How to Grow a Wild Garden

I go on a lot about how we should spend more time just loitering around in our gardens. Lolling. Drifting. Not gardening. Not being productive, not tilling the soil, digging weeds or any of that sensible goal-directed stuff. Just sniffing flowers and munching on herbs and lying around watching bugs roam and butterflies flap. Throwing ourselves into the wilderness and reaping all the benefits that immersion in nature offers.

But I realised there’s a problem with what I’ve been saying. I’ve been putting the cart before the horse.

You can only enjoy immersing yourself in a wild garden if you already have a wild garden. And wild-style gardens (as opposed to gardens that are actually just wild with grass, prickles and random plants) can be surprisingly tricky and time-consuming to establish.

So today I want to help show you how to grow a wild garden that you can lose yourself in. It will take a little bit of time and a little bit of effort, but it is so, so worth it.

But first!

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What is a wild garden?

First off, let’s work out what we’re actually aiming towards. There are many different ways to think about a ‘wild garden’. As I mentioned up top, a garden can be ‘wild’ if it’s just totally unkempt and largely neglected. Which, to be honest, is also something I kind of love. The way that nature will happily take the reigns if we step back, filling bare patches of earth with flowering dandelions and prickly thistles. The thing about these truly ‘wild’ gardens, though, is they often end up devolving into monocultures of things we’d usually refer to as ‘weeds’. The truly voracious growers that will pop up entirely unannounced and populate your entire garden in the blink of an eye.

When I was little, a neighbour had a wild garden like that. And actually, I loved it. As a 6 year old, the grasses grew up to my shoulders, rambling trees drooped overhead, laden with little red berry-like things that were hollow and popped crisply underfoot whenever you stepped on them. I know now, as an adult, that there could not possibly have been a trickling creek at the end of the suburban yard, but somehow part of me remains convinced that there was.

Wild places call to some distant part of us. Our streets may grow ever more manicured, green spaces may shrink and parks may be sprayed, mown and pruned. But in the end those places don’t satisfy the need we have to find ourselves amongst a world of living things that we haven’t totally reigned in and suppressed. This is where our gardens can help.

There’s something really wonderful about only vaguely controlling green things. Toeing that line between true wilderness and a space that is manicured to the point where it doesn’t even feel like ‘nature’ anymore. Most of you, probably, don’t want gardens that are thickets of ‘weeds’ and brambles. Neither do I. But there is something much more wonderful we can create. It’s not a wilderness in the true sense of the word. And it’s not a garden, insofar as gardens are neat, controlled and ordered. It’s a hybrid of the two; a wild garden. And I think we should all grow one.

Three key features of wild gardens:

There are three key features that characterise the kind of wild gardens that I like to grow:

1) They are secret, mysterious and secluded

2) They are filled with wildlife

3) They will always surprise you

1. Wild gardens are secret gardens

Wild gardens are mysterious and when you’re in them you feel like you might be the only one who’s ever learned any of their secrets. They feel secluded, hidden, a place you can go to really escape from the world.

If you want to know what it feels like to walk into a wild garden, take a trip back through time and watch the 1993 version of A Secret Garden. Oh, what’s that I hear you say? There’s been a new remake in 2020? And all the plants are CGI animations and everything is hyperrealistic and multicoloured?

STUFF THAT!!

Watch the 1993 version!!! Admittedly this is coming from someone who hasn’t actually watched the remake and, now I think about it, I have a feeling that I ranted about the evils of remaking my childhood movies only one or two posts ago. It appears that I’m rooted firmly in the 90s, I don’t like change or new things and I’m already repeating myself and criticising the use of modern technology in film. WHAT OF IT. Send me your complaints via carrier pigeon because I’m quitting electronic mail and I don’t trust the postal service since fake DHL accounts started sending me spam texts!!

You know, I didn’t expect to get half this impassioned all of a sudden. I think I just really like the Secret Garden. But I’m getting derailed.

