Gardens Illustrated – The Wild Issue, 2023
English | 124 pages | pdf | 94.06 MB
Welcome at Gardens Illustrated magazine The Wild Issue, 2023
Wild gardens. That pairing of words is challenging, because for many people, ‘wild’ means untouched by humans, but a garden is a landscape wholly crafted by us. Do we think a wild place can only be one without people? A romantic ideal of pristine untamed beauty, where everything thrives free from human influence – somewhere that, as landscape ethicist Rick Darke puts it, ‘the last best things reside’. In our modern, increasingly urbanised world, there are few places like this left, so it’s no wonder we revere landscapes we consider to be natural. But much of our countryside has been man-made over centuries of farming and forestry – often, what we see as ‘wild’ is actually not.
Maybe, if we flip this and open our minds a little, what we see as ‘not wild’, can be. As environmental historian William Cronon says: ‘Wildness can be found anywhere, from seemingly tame fields to the cracks of a sidewalk’. It’s all around us, and we are part of it, if we decide to be. Our gardens can be habitats for lots of wildlife, as well as a bridge that connects us back to nature and the wider world. Obviously, gardens by themselves cannot fix all the issues that we face, but as author Michael Pollan puts it, ‘the habits of thought they foster can take us a long way in that direction’.
In this special issue, we explore gardens that have embraced those habits of thought, from Dan Pearson’s Robin Hill (page 28) and Knepp Castle Walled Garden (page 82) to a water-meadow garden (page 60) and
one perfect for pollinators (page 94). No single garden here has all the answers, but each one offers some idea of how we can approach, develop and manage our gardens in a more nature-friendly way.
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