Accidental Ecology

I am staying with my sister in Brooklyn. Boerum Hill is a Historic District, with unblemished terraces of brownstone and brick, and large trees. Behind the houses, which are often divided into apartments like this one, residents have decent-sized gardens. They don’t use them much; the glamorously-named Gowanus Canal is nearby and in this once-swampy lowland, the biggest mosquitoes you’ve ever seen congregate by the front door, zapping you as you run inside. They rather put you off going out the back.

People are also really weird about gardens. Megan’s apartment is rented, and her garden is scrappy, with a few small trees and old pathways. A liquidambar once stood by her living room window. Although its dramatic autumn colour has recommended this tree to British gardeners, liquidambar, or sweet gum, is just another weed tree here, with spiky balls that are a nuisance when they land on a hard surface. The neighbour two doors down didn’t like finding them on her terrace, and instead of reaching for a broom, she persuaded Megan’s landlord into having the tree removed. After that, the heat in this apartment has been more intense in summer, with unfiltered light fading the contents.

Megan’s actual next-door neighbour lives in a house that her family has shared for generations. She doesn’t have this sense of entitlement, but she and the tree-basher do have anxiety in common, and her garden is proof. Until recently, it had been tended carefully by the old family matriarch. When she died, no-one knew how to look after her plants. They carried on in their own way, with untended herbage growing up around them, including wildflowers that had been waiting in the soil, or were sown by birds. The view from Megan’s kitchen window made washing up a pleasure; there was a lot of life flying around, as well as unseen activity closer to the ground, which brought in brightly coloured cardinals, woodpeckers and goldfinches.

Feast or Famine

But as biodiversity grew, the backyard garden next door became a source of angst for the new matriarch. She stopped to talk one day as my sister and I were putting some plants into Megan’s front garden, when I was staying there last time. She was so embarrassed, she said. She had to do something about the backyard; her mother had loved it so much and would be horrified by its current state. Oh no, we said, please leave it. “Your garden is a triumph!” My sister tried the line that here was a garden writer from England (me), admiring her garden, but she wasn’t listening.

The following week, a hard-working labourer spent three days cutting back and removing everything except for two leggy roses and a large evergreen shrub. He spread the ground with landscape fabric, followed by a wood chip mulch that is dyed red. This seems to be the most popular colour for dyed mulch, the ‘go-to’ solution for minimising gardening. Now, stepping stones tiptoe through the mulch, leading nowhere. An unused swing seat faces the big, light-sucking bush, and a bare fence. Of course, the birds didn't return, but the squirrels persist, gaily digging up fabric and tossing the mulch around.

Unfortunately, this ‘garden journey’ — from highly tended, to gently abandoned, to desperate measures — is something I’ve experienced before. During most of my 17 years of village life in Leicestershire, there was a sweet old lady next door, whose garden was separated from mine by a waist-high fence. She used to fret about slugs: “We’ll get there in the end,” she’d say, liberally scattering bright blue pellets, all the while conscientiously filling her bird feeders. It was a classic cottage garden, with bulbs and perennials coming up year on year, and a crooked apple tree in the middle.

My neighbour would lean on the fence and say, ‘I see you’ve let the garden go.’ It was more of a generational thing than a clash of styles. I realise now, looking at photos, that my own garden was abundant in a different way: I had filled it mainly with old-fashioned roses, which seemed to work with the fruit trees and hawthorn hedges that were already there. It was easy gardening, and it so happens that plants in the Rosaceae family score highly as 'plants for wildlife', which I didn’t know at the time, but I could see it.

Unwittingly, we had created between us a mosaic of habitats, at least after she released her grip on the poisons. Our semi-detached farm worker’s cottages were surrounded by fields and hedgerows, and crumbly stone walls. It was an undeclared SSSI, a Site of Special Scientific Interest, which can be said for intensely-managed (but chemical-free) gardens everywhere.

When my nice old neighbour eventually left, the house was empty for a few years and those were the blissful times: grass grew long, with wildflowers (and escapees from my garden) covering any bare soil. Meanwhile, the ornamental plants kept performing. A family of hedgehogs arrived after very little time, and like the garden next door in Brooklyn, it was wonderful to see how plant height and volume in the middle of a garden appeals to birds; perching and diving is what they love. This garden was slowly being buried under impermeable surfaces when we moved away.

A couple of months ago I was listening to Fergus Garrett deliver the National Garden Scheme’s annual lecture. I was struck by the fact that when he commissioned a (by now, well-known) biodiversity audit of Great Dixter in East Sussex, the highest number of butterflies and moths, bees, wasps, flies, beetles and bugs were not recorded by the pond or in the meadow but in one of the most intensely managed areas of the ornamental garden. The flower garden at Dixter had never been run in a consciously ecological way. ‘Nothing in that garden was chosen because it was good for a pollinator,’ said Fergus. ‘It was chosen because we liked the look of it, or we could use it.’ You might call this instinctive ecology. The small gardens that I've been talking about were more a case of accidental ecology, but either way, the absence of chemicals is a key factor, as well as diversity in plants. The level of detailed care is a moot point.

Great Dixter has to be considered as highly managed: one-fifth is bedded out every year. It’s not spic and span: the old house and garden have charm, a word that is often used to describe the place. Self-seeded wildflowers billow out of walls, creatures live in the crevices. Even the compost heaps have charisma.

The different areas of Great Dixter are like a village, composed of a mosaic of habitats, run along diverse systems. Any actual village or town could do something like this, and would have done in the past. It’s the patchwork element that counts, but also a complete lack of chemicals, in every diverse component. The audit's ecology lead said that Dixter was one of the richest sites he’d surveyed in 30 years. Says Fergus: ‘Dixter’s success is down to growing wild plants next to garden plants.’

This is how to charm the birds out of the trees. It’s easier than people think.