Alan Titchmarsh: ‘Rewilding is not the answer to making our country a green and pleasant land’
By Hannah Stephenson, PA
Gardening legend Alan Titchmarsh has warned that the trend towards rewilding – letting nature take care of itself to encourage wildlife and biodiversity – should not displace traditional gardening.
“Rewilding does not mean letting it [the garden] lie fallow and doing nothing with it.There’s a misconception abroad that the only way to get more wildlife into your garden is to rewild.”
Titchmarsh, 73 – TV and radio presenter, chat show host, documentary-maker and bestselling author – reveals his sentiments in his latest book The Gardener’s Almanac, and is keen to elaborate today.
“One friend who has done a survey of his wildflower meadow and of his garden found more wildlife in the garden than in the wildflower meadow. It’s a case of balance – there’s room for both – but rewilding is not the answer to making our country a green and pleasant land. “There are plenty of places where it is important – headlands and farms, the countryside in general, woodland and riverbanks, roadside verges. It should not and does not need to replace a well cultivated garden which has a wide range of species in it, which is equally as good and in many cases better for wildlife – and it’s beautiful too.”
Mental wellbeing
“One cannot go on, on one hand saying how important gardens are for mental wellbeing, and then knocking somebody for having stripes on their lawn, because it makes them feel good to have stripes on their lawn. Therefore it’s doing them good, and it’s also doing the blackbirds, the thrushes, the starlings good, who can get worms out of lawns but can’t get them out of long grass, and solitary bees, who can burrow into lawns.”
Balance is the key, he insists.“It’s when everybody goes wholesale into one thing, you know, it’s not quite like that.”
Pretty difficult
Rewilding and keeping things looking pretty is a very hard thing to do, he agrees.
“I have a wildflower meadow, which we cut in early September when the seeds have fallen, and taken all the hay and clods of grass off – you have to or it kills what’s underneath – and it won’t get cut again ’til next year. It was seeded as a wildflower meadow with a seed mix that’s good for chalk downlands, which we’re on,” says Titchmarsh. “It’s beautiful.We have cowslips in March and it goes through to moon daisies in April and May, and then scabious and knapweed and one or two orchids coming through. But it’s a meadow, not a garden. “I get loads of butterflies, moths, bees and birds in my garden as well as in my wildflower meadow. It [rewilding] has caught on in a way which I feel a bit sad about, if people aren’t being realistic.
Photo: Hannah Stephenson/PA
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