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?
About Me and My Garden
I grew up in the suburbs of Solihull, a metropolitan borough nine miles south of Birmingham. I never really knew wildlife until adulthood. Not ‘proper’ wildlife. Not the sort of species you see in old Ladybird books, not big birds of prey or badgers or moles or even swallows or house martins (although my granny, who lived in the countryside, would point them out on walks near her house). I knew blue tits and small tortoiseshell butterflies, frogs, worms and moth cocoons. I knew conkers and spiders and ants, pigeon feathers, slugs and snails. I didn’t really know anything wilder than that. But I’ve always craved it. ‘I always knew you’d end up working with the soil,’ says my mum.
Gardening was my way to wilder things. As a child I would lie on my belly and look deep into the thatch of the lawn, at ants crawling among the blades of grass. I would watch blue tits come and go from the tit box, I would move nearly dried-out worms stuck on the pavement, on to the soil (I still do). I have always been drawn to plants and planting, gardens, the outside. I had my first vegetable patch at the age of 10, a room packed with houseplants at 20, my first allotment at 24. But still there wasn’t much wildlife, or nothing that I’d really noticed. I guess it took a while for my eyes to open.
They were opened for me. A red-tailed bumblebee made a nest in an old duvet in my ex’s backyard, and her neighbours complained to the landlord. I searched online for how to move it and, with help from the Bumblebee Conservation Trust, managed to transport it – intact – to my former allotment. With just two stings to the face I fell in love, and suddenly a world opened up that I had barely known existed. I read bumblebee books, learned how to identify the different species (there are 24 in the UK), learned how they live and breed and hibernate. I would go out just to look for bumblebees, see if I could find them in early spring or still on the wing in late autumn. I would pick them up and stroke them, move them from pavement to flower. I would follow instructions on how to make a nest in the hope that, one day, a queen would return and make a nest in my garden. They never have. I’ve rescued and moved more nests since – nests made in walls that were being torn down or in compost bins that were tipped over, or in a bush blocking a doorway or in the ground too near a path. Many have been successful but most had already succumbed to parasites. But none has ever found her way here to breed in my garden. Yet.
I moved on to other species: butterflies, amphibians, birds, flies. I learned as much as I could, bought every book, absorbed every tiny detail of their lives and habits, their needs and … their declines. Most UK species have been in freefall since those days of lying on my belly looking into the thatch. Most have suffered the double whammy of changes in land use (building cities and towns, making farmland more ‘industrial’) and pesticides, including insecticides that kill insects, herbicides that kill the plants insects feed on, and fungicides that make the insecticides more potent. I made it my mission to create as many homes for wildlife in my garden as possible, to understand the needs of these species and use my position as a writer for a well-known gardening magazine to tell everyone how to do the same. I assumed that people, once they knew what was at stake, would want to help wildlife. That they would want to grow flowers for bees and erect boxes for birds. That it wouldn’t be long before we had streets of long grass and bird boxes, nectar-rich flower beds, hedgehog highways and native shrubs and trees. That there would be more wildlife. Cities of wildlife. That we would have more hedgehogs and more birds, more bees and more butterflies and hell, more spiders and earwigs and blow flies, why not? That one day there would be more, not less. Not even less. Not ever the quietness there is now. Because we knew about the declines and we had the power and knowledge to stop them. Why would we let things get worse? Why would we let species disappear?
In her 1962 book Silent Spring, Rachel Carson documented the chipping away of life at the hands of those who used the pesticide DDT, which not only killed insects but was also found to thin the shells of birds’ eggs, meaning few birds had successful breeding attempts. She died two years after her book was published and didn’t live to see DDT banned across the world (in the US in the 1970s and the UK in the 1980s). Neither did she live to know that it’s still used in some parts of the world today and persists in our oceans as a ‘forever chemical’. Nor did she live to see the continued destruction of the natural world, the habitat loss, the ‘progress’. I’m glad. To think her silent spring would have been so noisy and raucous to my ears some 60 years later is the cruellest irony. How would she have coped with the silence there is today?