If you want to grow a wild garden, you need to give it a sense of seclusion. It needs to feel private and enclosed. There’s one easy way to create this feeling: walls.

I’m assuming you probably have at least three walls bordering your backyard, but typically these are only about 1.2-1.8 metres high. As a general rule, to have a sense of being protected and enclosed in a space, the vertical edge of that space must be at least one-third the length of the horizontal space. This is called the ‘Law of Enclosure’ and it is a design principle often used by landscape architects when creating outdoor spaces.

So, if you have a garden bordered by walls that are 1.8m high and you want a sense of being enclosed and protected, the horizontal space (the distance from one side of your garden to the other) can be no greater than 1.8 x 3 = 5.4m. Usually our gardens are bigger than this, which is why they don’t often feel like private, secluded places.

If you have a reasonably big garden and you don’t have super high walls, you can create a sense of enclosure by building ‘rooms’ into your garden; spaces within the garden that are small enough to obey the Law of Enclosure. You don’t need to add actual walls to your garden to do this. You can add hedges that will grow into green borders, trellis that divides your garden into different sections, archways to divide different areas (these help give the appearance of rooms, even if they’re not actually attached to a wall), and - most importantly - trees.

Adding trees to the perimeter of your garden will help to make your boundary walls seem higher - especially if these trees are planted quite closely and grow densely. In time, they’ll turn into a green wall, giving your garden a higher vertical edge.

When adding trees, it’s important to be mindful that you’re not accidentally shading out your entire garden. If your goal is a super shady and secluded spot then go right ahead, but if you want to grow veggies and flowering plants that need full sun (which is a lot of them) make sure you’re leaving some spots that will still receive plenty of sunlight, even as your green walls grow. Another option to ensure you’re not over-shading your whole garden is to focus on making just your outdoor seating area feel enclosed while leaving some of your garden open to receive plenty of sun.

When you walk into a garden that has a real sense of privacy and enclosure it’s like you’ve dropped out of the city into a wild space. Without a sense of enclosure, wild gardens can often feel messy and chaotic, once you’re surrounded by trees and greenery this feeling changes somehow - imagine a picnic blanket spread out on top of long summer grass, in a quiet little patch of land encircled entirely by trees - perfect! You can have that! You should ABSOLUTELY grow that!!!

2. Wild gardens attract wildlife

This feels obvious, but it’s definitely worth saying. The most rewarding thing about growing a wild garden is having wild creatures arrive to share it with you. If you let them in, they will endlessly surprise, enthral and fascinate you. And, unlike the plants in your garden, you didn’t even have to pay for them!

The wildlife in our gardens provides a wonderfully objective metric of how our yards are doing on the wilderness scale. I find the more rambling and unkempt the garden, the more the wildlife loves it. Wild gardens provide safe havens for small animals to find food, mate and shelter from prey. And you can just feel it when you walk into a garden that is buzzing with life. It feels busy, and dynamic and healthy and exciting.

There are many ways to attract wildlife into your garden. But the first, most important thing you can do is to stop using any pesticides, herbicides or fungicides. Stop completely. Let none pass the threshold of your organic abode!

The main reason for this is that even if the pesticides you use don’t kill beneficial insects (and they sometimes do), they will be eradicating a valuable source of food for the beneficial (predatory) insects in your gardens. This is why I don’t really thing the concept of ‘pests’ is an actual thing.

Every creature in our gardens is doing a valuable job, even if it sometimes doesn’t look that way. Aphids provide food for ladybirds, snails and slugs and slaters help keep our gardens tidy by chewing through decaying organic matter. Caterpillars are nutritious for baby birds. Ants turn and aerate the soil just as much as earthworms and grasshoppers are food for various birds, mammals, lizards and spiders.

The real key to a garden that isn’t overrun with ‘pests’ or ‘weeds’ is to encourage as much plant and animal diversity in that garden as possible. Fill up empty patches of garden with plants instead of letting the soil lie open to whatever might spring up there. Plant umbelliferous plants (like dill, fennel, parsley, coriander and caraway) and let them produce flowers to attract wasps, hoverflies and bees.

