This is for anyone who is interested either in making their garden more nature friendly and/or in developing their understanding of our native trees and wild plants. As well as a resource for inspiration, I offer advice sessions and a range of one-day workshops, short walks & talks and weekend retreats, which you can read more about below - these will be developed on an ongoing basis starting in the autumn 2024.
Our gardens are more than an outdoor room. They are a stepping stone towards nature and a place to begin to be in it and connect with it. But it doesn’t need to stop there. Beyond the boundaries of a our little plots there is a world of beauty and mystery waiting.
The original concept for a garden (from the old German word ‘garten’) was one of enclosure. It suggests a time when protection and safety was needed, and order and control desired. Those motivations might still linger beneath the surface, but the landscape around us is no longer roamed by wild animals and bandits.
Nowadays other concerns preoccupy us, notably environmental ones, and it seems appropriate to see our gardens now not as places closed off from the wider landscape but as part of it. To see both our gardens as places where nature is welcome and the countryside around us as an extension to our garden, to be engaged with and explored - that is a Wilder Garden.
The more we familiarise ourselves with the wilder things, the more we will see the beauty there and be captured by its calming wonder. With knowledge and understanding we begin to relax, and redefine our relationship both with nature and our garden. We can learn to live with some ‘weeds’, see their value to pollinators, recognise them and know how they behave, reclassify a few as wildflowers, or at least as tenacious opportunists to be admired. ‘Pests’ like aphids and slugs become less a nuisance to eradicate and more an indication that we need to attract more birds, hedgehogs and amphibians to consume them - to build up our garden ecosystem, not reduce it.
And the more we inhabit and familiarise ourselves with the countryside, the more we see that it is full of interest, stories, character…. and relevance to our lives.. In particular, it is a chance to rekindle our relationship with trees and wild plants - a connection that goes back forever and has waned only in the last few hundred years. To observe plants in their natural habitat, to forage for food or medicine, or simply to admire them - that is when we want to protect them.
