Let the land remember

I saw something recently that made me smile. On the Holnicote Estate in Somerset, rewilded areas that have been allowed to become wet again have stayed green through an incredibly dry summer, while much of the surrounding landscape has turned brown.

And I thought: of course they have. Nature knows what she’s doing. That might sound overly poetic, but those who know me know my attitude toward self-regulation in nature, so you’ll have to allow me on this one. Or at least hear me out.

For generations we’ve been obsessed with controlling water. Straightening rivers. Draining wetlands. Paving land. Moving rainfall away as quickly and efficiently as possible. And then we’re surprised when the ground dries out.

Perhaps we need to stop fighting the land and start listening to it.

A garden should hold life

I think about this a lot when we’re designing gardens. A garden isn’t just a collection of beautiful plants. It’s soil. Water. Shade. Trees. Fungi. Insects. Birds. Roots. Decaying matter. It’s a living system.

And when all those things are allowed to work together, something extraordinary happens: the garden begins to develop its own resilience.

Healthy soil holds water. Trees create shade and reduce the temperature beneath them. Dense planting protects the soil from the sun. Roots help water penetrate the ground. Organic matter improves the soil’s ability to retain moisture. Plants create habitat for insects, which support birds and other wildlife. Everything is connected.

We don’t need to rewild every garden

Rewilding doesn’t mean abandoning your garden and allowing everything to run riot. And the principles being used across thousands of acres of countryside obviously aren’t directly transferable to a London back garden. But the thinking behind them absolutely is.

Instead of asking “How do we control this garden?”, perhaps we should ask:

That might mean reducing unnecessary hard landscaping and choosing permeable materials so rain can return to the soil. It might mean protecting an existing tree rather than removing it because it creates shade. It might mean creating generous planting beds instead of leaving large areas of exposed soil. It might mean choosing plants for the conditions that actually exist rather than continually trying to force the garden to become something it isn’t.

And increasingly, it means thinking about how a garden will cope with hotter summers, periods of drought and sudden heavy rainfall. That’s what climate-resilient garden design should really be about. Not finding a handful of supposedly drought-proof plants. Designing the whole garden as a living system.

Let the garden do some of the work

There’s a beautiful humility in this. As designers and gardeners, we don’t always need to have the answer. Sometimes nature already has it. Our job is to create the conditions in which those natural processes can begin working again.

I’ve always believed the most beautiful gardens aren’t frozen pictures. They move. They change. They seed. They fade. They regenerate. They become richer with time.

And perhaps the gardens that will thrive in the decades ahead will be the ones where we’ve had the courage to relinquish a little control. To let water stay. To let roots go deep. To let soil live. To let things grow.

Because beneath all our paving, walls and carefully drawn plans, the land still remembers what to do. Sometimes we just need to give it the chance.