Contents
Prologue
About Me and My Garden
April
May
June
July
August
September
October
November
December
January
February
March
April
May
June
Epilogue
Acknowledgements
30 Million Gardens for the Planet
Reading List
Helpful Websites
Index
Prologue
‘Darling, look out of the window! Everything’s fine!’
In my twenties I lived in Manchester, on the sixth floor of a block of council flats just off the A57, or Mancunian (Mancy) Way. A short walk from Manchester Piccadilly station and the city centre, it was grey, noisy and built-up. I loved every piece of it; my first stab at adulthood, at living on my own. I painted my bedroom silver and slept on a mattress on the floor and I grew sweetcorn, tomatoes and courgettes in pots on the balcony (I was 24 – of course I grew sweetcorn on the balcony).
I worked and played in the bars and clubs of Manchester’s gay village and I would walk home in the early hours, keys poking through my clenched fist to protect me from would-be attackers, and I would see hedgehogs.
It never occurred to me that the hedgehogs might be in trouble, that they might not have the best time foraging beneath the ring road, beneath the noise and stench of the city. It occurred to me only that their presence was magical, and that seeing them on the grassy wastelands around my council estate, as I stumbled home from parties and nightclubs, was everything I loved about being alive.
Their home and mine was urban and gritty but there were trees, areas of long grass, council houses with messy gardens. There was a little park with cherry trees. Not much but enough. The area was unloved, had an air of urban neglect, but I soon learned that it was ripe habitat for hedgehogs, along with the birds, bees and butterflies that would visit my balcony, too.
Years later I had a job in Manchester, and in the morning before my train left to take me back to Brighton I went for a walk, to the gay village, to the bars and the clubs, and finally to the estate where I used to live. The flats had had a makeover – the balconies were now sealed with airtight windows that presumably made the flats warmer and more soundproof but which further separated the residents from the natural world. The gardens of the houses had been paved over and there seemed to be more space for parking. It wasn’t just the people who would be suffering from the loss of green space; I wondered how the hedgehogs were getting on.
I posted about my trip on Twitter. An old mate, Choel, who lived two floors beneath me in the flats and still lives locally now, got in touch to say the hedgehogs were gone. The council had signed a PFI (Public Finance Initiative) with a private company to manage the area. They felled trees, paved over gardens and bulldozed the small park with cherry trees. They built the residents an allotment, but erected a huge fence around it, meaning hedgehogs couldn’t get in or out. She sent me photos of entire gardens in skips, of upended trees in full blossom with bird feeders still hanging from their branches. She told me she had found 10 dead hogs, and others out in the day and underweight. Eventually, she started rehoming them, going out at night and rounding them up to take to a rescue centre, where they were fed and watered before being released somewhere they actually had a chance of living. She regrets leaving it so long before she acted; she wishes she could have saved the dead 10. But she did save seven. I’m grateful she noticed them at all.
We cry habitat loss but it’s theft, really – no one is so careless as to lose their home. We call it progress, but how dare we? How many people, throughout the planning process, will have thought of or cared about hedgehogs? Or considered any of the other residents, both human and wild? The management company would have conducted an ecology survey, no doubt. But, as is often the case, it was probably done in winter when the hedgehogs were hibernating (I’m sorry to say there is such a thing as a dodgy ecologist). Did residents other than Choel and me know there were hedgehogs on that estate? Did anyone care? The council paved over the gardens to save money on maintenance. The trees and park were lost because the car parks that replaced them can be a source of income. The residents placed there by the council – many of whom are vulnerable migrants and sex workers – would not necessarily have known or thought about those habitats, making them so much easier to destroy.
Manchester City Council is not alone in its apparently wanton destruction of green spaces. In 2014, a now-infamous deal to remove nearly half of Sheffield’s 36,000 trees led to public outcry and a huge campaign to save them (they saved some, and their efforts led to the formation of a city-wide tree protection group that recently earned Sheffield ‘Tree City of the World’ status). In 2023 Plymouth Council ordered 110 mature trees to be felled in the middle of the night. The ill-fated HS2 project is still bulldozing through ancient woodland (again, in the name of ‘progress’). Then there’s the London Resort theme park that was nearly built on Swanscombe peninsula, an area of nationally important grasslands, coastal habitats, scrub and wetlands that not only buffers the coast from erosion but also stores vast amounts of carbon while providing homes for countless rare and threatened species. Thanks to a massive campaign, London Resort withdrew its application, but the threat of losing the land still looms large.
There are many more micro-aggressions, micro-destructions, that go under the radar including those, of course, in our gardens. There are around 30 million gardens in the UK but the trend to lock them beneath paving and plastic grass is growing. Back in 2011, Greenspace Information for Greater London (GiGL) published a study of the changes they’d observed in London’s ‘garden vegetation structure’ from 1998 to 2008. They used drones to look at tree canopies and vegetation and noted the colour of the ground – green for grass and grey for paving. They concluded that hard surfaces had increased by 26 per cent over the decade, equivalent to the loss of two Hyde Parks every year. As a young journalist I attended the press conference and put up my hand and asked, ‘If you measured the colour of gardens from green to grey, how did you account for the replacement of living lawns with plastic grass?’ They couldn’t answer my question and, after some hesitation, muttered that, perhaps, the loss of green space was more than they had been able to quantify in this particular assessment.
I was sorry to have thrown a spanner in the works of an otherwise excellent study. Plastic grass was only in its infancy in 2011, having started to be used in gardens in the 1990s – there probably wasn’t much laid in London between 1998 and 2008. But now? A study by Aviva in 2022 found that, nationally, 1 in 10 homeowners with outside space has replaced at least some of their garden’s natural lawn with plastic grass, with a further 29 per cent planning to or considering it. That means, of the 30 million gardens in the UK, 3 million have been lost beneath plastic. Where does that leave hedgehogs?
In Manchester City Centre my old mate Choel witnessed the local extinction of a community that, 20 years previously, had made me feel alive. But everywhere we are all chipping away at the very core of life itself: housing estate by housing estate, garden by garden, paving stone by paving stone, roll of plastic grass by roll of plastic grass. And there’s more now, isn’t there? Among all that’s wrong with the world, climate change has finally taken centre stage, as raw and destructive as a skip full of blossoming cherry trees. As if hedgehogs haven’t enough to deal with, they’re now dying of heat and thirst.
