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.
Habitat loss is something I know and have grown up with. I have seen it and mourned it from a very young age – the old gothic houses we used to drive past that had been abandoned and gone wild, before a developer bought them and turned them into flats; the horse paddock at the end of our road that remained for so long while the town grew around it, until it, too, was lost to a strip of new-build homes. The gradual stamping out of life and love. Habitat loss has remained the same the whole time I’ve known it, there’s just less habitat to lose, now. (Did anyone think to plan for it to stop?)
But climate change threatens to take everything away from us, not least a stable climate in which we can grow food according to predictable weather patterns. It’s already hitting the global south: in the Horn of Africa people are experiencing the longest and most extreme drought on record, causing crops to fail and livestock to die. In India, rising temperatures and droughts are reducing wheat and rice crops, while scorching conditions are preventing farm labourers from being able to work. Add to that the mayhem caused by fire and floods, in countries where there isn’t necessarily the infrastructure to cope with these assaults. Here, in the global north, we are also suffering droughts, dangerous heatwaves, fire, flooding and crop losses – in the summer of 2022 UK crops of berries, peas, broad beans and salad leaves were frazzled in the heat and sun, while in winter we had a tomato shortage due to ‘unseasonal’ snow and ice in southern Spain and Morocco. (Yes, I know, Brexit played its part as well.) As climate scientists repeatedly say on Twitter, ‘You ain’t seen nothing yet.’
I have used the effects on people and food as relatable examples of climate change here because most people think of climate change as affecting people (and usually other people at that). We rarely see or focus on the ecosystems that are collapsing due to global heating, the animals that live in and are a part of them, their roles in keeping those systems functioning. On the news we see skinny polar bears clinging to ever-diminishing icebergs but what do we see of the birds and butterflies moving north to escape the heat? What of the bees that emerge from hibernation in unseasonably mild weather, only to be frozen to death a week later? What of the hedgehogs that go thirsty, the baby birds that go hungry? As the planet warms, its life systems shut down, making plant and animal (including human) existence much more difficult than we have known since the end of the last Ice Age. And it drives me nuts that most of us are just carrying on as if it isn’t happening.
The thing about nature is that it has the means – to a degree – to limit the effects of climate change. Intact ecosystems such as forests, grasslands, oceans and peatlands are ‘carbon sinks’ – natural storage systems that remove atmospheric carbon and other greenhouse gases – and are essential if we are to minimise global heating. But they also help mitigate the effects of climate change: a bed of seagrass or kelp can reduce the velocity of waves hitting shores, and therefore prevent coastal erosion; a river system, complete with beavers, can prevent flooding in towns and cities downstream, while woodlands, peatlands and other terrestrial systems absorb and hold on to water. Gardens are human-made habitats, but they mimic the woodland edge, so they also hold on to water, slow down wind, create shade and provide food and homes for wildlife. In cities they can absorb pollution and help reduce urban temperatures. Crucially, they also link together to form vast corridors that connect other ecosystems (the woodlands, peatlands and other terrestrial systems mentioned above), enabling species to move between them, potentially giving them space to adapt to climate change. Of course, they also absorb and store carbon – in lawns, in the bark of trees, in the sludge at the bottom of garden ponds, in soil, in leaf litter and compost. Gardens are, or at least have the potential to be, an enormous but as-yet-untapped solution to the climate and biodiversity crisis. But what are we doing? Disappearing them beneath plastic and paving. Beneath weed-suppressant membrane and ‘decorative’ purple slate chips. Beneath cars, beneath gravel, beneath entire new homes. Beneath large stones and driftwood to make them look like the beach (my absolute favourite). We need to stop biting the hand that feeds us and we need to repair the hands we have already bitten. And we need to do this yesterday.
Climate change has happened several times in Earth’s 4.6-billion-year history but it happened slowly, over thousands of years, partly because ecosystems were initially able to take the hit. What we’re facing now is the rising of temperatures alongside the chipping away of the very systems that can lessen or even slow its impact. At the exact time we should be halting habitat loss and facilitating landscape recovery (rewilding) for the good of all life on Earth, we are still taking more than we are giving back – it seems we can’t stop ourselves. Temperatures are rising and the clock is ticking.
What if the solution to these problems lies, in part, in our gardens and other green spaces? Not that gardening can stop climate change, but what if gardens could reconnect us with the natural world, make us more aware of the destruction all around us? What if we rise up, garden by garden, park by park, balcony by balcony and do something – anything – to help a bee or a butterfly or a bird or a hedgehog? What would our world look like if more of us were tuned into the life systems that support us? Would we stop our pesticide-laden dog from jumping into the river? Would we switch from eating factory-farmed meat, with its many layers of pollution and trauma, to something kinder and more sustainable? Could we all collectively tread that little bit lighter, for the good of all things, while still pushing for the radical change that’s needed at the top? Would more of us push for that change? I think we would. So many people tell me they don’t bother with their gardens because they are ‘just full of pigeons and crows’, and they will be, if your garden is just decking and plastic. Bring it to life and see what else turns up. Talk to your neighbours and see what they can attract, too. Feed a hedgehog, identify a butterfly, stroke a bee! With 30 million gardens, 27,000 public parks and countless more allotments and other green spaces, not to mention the millions of balconies, patios and rooftop gardens in the UK, we can bring ourselves back to nature, we can rewild ourselves. Together, we can provide food and homes for wildlife, which is struggling as 12,000 years of predictable weather patterns go full bucking bronco and disrupt daily life. We can create corridors to enable wildlife to travel north as the world heats. We can grow plants to provide food, nesting opportunities and places to rest, that offer shade from the sun and shelter from heavy rain. Every single plant we grow will help cool our cities, prevent flooding, absorb carbon and root us back into the world we actually live in. Every insect, bird or mammal we care for will have an extra stab at life, at survival. Every good thing we do will make us feel better and more hopeful, more determined to spread the word and, ultimately, speak truth to power. Surely it’s worth a go?
I also believe our gardens can help some species survive climate change, because when it’s dry we can add water to quench the thirst of mammals and birds, stop leaves shrivelling and keep flowers producing nectar. When there’s little or no natural food we can offer alternatives, like halved apples for winter thrushes, mealworms for robins and kitten biscuits for hedgehogs. We can grow native plants for those that need it now and near-natives for those that are arriving here from the continent. When next door is covered in plastic we can be messy and wild; we can, at least for the time being, control some of the situations in our gardens; we can help the lucky few who have found a way to live among us. In that respect, gardens are some of the most important habitats in the world. If only more of us knew.
We are hurtling towards climate and biodiversity collapse at an astonishing and terrifying rate. I’ll be honest, most of the time I’m completely overwhelmed. But I have a little garden. And every good I do in it feels like a big two fingers to the world of greed and destruction, of climate change and biodiversity collapse, of big oil giants, media moguls and ineffectual governments. Gardening helps me focus on the things I can change, helps me be hopeful about the coming year. It lifts me when nothing else does. I truly believe our gardens and green spaces have the answer to the very root of the problem that’s plaguing the modern world right now: our disconnect from nature and the consequent acceptance of living in a dying world. Let’s not accept, let’s grow!
This book is part memoir and part call to arms. It’s about waking up, noticing things and being better humans. If you’re lucky enough to have a garden, this book is especially for you but it’s also for you if there’s a green space nearby that needs a little love. This book is about climate change and biodiversity, about gardens and parks, it’s about every single leaf and blade of grass that sucks up CO2. It’s about hedgehogs, bees, butterflies and frogs. It’s about a little garden in south Portslade and one terrified, angry gardener. But it’s about you and your garden, too. What will you do to make a difference?