I will never know the abundance of life my parents and grandparents knew, which they probably ignored and took for granted. I wish I could go back to see the abundance of species in childhood because, even though I saw very little, I know now how much more there was 35 years ago. I fill my garden with plants for wildlife, make spaces for only the wild things. And yet still it’s quiet. Still, there are few flies buzzing around my house in summer, there are few butterflies on my buddleia. There’s an eerie quietness that goes with the realisation that you can’t hear bees buzzing. Where are they? Why aren’t they in my wildlife garden? I’m surrounded by concrete but some of us are growing flowers. Is it enough? Will there ever be enough?
I garden for the wild things, for my sanity, for the child with her head in the thatch. I want there to be more wildlife. I want swifts in my nest boxes, butterflies on my buddleia. I want ants and slow worms and earwigs and caterpillars. I want fat hedgehogs that are fat on beetles, not cat biscuits. I want a full clutch of tits in the tit box. I want abundance and noise and to stop worrying about every last quiet thing. Is that too much to ask?
Home is a small Victorian terrace built for railway workers, in Portslade-by-Sea, just outside Brighton. It’s urban with an industrial past; it used to be called Copperas Gap, owing to the extraction of stones made of iron pyrites (copperas), which were used to make sulphuric acid. There was a windmill at the bottom of my road until the 1870s. The Victorian houses that replaced it are lovely but – unlike West Hove, which butts up against Portslade via a busy high street – there are no street trees. Now there’s a busy port in place of a beach and cliffs, described proudly as ‘the industrial centre of Brighton and Hove’. It was its own urban district until 1974, when it joined the borough of Hove and is now part of the city proper.
Portslade is considered by some as the slightly rough-and-ready cousin of Brighton and Hove. It’s not as pretty or as genteel as its fancier relatives. But it’s cheaper to live here and much, much quieter. It’s close enough to the South Downs that I can walk there from my house. Plus, we have bigger gardens than those in the city centre, and hedgehogs.
When I moved here four years ago, the garden was a fairly standard 1960s design, with patios at either end of its modest 14 metres and a concrete path to one side of a tiny lawn, overgrown with enormous non-native shrubs like Japanese spindle and Californian lilac. Someone had planted a eucalyptus tree less than a metre from the back door. The small front garden was covered in weed-suppressant membrane and stones. I ruthlessly ripped out all the plants, shrubs and eucalyptus in the back, along with the back patio and concrete path. In the front I took up the stones and membrane, replacing them with a riot of pollinator favourites: viper’s bugloss, dyer’s chamomile, lungwort, primroses, cranesbills, knapweeds. ‘Oh, you live in the house with the flowers,’ say the dog walkers in the park. ‘I always cross the road so I can look at them.’
While the front garden bloomed I worked on the back: I planted native trees (hawthorn, rowan and silver birch), a tiny mixed hedge of hazel, more hawthorn and things like guelder rose and field rose, and then planted more guelder rose, hazel and European spindle as shrubs in the borders. Among them I planted flowers: honesty, foxgloves, snowflakes, hellebores, primroses. I laid wildflower turf – proper turf, with lots of lovely native grasses for caterpillars to eat, and wildflowers for bees and other pollinators to feed from. I trained climbers up to the tops of the walls for nesting birds and punched holes in the bottom of them for hedgehogs to travel through. Along the entire side of the shed I made an enormous habitat pile out of the things I had ripped out, which is now home to everyone except me. I drilled holes in the trellis for solitary wasps, I made a log pile in the spaces beneath and behind the bench.
Smack in the middle of the garden I dug a pond. It’s big – some might say too big – but I wanted something that would bring lots of wildlife and, as a general rule, the bigger the pond, the more species it attracts. It’s kidney shaped, with a maximum depth of 60cm in the middle, graduating gently to shallow edges, as a good wildlife pond should be. It has a ‘beach’ of stones at either end, for birds to bathe and tadpoles to congregate, and hedgehogs to enter and exit easily. It has natural edges planted with grasses, primroses and trefoils. It has a dragonfly perch (a strategically placed stick for dragonflies to perch on) and a range of aquatic plants growing beneath, on and above the surface.
