidental introduction which will eat native plants (fritillaries) as well as garden lilies. It's unclear to what extent they are predated in this country. Should we kill the lily beetles to save the fritillaries? Incidentally, our precious Snakeshead Fritillaries may be native but may equally be an 18th century introduction. Neither of us are sure what the answer is. Being a conscious part of an ecosystem, even your back garden, has responsibilities.

So while I ponder all of that I'm working on providing a more attractive home for earthworms. Local farmland has zero visible soil life. Worms will aerate the soil, improve drainage in my heavy clay, enabling growth of plant roots, prevent erosion and increase beneficial bacteria in the soil. The mucous they produce to help them move and respire- coelomic fluid- is rich in glycoproteins and also encourages the growth of bacteria and fungi, both more essential to healthy soil and plants than we realised. I found this fascinating summary of a study on the Bacterial Diversity of Bacteria in the Digestive Tract of Earthworms by Brito-Vega and Espinosa-Victoria.

'The bacterial community inside the digestive tract of earthworms pertains to at least four physiological groups: plant growth promoters, free-living nitrogen fixers, biocides and phosphate solubilizers. The diversity of bacterial communities within the digestive tracts of earthworms depends on climate, soil type and organic matter.'

My garden is already no-dig and I try not to be too tidy, especially around the edges. Increasing the amount of organic material in the soil will benefit worms and other macro- and microscopic soil life and will also act as a carbon sink. It's thought that increasing the amount of carbon in soils by just 0.4% a year (by improving depleted agricultural soils) could halt the annual increase of CO2 in the atmosphere. Maybe I could start guerrilla compost-spreading as I walk the dog? Stuff dead leaves down the cracks in the clay?

Not least, improving soil health will increase the nutrient content of the food we eat. Tree quotes a study using data from The Composition of  Foods, compiled by UK biochemists that claims that between 1940-1991 potatoes have lost 47% of their copper, 40% of their iron and  35% of their calcium. Carrots losses were even greater and broccoli has 80% less copper and 25% less calcium. Oranges have 8 times less vitamin A. depleted, chemical laden soils have, unsurprisingly, led to depleted, chemical laden foods.

So many reasons to grow your own.