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7 hours ago
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It’s noisy outside. I forget over winter how loud the garden gets when the imperatives of shagging, fighting for territory, then raising babies become urgent – the sparrows are kicking off, the tits are fighting a turf war and competing wood pigeons are cooing to seduce Susan, the escaped wedding dove who lives on our roof. When I sat in the sun yesterday, the industrious buzz of bees tackling the dregs of cherry blossom was lawnmower-loud, accompanied by “back off” peeps from blackbirds nesting in the ivy.
There was another noise too, though: the rumble of a mini-digger ripping up a nearby garden. They started with the hedge – I thought, actually, that was all they were going to do, because it happens around here a lot. It would have been the third case I’ve spotted in a matter of weeks. The first was proudly pointed out to me by the owner; the second I only saw in the aftermath – a bare row of jagged stumps where there used to be dense leaves. But this time, I realised they had bigger plans: when the hedge was out, they kept digging, clearing away bushes, plants, trees, every inch of anything that ever lived there. By evening, all that remained was a scraped-back trench of bare earth and a skip full of uprooted branches, skeins of ivy, clumps of grass. In the space of one beautiful warm April day, what used to be a garden is not any more.
Aren’t we supposed to be a nation of garden lovers? It doesn’t feel like it. Round here, every year, a handful of front gardens get concreted over: neat timber fences replacing straggly privet (or even blackthorn or holly); paved driveways covering what were patches of mossy, neglected, patchy grass and borders full of thistles and dandelions. And it’s happening almost everywhere: a Royal Horticultural Society (RHS) audit published last year found that nearly half of Britain’s garden space is now paved over. People have their reasons and it’s none of my bleeding-heart business, but every year I surprise myself with the emotion it arouses in me. “God forbid anything should grow,” I mutter as I walk past, uncharacteristically reckless about risking a fight. “God forbid your grandkids should see butterflies.” (I get melodramatic and sanctimonious when I’m sad.)
I’ve interviewed conservationists recently and they talk about gardens with such wonder and reverence – these little oases of oxygen and biodiversity that support “over 50% of the nation’s butterflies, amphibians and reptiles, and more than 40% of our bird and mammal species”, according to the RHS. It’s what the new David Attenborough series, Secret Garden, is about. “Magical places,” Attenborough calls them, some “almost as diverse as a tropical rainforest”. I watched the Bristol episode – a small but beautiful urban garden, supporting hedgehogs, frogs, blue tits, 50 species of bee – and it was funny (well, not funny at all) to be watching this hymn to garden magic as another garden got ripped out.
A “gorgeous fantasy”, a review called it and yes, one in eight households has no garden, and poorer people and ethnic minorities are disproportionately deprived of green space. Even those who do have gardens often don’t have time or resources to tend them, let alone create densely, cleverly planted, diverse wildlife oases. People are busy; gardening feels burdensome or intimidating.
But what anyone who has a corner of outside space can do is nothing. Nothing might be the best thing of all, actually: dandelions and thistles provide nectar and pollen; straggly grass feeds caterpillars; mining bees burrow to lay eggs in bald patches of earth; birds line nests with moss; aphids are food; dead stalks and drifts of unswept leaves are havens and larders. The negative space where you don’t garden can be precisely where the ordinary magic of life happens. The work, I suppose, is mental – letting yourself find something different beautiful; resisting the urge, or external pressure, to keep things tidy.
I know he’s nearly 100, but could we coax Sir David out for a bonus episode, showing us that bog-standard, neglected gardens full of tangled brambles, nettle patches, scrubby bald lawns and overgrown hedges can also be vividly alive and beautiful? His country, and its creatures, need him.
Emma Beddington is a Guardian columnist