Some wildlife came straight away, and most of it came for the pond. Water bears and other microscopic life I couldn’t see, but then masses of flies mated and laid eggs on the surface, followed by water beetles and backswimmers, dragonflies and damselflies. One day I came home to find hundreds of backswimmer nymphs bobbing about in the water, and I watched them grow into adults and stay to lay eggs of their own. Other days I’ve watched egg-laying blue-tailed damselflies, mating common darter dragonflies. I’ve seen a sparrowhawk breakfast on a goldfinch at the pond edge, red mason bees take pond mud to line their nests. I’ve rescued half-drowned male wool carder bees that were fighting for territory over nearby bird’s foot trefoil and had accidentally fallen in (or been pushed?). I’ve seen bathing birds, from blackbirds, house sparrows and robins to goldfinches, chiffchaffs, crows and herring gulls.
One day I caught sight of a frog hanging at the water’s edge, as frogs do, for insects. I was so excited. I had high hopes of frogspawn the following spring but nothing came. They took a chance the year later, spawning for the first time the night before my 40th birthday – the best present I could have woken up to. And it wasn’t just a few; as if from nowhere, masses of frogs took to the water and spawned in great vigorous parties. I watched them through binoculars from the kitchen: frogs arriving to the pond and being ambushed, males fighting for females, the slow queue to the perfect spawning spot. I couldn’t count the clumps. After about two weeks they were spawning on spawn, completely filling one shallow ‘beach’ and then starting on the other. I’d never seen anything like it.
Summer was a riot of jumping froglets. They were like fleas, hopping about everywhere, in the borders, in the grass, on the patio. I was terrified of standing on one, of disturbing them. But I was so happy they were using the garden.
There are toads here, too. The first one I found was dead, lying on its back with its tongue hanging out. I’ve since found them in the habitat pile at the side of the shed, and occasionally they turn up on the night camera. Once, a neighbour brought me one she’d spotted in the road and thought it ‘must be on its way to your garden, Kate.’ It wasn’t, I popped it at the bottom of the habitat pile where it remained safe for the day, and then set the camera on the back gate to see if it would pick it up at night. Sure enough, as night fell, the toad headed out of the garden. Where was it going? There must be another pond somewhere. I scoured Google Earth to see if I could spot one in neighbouring gardens, and came to nothing.
The trees I planted were tiny whips but they have grown and now don’t sway when birds and squirrels land in them. The hawthorn and rowan bear blossom and berries, the silver birch catkins and seeds – all food for different species. There are bird boxes for nesting tits, although they have nested with me only once, and there are kitten biscuits for hedgehogs. There are bee hotels and hedgehog boxes and a bat box and swift boxes. There are neighbours with paved gardens but I’m working on that.
Because it’s not just my garden that matters, or my garden alone that can make a difference. I’m grateful for the alleyway (known in Sussex as a ‘twitten’ but you may know it as a ‘ginnell’) that connects my garden to eight sets of neighbours, a whole other road of gardens and, eventually, a small park. It’s quite brambly in places and some people use it as a dumping ground – both those who live here and those who don’t. But this is how the wildlife gets in. The hedgehogs, frogs, toads and slow worms all enter and exit via my garden gate and travel by stealth along a century-old coal route, in and out of the wider landscape.
Just one block from a busy high street in an urban, industrial port, with small gardens, many of them paved over or covered in plastic, you’d be forgiven for thinking wildlife doesn’t live here. But you’d be wrong: there are hedgehogs, frogs, toads and slow worms. There are birds and there are insects. There aren’t many of some species – songbirds are quite rare here, due, I think, to a dense population of cats, squirrels, magpies and crows; the nests always get predated. And I don’t know how well others are doing or how numerous they are but they are here, so I can help make life better for them. In my lawn there are nesting mining bees, in my long grass and knapweeds there are caterpillars. In summer a bat catches mosquitoes over the pond, in spring and autumn the garden becomes a stepping stone for chiffchaffs and willow warblers, on their way to and from their breeding grounds. Plenty of species either don’t live in the area or haven’t found the garden yet but I always keep an eye out for them. That’s half the joy of wildlife gardening: wondering who will turn up next.
