Gardening for biodiversity - why changing the rules is good news for garden lovers!

There's been a revolution in gardening over the past few years. Ten years ago you would have been advised to mow your lawns weekly, to scatter slug pellets to deter slugs and snails, to take leaves off borders and take them to the local tip. You'd be expected to spray against pests, to dig your borders over and generally keep up a relentless program of control against nature. But now many of these jobs are being questioned and they're being questioned It's not just a kind of few fringe individuals suggesting that we do things differently. The new way of gardening is being spearheaded by the leading gardening authority in the United Kingdom which is the Royal Horticultural Society. So I went down to the RHS to talk to Principal Horticultural Advisor Lee Hunt and Senior Wildlife Specialist Helen Bostock to find out why gardening is changing and what it means for our gardens. The RHS has just opened a new research centre called Hilltop which they call the home of gardening science and anyone who worries that gardening with nature rather than trying to control it means they've got to have an untidy garden will be hugely reassured by the wildlife garden beside Hilltop. Although it's wildlife friendly it's a smart contemporary garden and that beautiful sculpture that you can see actually houses birds nesting materials and also bug hotels. So birds and bugs can fly in and out of the slats and yet to us it's just a beautiful modern sculpture. At the heart of all this is gardening for biodiversity and so I asked Helen why biodiversity matters. So biodiversity is one of those buzzwords which it can be a bit difficult to know what that actually means but it's really it's really simple. It's the variety of living organisms whether that be both plant and animal and that can be in a given location or it can be globally and of course at a global scale many of us are now aware that biodiversity is really struggling. We're losing species so we can't necessarily do everything to support biodiversity at a global scale but many of us have a little patch of garden or yard and that will mean that we've got a space that we can make a difference to the biodiversity that's on our doorsteps and I think that that delivers in two ways. One it's important because for our own sort of enjoyment and well-being wouldn't our gardens be a poorer space if they didn't you know have the birds in them didn't have you know the sort of creatures buzzing but it goes a bit deeper than that because that wildlife that biodiversity is having a different function what's called an ecosystem function. So an example might be let's say if we didn't have springtails and composting worms our composting heaps just wouldn't work as well you know we wouldn't have that decomposition of organic material so we'd lose out on that service or equally if we didn't have snails or perhaps caterpillars and so we perhaps wouldn't have the song thrushes that come to our garden and they in turn wouldn't be eating the berries off our holly trees and spreading the seeds so there's all these sort of knock-on services and functions that biodiversity performs within a garden and without it we would actually you know be really struggling. What it means is that instead of seeing elements of your garden separate and jobs in your garden separate everything actually feeds into itself. For example making a compost heap and controlling slugs and snails used to be two separate jobs but actually they are related to each other because slugs actually are part of what makes a compost heap work. The RHS is actually discouraging the word pests now and is encouraging people to see that a certain amount of damage can be tolerated in the garden and to be honest in the days when we had really lethal slug pellets we still had slug and snail damage so I don't think anything's changed there. Amongst the advice is that if you have a wildlife friendly garden then actually there are beetles and there are birds that will eat your slugs and snails so they can do the work for you and I've heard and I wonder if this is true that the importance of a garden in particular even if it's a really tiny one is that it's like a wildlife corridor between bigger spaces because if you had a wonderful space like this amazing place we've got here in Wisley which is obviously fantastic for wildlife but if you've then got a town near it and then there's another space on the other side of the town the wildlife can't actually get from one space to another then they can't reproduce and if anything comes along to knock them out they would just be knocked out. This connectivity this this sort of corridor of gardens as it were is extremely important because things are happening that put pressure on on lots of different species and they need to be able to move between spaces it might be that they have to move to higher ground or further north could be that conditions are just not suitable for them that means that they've they've got a way to you know sort of stay connected so don't feel you're not part of that bigger picture. And so what can we do what would you say to somebody if we're thinking about a middle-sized garden which I always say is sort of under an acre and I used to say more than a courtyard but actually now courtyards are quite large so if you've got anything from a courtyard upwards what would you say we really need to do? I think if I had to pick three things you know just go out and do them sort of thing that you don't have to necessarily replan your whole garden the first thing would be to add water so water is a basic element for any anything living it can be anything from a bird bath up through to a full-blown wildlife friendly pond you know if you want to go the whole hog but yeah a little bit deeper perhaps water if you're wanting to encourage things like amphibians and discourage certain things such as mosquitoes if those are a problem in your area perhaps avoid the really shallow water dishes but adding water is such a wonderful thing and can be done really quickly second thing would be to plant a tree and again whether that's a tree in a pot if you don't have a planting opportunity in the ground if you've got a courtyard garden but ideally get it in the ground because it's going to be able to take care of itself a lot better and also do all those functions that trees do so wonderfully so they cast shade which helps with cooling of our environment they absorb some of the sort of pollutants and dust particles in the air and they just have that wonderful seasonal quality you know they're giving an interest normally in every time of the year even deciduous trees that are going to be dropping their leaves and from a wildlife perspective you've got a whole vertical dimension that you are achieving with a tree that you can't necessarily do you know just at ground or knee level so it's really sort of providing you know a sort of much bigger architectural feature that many more things can nibble on the leaves of the tree to be honest because it's a little bit above our eye line and we're probably less aware of and then the third thing that i would go ahead and you know sort of just do this is possibly the most simple thing and that's if you have a patch of lawn patch of grass just simply go a bit easy on the mowing of it you know try something a bit different this year maybe take a strip around the edge or maybe take a whole section in the middle whatever it is that that takes your fancy and just hold back from mowing in order to to really sort of make an effect i would give it a go for a good 46 weeks and that way you'll start to see if there's something a bit more interesting in your lawn perhaps a few clovers and things like that and then suddenly you've you've got things that have opportunity to flower and bring in