Digging up the daisies

I have just recorded an interview with Chris Baines the author of the book below, now in its 4th edition.

Chris Baines book

Chris was chatting with myself and Anne Harrap who has created the 22 wildlife gardens at Natural Surroundings in Norfolk. It is next month’s episode. Anne had picked up Chris’ book in 1987 and she was amazed and thrilled that someone had put into words the ideas that she was trying to promote. Chris explained that the book came out around the same time as he was building the first wildlife garden at the RHS Chelsea Flower show in 1985. He explained that when he first arrived at his marked out plot he realised that his bit of grass didn’t have a single daisy on it and he really wanted these flowers on his lawn. So for the first day he went around everyone else’s plot digging up their daisy plants and transplanting them into his! He recalls that people thought he was very odd.

He won a medal for that garden but perhaps it was indicative of how the RHS saw it too, that on the back it was inscribed with words congratulating him on his ‘Wildfire Garden’. Wildlife gardening wasn’t really on anyone’s radar and we were more focused, with a multitude of pesticides, on how to kill it rather than encourage it. Plants that had been nibbled by bugs and were less than perfect were destined for the tip at RHS Chelsea - do listen out for his lovely story about Clare Austin and her wheelbarrow of ‘damaged’ foxgloves!

It’s 40 years since he first put his ideas into that RHS horticultural spotlight, though he had been talking about them on Pebblemill at One (some of us are old enough to remember that programme) before then. But he knew that the only way to really get the attention of the horticultural world was to build such a garden in a big RHS show.

Chris is definitely an optimist, though we might sometimes wonder at what happened in the intervening 40 years when as he says in the latest edition of his book, we have continued to destroy wildflower meadows, ancient lowland woods and heaths, fens and mires. However he looks to initiatives like ‘no mow May’ and the explosion in bird food and bird feeders and the wildflower meadows at flower shows, as signs that at least in some urban settings his ideas have taken root, even if the bigger picture may still feel gloomy. He points out that in cities our gardens make up almost a quarter of the greenspace and that there are around 400,000 hectares of private gardens in Britain and together they occupy much more land than all the official nature reserves combined. He doesn’t ignore the gloomy parts, he wants people to join groups, campaign to save green spaces but he is an optimist and believes that even in the smallest garden we can make a difference. Which I guess is why he inspired Anne all those years ago to start building her 22 wildlife friendly gardens to show people what they could do on their small plots.

This weeks episode:

Last week I shared a trailer for the conversation with Poppy Okotcha and Adam Frost recorded at the British Library in July and this week I put out the whole episode. I am sharing it below in case you haven’t had the chance to download it. I have heard Adam talk before about ‘moments’ in a garden being what we strive to achieve and also the need to stop to observe them. In this conversation he talks about leaving the garden alone at the end of the season, resisting the urge to tidy everything to within an inch of its life. The resulting flock of goldfinches that descended on the seedheads provided one of those ‘moments’. I am sure Chris Baines would love that.

I hope you enjoy this month’s special episode and if you are in the UK - have a lovely bank holiday weekend.

Sally

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