Five Tips to Rewild Your Garden

Gardening for Nature

Five principles for working with living systems

I trained in organic horticulture around twenty years ago. From there, I moved into garden design and build, working for many years using organic principles and trying to be as sustainable as possible in how we built landscapes.

That meant reusing hard materials on site, reworking existing structures, and even in soft landscaping — lifting turf, reshaping it, and putting it back rather than importing new materials. It worked. It was successful.

But when it came to specifying plants - the flowers, shrubs, and trees themselves, something began to feel wrong.

As I read more about the extinction crisis and what was happening within the horticultural industry, I realised that the system we were working within simply wasn’t fit for purpose. So I stopped. I took time out. And I wrote myself a way of working - not for publication at first, just to understand enough to be able to return to practice with integrity. That work eventually became a course.

But today, I want to share the headlines - five simple principles that came out of it.

Not rules. Just things worth remembering.

Why gardens matter

Before we get into principles, it’s worth asking a more basic question:

Why gardens?

Around 87% of households in Britain have a garden — that’s roughly 23 million gardens, covering about 1.5% of the UK landmass.

To put that in context:

• Projects that Rewilding Britain support collectively cover around 1%

• Farming occupies over 70%
  

Gardens may be small individually, but together they form a vast, connective tissue across the landscape. For me, that makes them profoundly important.

Gardens aren’t the same as landscape-scale rewilding, and we need to talk about them differently, but they can help rebalance systems, reconnect habitats, and support life where it still has a foothold.

1. Use Native Plants or plants that behave like them

I don’t particularly like the phrase native plants. Botanically, it has a very specific meaning: plants that have survived since the last ice age, or arrived without human help.

That definition is useful but it’s also limiting.

What I care about more is function.

A British wild plant, in my mind, is one that sits in a balanced relationship with the ecosystem around it, along with its entourage of insects, fungi, birds, and other organisms that have evolved alongside it.

Many garden plants are introduced species. In researching them, I came across terms I’d never properly engaged with before, such as: archaeophyte and neophyte.

• Archaeophytes have been here for at least 500 years

• Neophytes arrived within the last 500 years
  
  

That distinction matters because of what happened after 1492 - the Columbian exchange, when global movement of plants and animals accelerated dramatically. Earlier introductions were largely functional: food, medicine, and materials for making. Later ones were often ornamental, brought from much further afield, and less embedded in local ecological relationships.

This doesn’t make them “bad”. But it does affect what they give back.

Pollinators, caterpillars, and the missing half of the story

Gardeners know a lot about pollinators. Bees, in particular, have had a very good PR campaign.

Nectar is essentially sugary rewards. Any plant that produces it can, if the mechanics fit, feed adult insects such as moths and butterflies.

But that’s only one life stage.

Many insects undergo metamorphosis. And caterpillars or other larvae, whether butterfly or moth, fly, beetle or thrip, almost always have very specialist diets. This is because of long co-evolutionary relationships between plants and insects.

Caterpillars can often only eat the plants they’ve evolved with.

This is why larval food plants matter so much - even if the phrase itself isn’t very glamorous.

If we focus only on flowers, we miss the part where insect lives begin.

2. Avoid pesticides — especially systemic ones

Most modern pesticides are systemic. That means they move into every cell of the plant.

So whether an insect feeds on roots, leaves, flowers, pollen, or nectar — once it ingests any part of that plant, it may be fatally harmed.

Even plants sold as “pollinator friendly” are often contaminated.

In 2018, plants labelled perfect for pollinators were tested and found to be saturated with pesticides. Labels changed. Supply chains largely didn’t.

The solution isn’t complicated:

• Ask nurseries how plants are grown

• Support those who don’t use pesticides

• Walk away when answers aren’t clear

Practices change when customers insist on them.

3. Grow grass longer — not all of it, but some of it

A Butterfly Conservation study of 6,000 gardens showed up to 93% more butterflies where grass was allowed to grow longer.

Even coarse grasses matter.

Cock’s-foot grass, for example, supports seven butterfly species as a primary larval food plant, yet it as a coarse grass wouldn’t appear in meadow mixes. In trying to recreate lost meadows, we often destroy the very habitats that still function.

Many grass-feeding larvae live for a full year in tussocks. When we cut lawns flat, we erase those lives entirely.

Improvement without understanding can cause harm.

4. Think of your garden as a woodland glade

Rather than forcing gardens into fixed categories - lawn, meadow, border etc.  I find it more helpful to think in terms of succession and edges.

Ecotones - where one habitat blends into another, are where life flourishes.

In my own garden:

• Long grass flows into hedgerow

• Shrubs emerge from that edge

• Saplings are allowed to grow, then perhaps coppiced

• Structure, shelter, and topography develop naturally

I’m gardening primarily for insects - but birds, mammals, reptiles, and amphibians all benefit.

5. Lawns aren’t the enemy - uniformity is

Lawns are useful. They’re social spaces.

But they don’t need to be sterile.

Older, untreated lawns often contain selfheal, daisies, clover, black medic etc - rich mixed swards that support life. Letting them grow a little longer, even seasonally, changes everything. As Plantlife express with their slogans: 

• No Mow May - to let flowers bloom

• Let It Bloom June - to show that flowers bloom beyond May

• Knee-High July - to encourage maintaining wilder lawns throughout the peak summer months 

• Mow-Saic - to encourage having a patchwork of grass types and cutting regimes. 

The plantlife team obviously had fun thinking those catchy phrases but the deeper message is grasses and the plants that grow alongside them support a host of insects throughout their lifecycles but very short lawns support much less.

Designing with data, not dogma

How I work now is simple.

I assess gardens plant by plant, building an ecological picture:

• Larval and phytophagous (herbivorous) host relationships

• Pollinator support

• Seasonal function
  

Designers design. Then we assess.

If a plant flowers in June, is yellow, herbaceous - perhaps there’s a swap that performs better ecologically while keeping the intent intact.

I’m not against ornamentals.

I just think they should come after the ecological foundations.

Like building a house: structure first, decoration second.

A way forward

Gardens don’t need to be perfect.
They don’t need to be wild.
They just need to work.

If we get the foundations right - plants that support life, systems that allow cycles to complete - then beauty will be present and pretty can follow.

Andy Dean.