Monty Don and Alan Titchmarsh Unveil the Garden Revelation: Embrace Rewilding without Fear | Isabella Tree

Celebrity gardeners have joined the rewilding debate, expressing their opposition to applying rewilding principles to gardening. Monty Don, in his passionate objections, describes rewilding gardens as “puritanical nonsense,” while Alan Titchmarsh believes that gardeners have been “brainwashed” by this trend. Titchmarsh has even written to the Lords to express his concerns about the “ill-considered trend” and its potential consequences for botanical richness and wildlife populations.

Unfortunately, both Don and Titchmarsh have misunderstood the true meaning of rewilding a garden. Many mistakenly believe it entails doing nothing and allowing nature to take complete control. However, both Don and Titchmarsh recognize that neglecting a garden will not improve it for wildlife. In reality, rewilding gardening requires the conscious, deliberate interventions of the gardener to maintain a diverse and thriving ecosystem. Without such efforts, aggressive plants can dominate and shade out other species, resulting in a lack of biodiversity and abundance of insects and other forms of life.

Rewilding in its truest sense applies to expansive areas like Alaska, characterized by functioning ecosystems and apex predators, where human intervention can be minimized. However, the majority of land on Earth is already influenced by human activity. Given the current state of our world—depleted, fragmented, developed, and polluted—we must actively intervene at varying degrees to restore and conserve natural processes that are vital for life.

Large-scale rewilding projects involve reviving dynamic river systems and reintroducing keystone species, such as beavers, bison, and water buffaloes, which play significant roles in reestablishing wetlands, soil health, and overall vegetation. On a smaller scale, projects like the Knepp rewilding project in West Sussex utilize domesticated cattle, pigs, and ponies as surrogates for extinct species. Their controlled disturbance creates diverse habitats that are highly beneficial for wildlife. In the absence of apex predators, managing herbivore populations becomes crucial to maximize habitat availability.

Even on an even smaller scale, where free-roaming animals are impractical, tools such as scythes, spades, bulldozers, hedge trimmers, and chainsaws can replicate their natural disturbances. Randomizing and varying the intensity of these interventions, as seen in the wild, allows for the development of complex and dynamic ecosystems in even the smallest rewilding sites.