Call of the wild

Want to try a more natural way of gardening but not sure where to start? Sally Nex explores rewilding on a small scale and offers easy first steps

- Sally Nex

Everyone's going wild for rewilding. You can see it on unmown road verges newly billowing with cow parsley and in the gardens of stately homes where previously manicured lawns are now shaggy and alive with wildflowers. It's even got its own storyline in The Archers.

Rewilding is all about letting nature take back control. It's about standing back, putting away the mower and the hand fork for a while, and letting grasses and wildflowers self-seed as they will. In rewilded gardens you allow dead material to return to the ground, locking in carbon (and helping to combat climate change), letting your garden's natural biodiversity find its own balance and thrive.

It turns much of what we thought we knew about gardening on its head. So with the help of leading rewilding pioneers we've put together your guide to the steps you can take to release your garden's inner wild child.

Large and small scale

At first, rewilding seems to have little to do with gardens. When pioneering environmental charity Rewilding Britain says it wants five percent of the UK returned to the wild, it's talking national parks: big-sky solutions to save our vanishing wildlife, chased out by urban sprawl and intensive farming.

Large-scale rewilding lets woodlands and grasslands regenerate without human interference. It also reintroduces lost wildlife to maintain habitats naturally. Longhorn cattle roam the rewilded farmland at Knepp Castle in Sussex and beavers are back in rivers from Devon to Scotland after 400 years. Their dams could reduce flooding by 60 percent, according to a study* reported by the Beaver Trust.