Every year, towards the end of May or the beginning of June, I catch my wife looking shifty. She always sets to work in the evening, as dusk draws in, hoping that I’ll be too wrapped up in a book to notice her nefarious activities. By some strange and unstated rule of garden administration, the hydrangeas in our two-acre plot of Kentish Weald are her preserve. After our first year in the house, when they were ravaged by slugs, she now surrounds the Annabelles and Emile Mouillères with little blue pellets of songbird – and hedgehog-killing metaldehyde. I disapprove – I run my horticultural bailiwicks on strictly organic lines – but I recognise that I am still in the minority when it comes to Britain’s gardeners.
Dave Goulson is the country’s foremost expert on bees, the author of the superlative A Buzz in the Meadow, and has now written an exquisite, compelling and quietly evangelical book about how gardeners can play their part in saving the planet. Each chapter of The Garden Jungle begins with a recipe – from home-brewed cider to mulberry muffins to Jerusalem artichoke soup. These culinary snippets paint a picture of the good life, showing how our approach to managing our gardens can lead to a deeper and more permanent re-engagement with nature, one that feeds through to our physical and mental health, as well as being a necessary counterbalance to the chemical-intensive aggro-industrial complex that is doing its best to destroy our environment.
The Garden Jungle purports to be “a celebration of the lives of the little creatures that live in our gardens”, but is in fact, in its way, as radical and angry as Mark Cocker’s galvanising Our Place. Goulson, like Cocker, has grown tired of the hypocritical paradox that lies at the heart of Britain’s relationship with nature – that we profess ourselves to be gifted gardeners, champions of wildlife, but are destroying the networks of biodiversity in our countryside more quickly than almost anywhere else on the planet.
Where Goulson’s book is so good is in suggesting specific, practical and easily implemented remedies that every gardener can adopt, no matter how small their patch. It’s easy to feel that we are powerless to stand in the way of climate change and the collapse of pollinator numbers, but, Goulson says, even the smallest act of resistance is meaningful both in the cumulative effect widespread green gardening would have on the environment, but also in the message it sends about where our priorities lie.
A lawn – “neat, green and stripy” as we British like them – is an environmental wasteland. Over the last year, I’ve slowly stopped mowing ours and now, knee-high and dense with wildflowers, it thrums with crickets in high summer, teems with a vast range of butterflies and bees. We need writers such as Goulson just now and this is a book that should be read by every gardener in the country: a manifesto for the grey-haired branch of Extinction Rebellion.
It may feel like the world is on a downward slope both precipitous and irredeemable; Goulson says that by acting together, we might just turn things round, one garden at a time.
• The Garden Jungle Or Gardening to Save the Planet by Dave Goulson is published by Jonathan Cape (£16.99). To order a copy go to guardianbookshop.com or call 0330 333 6846. Free UK p&p over £15, online orders only. Phone orders min p&p of £1.99
