By
Ben Spencer |
Science Editor, The Sunday Times |
There is a line by the American journalist and thinker Michael Pollan that perfectly sums up my attitude towards gardening: “The garden,” he wrote in 2007, “suggests there might be a place where we can meet nature halfway.”
Gardening, for me, is the activity of creating a sanctuary, a little bit of nature away from the bustle of modern living. Gardens are not the wilderness – we weed and mow and prune and cut back. We curate and manage nature to suit our needs. But the best gardens have a touch of wilderness about them, a hint of a wilder place to stir the soul. We are, as Pollan puts it, meeting nature halfway.
There are 41 million active gardeners in Britain. Combined, our weekly or monthly pottering about the garden, meeting nature halfway, can make a big difference. The Royal Horticultural Society publishes a report this morning which confirms exactly how much of a difference. The charity for the first time has mapped Britain’s gardens. Private domestic gardens, it found, cover 503,000 hectares – 2.4 per cent of the British landmass and 60 per cent bigger than the country’s national nature reserves. That is more space, put together, than every park, allotment and school ground in the country.
And it is packed with nature. Domestic gardens, the report says, are “biodiversity hotspots and climate allies,” holding 19 million trees and providing habitats for more than 40 per cent of Britain’s bird and mammal species and more than half of butterfly, amphibian and reptile species. They are also huge carbon sinks, storing an estimated 158 million tonnes of carbon in the soil and plants – equivalent, hectare to hectare, to a 30-year-old native woodland.
It is not all good news, however. More than half of Britain’s front garden space and a third of back garden space is paved over, reducing its beneficial impact for wildlife, flooding prevention and carbon storage. Artificial lawns still only make up 0.15 per cent of gardens, but this is thought to be growing.
Clare Matterson, RHS director general, said: “Gardens are the most important touchstone to nature, fostering an active engagement in and understanding of plants and wildlife.”
Not everyone, of course, has access to such space. Polling in the report suggests that of those who have not gardened in the last 12 months, 38 per cent said they had no access to a garden.
Professor Alistair Griffiths, director of science at the RHS, added: “When people talk about the biodiversity crisis or nature loss they [generally] think about loss of wild plants or wildlife, they rarely think how cultivated plants and trees are also at risk and make a significant positive impact to our lives and our damaged planet.
“With over 2,670 species of plants and animals being found in one typical UK garden, there couldn’t be a more appropriate place to ‘bring nature home’ than your own outside space, be it your balcony, doorstep, your community, school, work garden, or your own private garden.”
Or, to paraphrase Pollan, get out into the garden and meet nature halfway.
Until next week,
Ben