things like pollinating insects but you can go the full hog and maybe do a strip that that you leave long you know for the whole of summer and then things that actually feed on the grass itself so you might get grasshoppers you might get larvae of caterpillars of moth species some of the meadow species might come in so it's really about playing around but that's such a simple trick and actually it's quite a nice one because you know we we do less less jobs for us and so taking so many expert gardeners here where you work what would you say to people who are afraid of never getting the lawn back into shape again i hear those concerns and it can be a bit daunting especially if you've not had a go before but i've done it for many years in my own garden and we've been doing it for a good few years here at wizzy you know you're in a big you know public garden we have you know over a million visitors each year it's incredible and it's not as damaging as you might think in fact if anything it's it's quite a relief on the grass i would say that you don't want to leave that grass long indefinitely that we do still need to take off some of the dead material so even if you don't do it at the end of summer make sure it's done really sort of at you know at the end of winter before the grass starts growing again and provided you just rake that up add that to your compost heap that will make space for air to get in and light to get in and and for the new grass blades to come through but people often quite worried even just about lawns turning brown during a drought for example and but again the vast majority of that brown dead looking grass will actually you know green up as soon as the rains return but no allowing it to grow long for the summer isn't damaging on the grass you might have to think a little bit about how you're going to cut it so a very practical point might be that it's become too long for a mower to get over so you might have to get in there perhaps with some hedging shears if it's not too big an area i'm now the proud owner of a scythe i'm getting myself on a on a course this summer though because i i don't have the skills yet to to really wield it effectively but for larger areas scything is something that's certainly increasing in popularity other than sort of tweaking your your mowing equipment i would say yeah don't be afraid about embracing a little bit of long grass i asked lee hunt if there were things we should really avoid in the garden there are a few things that would be really helpful if we didn't do in the garden so what would you say are the big mistakes in terms of biodiversity in the garden so often we inherit lots of these things so it's not always even our fault if we think about having walls and fences they're not very biodiverse but if we replace them with a hedge the plants are more diverse and also the insects and the birds of course that come and live in them more biodiverse then if you think about something like a driveway well that's a big area of concrete but potentially you can't park everywhere so could you get some plants in the corner therefore lift a bit up get some plants in there can you plant up the wall that's in your house wall is somewhere that potentially could become a green surface and so you're saying that in fact if you've got a lot of concrete and hard landscaping if you can just reduce a bit that would yes you know even if it was just one paving stone in a small garden that is more real kind of habitat if you'd like soil is also a huge habitat um so anything you can do just to reduce a bit the hard stuff and get a bit more of the green stuff that's a good thing and we like to say you know for plants more is more more plants more biodiversity um anything you bring into the garden is an input so it has a carbon cost anything that you can bring in as a smaller thing whether that's as a seed or a little bit of bare root to grow is a lower input and anything as well that you doesn't become waste in the process is a lower input so these are things you can do we often think about i don't know saving the amazon rainforest but these are little things we can do on our doorstep with kind of getting more green space and putting less inputs in in the autumn i did a short video which i'll put in the description below saying the rhs had just said that we didn't need to clear leaves from our borders in autumn because they would rot down and restore the nutrition to the soil and one person asked me if i could point to where on the website the rhs had said this now it was very new research and i don't think the website had been updated by then however so that you know that this really does come from the rhs i asked lee to confirm that it's fine to have leaves on your borders all those leaves that come down to the trees actually if we kind of move them into the borders underneath the shrubs they can rot down there so there's no need to kind of take them away compost them and then spend all the effort of bringing them back they can do their job right there in one go so make it easy for yourself as well as for the a good thing for the environment another thing people say about this is that the leaves if you leave them on the borders will blow all over the lawn and i did check this out last autumn if you've got borders against a wall fence or hedge the wind actually can't get behind them so certainly the leaves are quite likely to stay there and they did in my case however if you've got a tree in the middle of a garden which we do have then the leaves do get blown around a bit i did notice that they were being blown onto the lawn i was perfectly happy to pick them up but i thought it was worth saying that not all leaves blow around but a few do one of the big things that we often do as gardeners is go out and buy bags compost for our containers but we have soil we have the potential to make leaf mold we have our own compost heaps often those are brilliant constituents to make potting compost so rather than kind of sending stuff out of the garden in the green bin and then buying stuff back in it kind of saves money at the same time as actually keeping that zero waste loop going there will be a recipe on the rhs website soon for making your own compost but basically it's two parts soil to one part of your sieved garden compost doesn't have to be very sieved it's just like remove the really big bits so if you don't have a garden sieve just pick out the worst mix that up that'll be really good for things whether it's tomatoes or your containers you might just need to do a bit of additional feeding if they look a bit yellow but something like a seaweed feed to sort that out and right plant right place has also got that part for keeping the zero waste down as well because if we can get a plant into the garden it thrives so this is about a really good plant choice then we won't have to dig it out and compost it and get something new and the bigger that plant grows the more successfully it grows it will provide that habitat so again another part of increasing your biodiversity species everywhere are under threat and i know that in parts of the world you're dealing with wildlife that can actually be quite dangerous such as snakes or mosquitoes that transmit dangerous diseases but even so i think the general opinion around the world is that we do need to garden with wildlife rather than against it because of the value of every element in our food cycle the microorganisms in the soil the worms the fungi they are as important as the insects the pollinators the birds the larger mammals the animals we farm and of course ourselves if you take something out of that cycle you actually don't know what consequences there may be later on i've put together a playlist about all these new ways of gardening if you want to go into a bit more detail so don't miss that and thank you for watching goodbye