Grow buddlejas, tropical milkweed and gauras to attract butterflies and fragrant night-blooming flowers like moonflowers to attract moths. Accept a certain number of caterpillars on your brassicas and, if anything is getting seriously munched, gently pluck off the culprits and throw them into a sacrificial patch of nasturtiums.

Do this patiently for a year or two and you’ll be amazed at just how full of life your garden becomes. Suddenly your time in the garden won’t be exclusively filled with planting (and you can forget about weeding entirely). Instead, mornings spent out there will be occupied by beautiful novel critters you’ve never seen before and birds that flit between branches while singing at you.

A few other tips to encourage wildlife into your garden:

• Provide multiple water sources (bird baths, ponds and small dishes of water)

• Grow shrubby trees that provide shelter for small birds

• Leave some patches of your lawn to grow long and wild (this provides a great home for a huge variety of insects), and

• Aim to grow a wide variety of plants that are planted densely and flower throughout the year producing plenty of food for pollinators during every season

3. Wild gardens are full of surprises

Finally, a wild garden should be a place that surprises you. A little patch of land where you have the sense that there will always be something new around every corner. Where plants pop up unexpectedly (and without your having planted them), and where you have the irresistible feeling that there are goings on you’ll never fully know about and hidden mysteries that you’ll never entirely uncover.

Obviously as the gardener you will know about a lot of the mysteries of your garden. But that’s half the fun part, too. I love hiding things around our garden for people to stumble upon one day. A little bird bath hanging from the branches of the elderflower tree, teeny pots with grape hyacinths that burst up unexpectedly in late winter, large shells planted with cacti. Things that visitors to your garden might stumble across totally unexpectedly and be delighted by.

And don’t worry, as the creator of this garden you’ll have ample surprises too. If you let your garden grow wild enough it will surprise you endlessly. Let your plants set flower and go to seed. You’ll be amazed by just how beautiful the flowers of a rogue radish plant can be; white-flecked with lilac tips. And once you’ve let plants go to seed in your garden they’ll be forever popping up of their own volition. Parsley bursting through cracks in out-of-the-way paths, nasturtiums climbing arrogantly up the side of a wall, perfect little lettuces popping up in your flower beds, ready to be thrown into last-minute salads.

The way to create a garden that surprises you is, well, to just keep throwing plants at it for a handful of years. And also to take a fairly laissez fair attitude to whatever’s growing at any point in time. Don’t tidy up too much. Over the years, the plants that have given me the best surprises have tended to be those that I’ve forgotten about for long stretches, only to uncover them one day in flower. Expecting plants to behave politely or do things according to our particular timelines is often a recipe for missing some of the most amazing things they might do.

Case in point, two and a half years ago I sowed seeds for blue sea holly in two pots in the garden. Or at least I thought I did. Seedlings emerged, I was excited. As they got larger and larger they looked absolutely nothing like sea holly. One sent a massive taproot down into the lawn through a hole in the pot. For two years these weird plants grew long, floppy leaves and got progressively more waterlogged in their pots. They looked happy enough so I did nothing, just let them take up their little bit of space and wondered bemusedly what on earth I’d planted.

One week ago a giant spike began to emerge from the smaller pot. It split off in ten different directions, like some kind of green, static firework. It was blue sea holly after all! The slowest, most lethargic growing sea holly imaginable. I am so ridiculously into this weird little plant that allegedly takes 200 days to flower from seed but absolutely does not (at least, not in my garden)! I am so glad I waited, I’m so glad I let the garden do its thing.

We have a tendency to set expectations of our gardens, but if you relax these just a little you open the doors to all kinds of weird and wonderful discoveries. Wild gardens are those that have their gardeners permission to do things their own way. And, when they’re allowed to be themselves, they are the most wonderful spaces to be in.

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