In short, the garden is just beginning. By the time you read this it will be at least six years old, the trees and shrubs growing into the space created for them, the pond hopefully hosting a complex variety of life. I sit or stand at the kitchen window that looks out on to the garden and I watch and dream of wildlife. I imagine the space when it’s grown, make plans, see what’s working, laugh. Sometimes I cry and I sit on the floor, looking out until I feel better, until I see a frog or a sparrow, a butterfly, a hedgehog. The garden is a part of me as much as it is the wider landscape, and I am a part of it. We grow together but we struggle together, too. We help each other out, me providing water to keep it going, it providing life to distract me from The Big Things. I hope the wildlife will come to know my garden as a safe space, an oasis in a desert of plastic and concrete, amidst unpredictable weather and humans with their collective fist on the self-destruct button. I hope I can encourage my neighbours to do more for the species that live here, that we can all create better habitats, better connectivity and a better understanding of what is actually needed to save species and improve our world. I hope, across the whole country and indeed the whole globe, we can fall back in love with our environment and treat it better, through the simple act of tending the spaces outside our back doors. I hope, I hope, I hope.
April
My story begins in spring, 2022. So far, the year has mostly been dry and above averagely warm – we had the mildest New Year’s Day on record and less than half of January’s average amount of rainfall. I found my first paired-up couple of frogs on 26 January, which sent me into a meltdown because it was so horribly early, but my first snowdrop on 29 January, which is about the same as it always is. Conditions remained mild for February but grew stormy: Dudley, Eunice and Franklin all occurred within a five-day period, bringing strange purple but sunny skies, fallen trees, disruption to roads and railway networks and flooding to parts of the north. Here it brought enormous sticks for our dog, Tosca, who kept trying to bring them into the house but couldn’t work out how to get them through the door. Most of the country saw above-average rainfall during the storms but in Brighton it remained dry.
Spring is a time of greeting old friends: the first hairy-footed flower bee of the year, the first great fat bumblebee queen, the first butterfly, the first flute-like call of the blackbird on the roof. I press my ear to the trunk of my silver birch and listen for the rising of sap. I marvel at the mitten-like leaf buds of my rowan. I watch bumblebee queens taking baths in the bright orange pollen of crocus flowers, great tits gathering caterpillars to feed their young. Every day there’s a new friend to greet, a new bee, a wasp, a butterfly, a frog. I’m so grateful they survived winter. ‘Hey bee,’ I say, ‘you made it!’
And so it’s April. Still very dry but now cold. There are lots of bees in the garden and I’m grateful so many seem to have survived hibernation. There are fat bumblebee queens but also mining bees in the lawn and borders, red mason bees in the bee hotels, hairy-footed flower bees on the lungwort and primroses. They have everything they need in my garden, but only because I’m watering it. I’m so troubled by the lack of rain.
Spring is happening but it’s muted, it’s less than it should be. The ground is parched, the plants are stunted and there just isn’t the volume of insects I have known before. Everything should be lush and green. Caterpillars should be feasting on foliage, beetles scuttling among the thatch. And aphids, hoverflies, leafminers and millions of other critters that most of us never even notice, should be feasting, breeding and then being eaten by species further up the food chain. And they are, but there are fewer of them than usual, and they’re struggling.
The hedgehogs are struggling, too. Rescue centres are filling up with dehydrated and hungry hogs who can’t find enough natural food – typically caterpillars, beetles and earthworms despite their reputation for eating slugs and snails (they do eat slugs and snails but far fewer than we would like them to). I’m keeping a close eye on them. I have a small trail camera, which I position by the hedgehog boxes or by the feeding station, or looking out over the pond or a bit of grass, or the bird bath that has become a de facto hedgehog watering hole, and each morning I drink tea and watch hedgehog videos in bed, a ritual I have come to love since moving here. I live in hope that I might spot them mating or bringing hoglets into the garden – the closest I have got is seeing a male circling a female as a precursor to mating but the camera shut off before I could find out if he was successful. Still, without mating (which, I realise, is an odd thing to obsess over at breakfast time but is a nice distraction from the weather), I can see how the hedgehogs are doing. I can watch their gait for limps, count ticks, see if their eyes are OK, see if they’re drinking and feeding enough. It all adds up to monitoring the population, even if I’m probably monitoring the same ones several times a night.
There are two hedgehog boxes filled with straw in the side return, partially hidden by pots planted with hazel, ivy, wildflowers and herbs. At this time of year there’s always lots of activity here, as the males search for females to mate with (often while maintaining huge erections). I watch them trundle down the path, looking in one and then the other. They use the boxes as sort of ‘bachelor pads’, sleeping in them for several days at a time and then moving on to another den somewhere else. The boxes are usually empty in winter, so apparently not good enough for hibernation, and I’ve never had a female make a nest in one. But they seem perfect for nomadic, horny males.
