The Journey to Wilding the Garden
May 2024
It is not until the second week of the month that May as we understand it – the beginning of summer, long, warm days, flowers emerging, crops racing skyward – finally arrives. We waited while lightning, thunderstorms, daily rainfall and cold nights culminated in a large solar flare that created a major geomagnetic disturbance. The night skies were blanketed in a gauzy film of pinks, violets and purples as the aurora borealis shimmered from one end of the country to the other. As if the pages of a story had become glued together, the weather turned and we were plunged straight into the drama – trees appeared to sprout foliage overnight, the hedgerows of hawthorn and cow parsley exploded in frenzied flower, suddenly all was in verdant, lush, exuberant growth.
In the garden, the sun finally shines and ladybirds, shield bugs and dragonflies are everywhere, busy with the responsibilities of making new generations, making up on lost time. The rain has favoured many plants – roses, rock roses and California lilac crowd their stems with flowers and the orchard is a snowstorm of pink and white blossom. In the Rewilded Garden our patience has been rewarded as one of the giant fennels (Ferula communis), now in its third season, begins to form a magnificent flower head that slowly unfurls into a butter yellow candelabra of umbels for the first time. Growing to 2.5m, its statuesque form contributes to the structural complexity we want to build in the garden, mimicking the conditions in the rewilded area of the estate. The crushed concrete and sand in the Rewilded Garden resemble the fennels’ native habitats – chalky or rocky conditions often in mountainous regions in the Mediterranean, Middle East and East Africa. The flowers are pollinated by flies. An often-overlooked group, they can be the dominant pollinators in high altitude or latitude environments where traditional pollinators such as bees are not present. In some estimates, they are said to contribute to the pollination of 70% of food crops. Hoverflies and bee-flies tend to be generalised feeders of pollen, nectar or both, depending on whether they are short or long-tongued species. They are known to favour white or yellow day-flowering (diurnal) plants, so the clusters of the fennels’ many small, open flowers are an obvious draw.
Giant fennel (Ferula communis) flowering for the first time in the Rewilded Garden
Another plant that we’ve seen serving numerous species this month is the hedgerow cranesbill (Geranium pyrenaicum ‘Bill Wallis’). In the first year of planting these delicate violet-purple flowered geraniums were slow to establish, and we feared for their survival. This year, they have positively overrun all the mounds and hollows, seemingly impervious to differing conditions, clearly having set seed last year and thrived. Despite their ecosystem services to pollinators, they were beginning to impede the growth of later emerging plants, so we grazed out roughly a third of them, leaving enough to continue to self-seed.
The delicate flowers of hedgerow cranesbill (Geranium pyrenaicum ‘Bill Wallis’)
In the Kitchen Garden, we’re continuing with imitating the pig-rootling that drives diversity in Knepp’s rewilded landscape. In horticultural terms, a designer would say a spring garden can take care of itself – all is new-leaved and blooming, alliums, roses, geraniums and salvias colouring the scene and scenting the air. The trick is to ensure there is a ‘B’ team waiting just off the field, ready to step in when these star players begin to flag. Just as the pigs clear the grassy sward and allow broad-leaf wildflowers to colonise the space, we edit the profusion of wode and wild marjoram and plant the seedlings of sunflowers and kales, and some unusual spinach substitutes we sowed earlier in the year. New Zealand spinach (Tetragonia tetragonioides) has a curious succulent-type leaf that belies its tasty crunchiness and Caucasian spinach (Hablitzia tamnoides), is a perennial climbing vegetable where both the leaves and new shoots can be eaten. We’ve also been editing the profusion of ox-eye daisies (Leucanthemum vulgare) visited by bees, wasps, butterflies, moths and beetles – we can fill three ton-bags with what we graze out and the Kitchen Garden is still dominated by their cheery, waving white flower heads, leaving plenty to go round. We are also trying to combine plant thinning with providing a harvest for Bradley, our chef at Knepp’s Wilding Kitchen that opened last year. We managed to collect a good-sized amount of unopened ox-eye flower buds for making caper substitutes. We’re intrigued to taste these but we’ll have to be patient and wait a while after Brad’s pickling for the flavour to deepen.
Ox-eye daisy (Leucanthemum vulgare) and the unopened flower buds harvested for capers
The seasons various garden safaris are well underway, this year delving a little deeper into the details of the design and planting, maintenance and produce of the garden, as well as the ecology and wildlife within it. As always, the interactions we have with visitors is as enlightening for us as we hope it is for them. It is particularly interesting discussing this garden experiment in rewilding to hear the views of guests who aren’t totally convinced by the concept or our management. One visitor asked us about a particular West Sussex Grade II listed house and garden open to the public – “Would you have them dig up all their beautiful beds?!”
This idea of well-tended, neat edges and orderly frames being the accepted norm of horticultural excellence is common. Gardens are often designed to show authority, wealth and power and dominating and manipulating nature has a long tradition. From the Romans importing their symmetrical shady avenues and topiary, through André Le Nôtre’s majestic geometric design of the gardens of Versailles in the 1600’s to the idealised view of nature inspired by landscape paintings of the 19th century embodied in the English Landscape movement, the hand of man prevails.
It’s easy to forget too, that many visitors here would have had grandparents who gardened very much in the Victorian style. There is also a social construct – pictured brilliantly below in Sunday Gardening by American illustrator John Philip Falter – equating disorder with laziness.
The American artist John Philip Falter’s 1961 painting ‘Sunday Gardening‘
But this change of mindset, to leap from the negative concept of ‘untidiness’ to a positive one where untidiness represents a huge array of opportunities for all sorts of wildlife is one of the pivotal points of this garden experiment. Our industrialised “civilisation” with its fixation on dominating and exploiting the natural world has clearly reached a tipping point. According to the United Nations, 1,000,000 species are now threatened with extinction.
By the end of the safari tour, the sceptical guest had softened somewhat; “I can appreciate what you’re doing here, but it’s not for me”. But another voice spoke up. “I find it so wonderfully relaxing and tranquil!” Not so different then, from the feelings we experience in nature.
Moy Fierheller Deputy Head Gardener May 2024
Photos courtesy of Karen Finley, Moy Fierheller
What we’re reading;
Flies and Pollination: More than Just Aphid Slayers and Nuisances – Maryland Agronomy News (umd.edu)
Global Extinction Rates: Why Do Estimates Vary So Wildly? – Yale E360
Scott James, A & Lancaster, O, 1977, ‘The Pleasure Garden’, Century
