Set Your Garden Free: Start By Rewilding One Half, Says ‘Reformed’ Landscape Designer Mary Reynolds
Mary Reynolds is a landscape designer with a starry past.
“Looking at gardens as artistic endeavors or feasts for the senses is outmoded,” she says at the beginning of her new book We Are the ARK, published this week.
Verge meets woodland edge, with a band of stinging nettles. Ecotones are the places where one type of eco-system merges into another, enriched by both.
“The overlapping edges are where the magic happens.”
Photograph by Jim Powell for Gardenista.
Wildflowers and weeds—violets and shepherd’s purse. Bare soil is not natural, and is soon covered by unplanted greenery, or if you like, weeds.
When native weeds emerge on uncovered earth, they “are healing the soil and rebooting the ecosystem.”
Photograph by Britt Willoughby Dyer.
Photograph by Howard Sooley.
See: The Best Vegetables You’ll Ever Taste. Lawns have historically moved from status symbols to the ground zero of respectability; it’s important to ask if this is really for you.
“Gardens now typically use ten times more chemicals by volume per acre than industrially farmed agricultural land.”
“The collapse of wildlife populations can be attributed (in part) to the islandization of wild habitats.”
How do frogs get through fences?
Photograph by Britt Willoughby Dyer.
With too much hardscaping, fences and mortared walls, “creatures are cut off from sources of food, sanctuary and suitable mates.” Part of the aim of ARK-ing is to open communication between people as well as between humans and other animals.
“The more diversity that is present, the stronger the ecosystem.”
Photograph by Jim Powell.
See: What’s the Point of Wasps? Removing animals that don’t please us is like dissolving strands from a spider’s web.
Old pears around an old doorway. Tree seeds can be foraged from self-sown trees in local hedgerows, wasteland and woods.
Photograph by Jim Powell.