We must cultivate our garden

After Voltaire

During my partner’s convalescence from open heart surgery, we were knee deep in daytime TV when we stumbled across this.

It was a programme that featured a camera-man, Colin Stafford-Johnson who had made his name filming nature documentaries like ‘Planet Earth’.

In his middle years he had decided to return home to Ireland to transform the family’s old garden into a haven for wildlife. He had a pond dug, cleared the top-soil to encourage wild flowers and built a small cabin to watch what happened next.

Over the course of a year he watched invertebrates make themselves a watery home, butterflies return for the wild flowers and migrant birds sniffing suitable spots for nest building.

This was a man who had traveled round the world for a living to capture some of the world’s most iconic animals. Now at this stage in his life, satisfaction was to be found in re-wilding a patch of land close to where he was brought up to bring more everyday wildlife into close-up.

It put me in mind of a book I studied for French ‘A’ level.

‘Candide’ follows the adventures of a naive young man who is propelled helplessly around the globe by a picaresque plot.

Everywhere he is witness to horrifying examples of man’s inhumanity to man.

The book’s full title is ‘Candide or the Optimist’; his mentor Professor Pangloss has drummed into him that we live in ‘the best of all possible worlds’.

After surviving every imaginable atrocity (and many unimaginable ones, including death) Candide and the motley crew that has formed around him retire to a small plot of land by the Bosphorus in modern-day Turkey. There they grow enough to live on and so doing that keeps them free of the “three great vices of boredom, vice and poverty”.

The very last words of the book are “il faut cultiver notre jardin’ - we must cultivate our garden. In a hostile and volatile 18th century world, something resembling happiness can only be found tending one’s own little corner of the globe, is the book’s take-out.

In my more pessimistic moments I feel that ‘re-wilders’ like Colin, the camera man are a little like Candide. In the face of sometimes overwhelming data about declines in biodiversity across the board, they insist on restricting their sights to their own patch. They ignore the bigger picture as it can be just too horrifying to contemplate.

Armed with such inspiration I decided I wanted to join these guys and become a re-wilder too.

Reading about it and wandering in those landscapes is one thing; doing it is quite another.

However that didn’t look like it was going to happen any time soon, as I live in a block of flats in one of the most densely populated neighbourhoods of London. It is 11 floors up and the air ain’t clean. But I did have a secret weapon.

The flat has a small terrace. One that is so windswept that there are only a handful of days you can sit out there. It is subject to the Goldilocks principle; the weather is either too hot or too cold, rarely the right temperature. So how was I going to create my own little piece of rewilded paradise high above the gridlocked London traffic?

Inspiration came to me in two forms.

The first was the ‘Bosco Verticale’, a vertical forest that provides 30,000 square metres of ‘woodland’ on a Milan tower block.

As well as providing nests for twenty species of bird, the trees shield the flats from noise pollution. It also lowers the temperature of the ‘heat island’ caused by sunlight reflecting from the glass facades by as much as 30 degrees in summer.

Living in a new flat with lots of glass and lots of insulation, we were finding this an increasing problem ourselves in London too as climate change makes itself felt .

The second inspiration was Isabella Tree and Charlie Burrell’s ‘The Book of Wilding’. It is the follow-up to their bestseller ‘Wilding’ which chronicled how they turned their deeply unproductive farmland at Knepp in Sussex over to nature.

One of its key concepts is the creation of wildlife corridors to connect one landscape up with another. By forming a web linking nature, these corridors can allow animals and plants to move around safely and thus thrive.

According to the book “a small patch of land can have an exponentially positive effect if it operates as a link in the chain”.

I thought, wouldn’t it be nice to get in Brixton just a fraction of the birds we saw in lockdown in the modest garden of the house we locked down in Essex. Perhaps a wildlife corridor would do the trick.

So my first step was to put out a few pots with random plants and a solitary bird feeder. That would be a good start, I thought.

It wasn’t like there weren’t any birds in the vicinity.

There are the tits and parakeets that feed in the orchard below us to our right. And the crows that wheel round the building when the wind gets up.

But over the course of six months my meagre planting attracted just one pigeon. And that was only for a brief moment.

I had to up my game.

We got ourselves a design for our rewilded terrace.

Last spring planters were installed that we populated with pine and birch scrubs, reed grass, maidenhair, anemones and jasmine.

We grew herbs, rosemary and oregano that made their way into the cooking, although we had to make sure they got a good wash given the diesel particles from the buses idling below.

The jasmine came into bloom that first summer and the fragrance was joyous.

But where was the wildlife?

We had built it but would they come?

How would they know we had created a haven for them so high up?

Would it be a wildlife corridor that connected it all up?

We will only know when next spring comes around.