the rewilded Walled Garden

The potential of our gardens to provide for wildlife and help reverse global biodiversity loss is enormous. At Knepp, our manicured lawns and weeded paths and borders were – ecologically speaking – similar to the ploughed and homogenised arable land that pre-dated our rewilding project on the rest of the Estate. As a result of rewilding, the wider landscape at Knepp is now a complex mosaic of habitats, teeming with wildlife. But can we achieve this in much smaller areas? Can we rewild an outdoor space that many of us consider an extension of our homes?

Our experiment within Knepp’s walled garden is proving that we can, and it’s changing the conventional gardening mindset. Our advisors in this experiment are some of the UK’s most imaginative garden minds: landscape designer Tom Stuart-Smith, James Hitchmough (professor of horticultural ecology at the University of Sheffield), Mick Crawley (emeritus professor of plant ecology at Imperial College, London) and Jekka McVicar (organic gardening expert).

We’re using our experience from the wider rewilding project to spark a new way of thinking about how a garden can function as a dynamic ecosystem. It’s about setting the stage, and then working with nature to create a complex mosaic of habitats to maximise opportunities for insects, birds and other life.

As rewilding gardeners, we become the keystone species – a proxy for the larger animals in the landscape whose disturbance creates opportunities for everything else. This is not about ‘letting go’, allowing a garden to revert to brambles and trees. This is about thinking like a beaver, or a wild boar. It’s about giving nature more space to evolve, intervening judiciously, always looking for greater complexity but trying not to dictate the outcomes.

Prioritising the plants that benefit insects – not just the pollinators but the scavengers, decomposers and insect predators – can have a dramatic impact, and so does varying the topography. We took a radical step and dumped 400 tonnes of crushed brick and concrete onto the former croquet lawn. Creating the kind of lumps and bumps that occur in nature provides pockets of sunlight and shade, damp and dry – encouraging a greater range of conditions for a wider variety of plants.

We’ve planted over 1,000 different species in the garden, chosen with global warming in mind. As a result, the garden is much more resilient to disease, drought and adverse weather conditions.