Rewilding and Garden Design
At the wonderful and informative day we had at the SGD conference “Connectivity in Garden and Landscape Design”, it was so heart warming and exciting to see how designers were embracing the challenge of helping nature in their designs.
In response, I wanted to comment on a slide which came up a few times over the day, the well-known diagram of ecological succession showing how land is colonised over time from bare earth through small herbs and grasses to shrubs and finally the “climax” of closed canopy woodland. I wanted to draw attention to this because the ideas around this may be important to how garden designers consider nature in their designs.
There is a bit of confusion about the succession theory and how it relates to rewilding and nature restoration. This is discussed at length in the book “Wilding” by Isabella Tree, who describes the changes at the former farm Estate at Knepp in East Sussex. In this case, it is the addition of large herbivores and their disturbance which is key to the successful outcome –trends of local extinctions have actually been reversing, e.g. the return of turtle doves and nightingales.
Closed canopy woodland is not necessarily the “climax” for nature restoration and biodiversity, in many cases it is the halting of this process at different points in this succession that creates greater diversity – periods of disturbance instigate opportunities for different organisms and seed dispersal.
Plant communities and the habitats they shape have evolved with animals eating, digging up, pushing over, trampling and tearing at them for millions of years, it’s partly how they became so rich and complex.
Private gardens are now being considered as a means to help restore nature - this seems a tall order given how fragmented any effort might be, and if approached from a rewilding perspective[CH1] most experts would doubt how a piece of land the size of a garden, even a large one, could accommodate the complex interactions and processes required to help to restore wild systems. And of course a client would protest at keeping a heard of bison in their garden! These are very good points, but perhaps there is a solution right under our noses – a gardener.
Perhaps gardeners can act as those missing herbivores: a gardener can browse like a deer with secateurs, graze like a tarpan with a lawnmower, root like a boar with a fork (with the robin joining in) or turn over the turf like a herd of bison.
Crucially for us garden designers, we can add the vital step here - enlisting the advice of a qualified ecologist or learning some basic ecology and land management practices ourselves. With ecological information in mind we can still design aesthetic spaces, but also create habitats for wildlife: we can select appropriate plants and create management plans for those gardeners who, with their opposable thumbs and tools, can do any kind of advised disturbance that the tiny plot of land needs.
