Changing what it means to be a modern gardener
Wildlife gardening experts John Little and Benny Hawksbee have launched a free training course to pass their principles on
You’re welcoming more visitors to Hilldrop for open days, including horticulturists from local RHS Garden Hyde Hall. Why has your approach struck such a chord?
John Little: It’s our emphasis on biodiversity and aesthetics, and how the two can be combined. We encourage people to create complicated places. If everything’s flat and growing out of the same soil, the biodiversity – and I would suggest the interest and joy of a space – is less. As soon as you start to mess around with those elements, all sorts of wonderful things happen. For example, mounds of soil, sand or rubble that create level changes in the garden aren’t just pleasing to the eye;
John Little and Banny Hawksbee sit in front of a dead tree trunk planted upright, which creates ecosystems both above and below ground
You’re known for your use and re-use of waste materials – why is this such an important aspect of your work?
You’re launching a new training course called Care Not Capital to pass on these principles. What do you hope to achieve?
Lots of invertebrates rely on dead and dying plant material
What techniques will they learn?
Benny: We want to give gardeners the skills to use the resources they have on site. We’ll be looking at things such as green roofs and dry-stone rubble wall building – which reuse waste materials and create habitat. We also want to debunk the idea that plants need to be happy all the time. Mildly unhappy, even dead and dying plants, are fine. The ecology around hollow plant stems and dead wood cavities for beetles, solitary bees, wasps and more, is under-appreciated; these are some of our most exciting garden pollinators and regulators and they’re crucial. Others, such as millipedes and woodlice, rely on unhappy plant material – by obsessively removing it we keep those species out of the garden too. Finally, we want to give gardeners the knowledge to record the ecology of their sites and understand the wildlife around them. It sounds grand, but we want to change the job description of what it is to be a modern gardener.
The idea of putting rubble in the garden won’t sound visually appealing to all – does this form of ecological gardening mean compromising on beauty?
Log piles provide shelter and food for wildlife
You have a unique approach to planting design – what’s your process?
John: We use seed mixes and broadcast sow everything, which uses fewer plastic pots and means the plants that thrive are the ones best suited to the environment. Of course, what you then need are good gardeners to hand-weed the design in. That’s the labour, but it’s also the joy: you start from the seed packet and the design comes from the gardener.Benny: The garden contains a wonderful mixture of native, naturalised and near native plants. We put a big emphasis on wild plants – field scabious, fennel, white bryony and others – and of combining wild species with their garden-classic relatives. Our native field scabious (Knautia arvensis) and the more popular Macedonian scabious (Knautia macedonica) look great planted together, as do wild meadow cranesbill geraniums growing alongside garden plant Geranium Rozanne (‘Gerwat’). One of the highlights at Hilldrop is our white bryony (Bryonia dioica). Instead of scrambling over a hedgerow it grows up a support outside the house in full sun, and it looks beautiful. You can create pot displays of native plants and do all the things you’d do to a garden plant. It allows you to realise the beauty of these plants, but also to better understand them and the wildlife they support.
John and Benny among the habitat planters, which provide nesting places for many solitary bees
What can people do to welcome more wildlife into their gardens?
John: Simply buying a perennial labelled as good for pollinators is not, in and of itself, going to fix much. You need habitat nearby too, or those pollinators won’t turn up. Take the white bryony: it has a specialist pollinator, the bryony mining bee. The females only collect pollen from that one plant. But they need sand or very free-draining soils in which to nest and breed, and they may not travel far between feeding and breeding points, so you need to provide both things in close proximity.Benny: This is the kind of thing we want to share with the people who attend our course. And things like double-flowered roses, which aren’t known to be great for pollinators, can be brilliant because leafcutting bees use them for their nest cells. And a bit of strategic bad pruning on that rose? That’s going to be beneficial for solitary aphid-hunting wasps who nest in the thicker dead stems. The wasps will then eat aphids, keeping all your roses happier, so don’t cut out all dead material. Once you begin to attune to a slightly different magnification, you start to see the tiny things eating your plants, and you can then become fascinated by them. We want to give this insight to people. It’s exciting, it’s enjoyable, and it’s key for pushing gardening to a different ecological level.
