I spent several years living and working in the Netherlands and this m On the sandy heaths of the Veluwe, the largest stretch of lowland heath in the Netherlands, you can watch a landscape lose its colour. The purple of the heather is giving way, year on year, to the flat green of a few vigorous grasses and the dark sprawl of bramble and young birch. Nothing has been planted here and nothing sprayed. The heath is being fed to death, by a gas you cannot see. That gas is ammoni

Droughtproofing a suburban garden, part two of twelve. One statistic turns up again and again in gardening books, seed catalogues and regenerative-farming talks: every 1 percent increase in soil organic matter lets an acre of soil hold roughly 20,000 gallons more water. It is a compelling number, and it is repeated with great confidence. It is also, soil scientists have concluded, largely wrong. That matters for anyone trying to droughtproof a garden, because building up the

A coppice wood in the Weald of Kent Mind that low branch as you come in, and give your eyes a minute to settle, for it is dark under here after the lane. There. Now you are in the wood proper. Sit you down on that stool, the old cut stump there, that is a hazel been cut and come again for three hundred year very like, and I will tell you what this wood was, for you have caught me at the right time of year to feel the want of it. It is May. And on a May evening this wood shoul

An earlier piece in this series built the living world from the bottom up - insects as the foundation everything else stands on. This one turns the picture upside down and looks from the top. Because just as a system can be starved from below, it can be held together, or brought down, from above, by a single species whose influence is wildly out of proportion to its size. Remove that one species and the whole edifice can shift, sag, or collapse. Ecologists call these load-bea

When I was about ten or eleven my dad had a computer game which revolved around the decisions you needed to make as the owner of an arable farm. It was immensely frustrating....whichever decisions you took about how much fertilizer or pesticide or fertiliser you took or how densely to seed your fields or which markets you were going to sell your crop too there were simply too many variables outside your control. Crop prices would fluctuate widely. Heavy rain would cause rust

I first read Rachel Carson's 'Silent Spring' as an undergraduate. She warned us that the birds might one day fall silent. More than sixty years on, was she right, and what, if anything, can any of us do about it from a back garden? This article was also prompted by the rediscovery of a poem I wrote on a steam train in North Wales on a school trip when I was ten where I felt able to access a similar feeling of sadness. Tellingly, Rachel Carson began her most famous book not w

It feels particularly appropriate to be finalising and publishing this article the day after I went to both the Science Museum and the Natural History Museum with my children, where we enjoyed the thought provoking exhibit at the science musem on 'The Future of Food'. Not only that but today is the celebration of Lammas in the northern hemisphere, the festival that celebrates 'first harvest'. If you'd like my meditation for today, it's available for puurchase and download her

If you want more birdsong in your garden, more bats stitching the dusk, a hedgehog snuffling under the hedge, the counterintuitive place to begin is not with the birds, the bats or the hedgehog. It's with the insects; the aphids and caterpillars and beetles and flies that most of us spent years trying to get rid of. The naturalist E.O. Wilson put it best when he called invertebrates "the little things that run the world." He meant it almost literally. Insects and their kin ar

The garden you tend by day has a second life you have almost certainly never seen. When the last of the light drains away and you go indoors, a whole other workforce clocks on. Moths lift from the borders and begin their rounds; bats unspool from the eaves; a hedgehog noses out from under the hedge; and, if you are very lucky and your garden is dark enough, a female glow-worm switches on a small green lamp in the grass and waits. The night is not an empty, sleeping version of

Beneath every healthy garden runs a partnership much older than trees themselves - something I only discovered when I fell hopelessly in love with Merlin Sheldrake and his book 'Entangled'. Thread-like fungi wrap around and into plant roots, reaching out through the soil in a filigree far finer than any root could manage, and strike a deal that has shaped life on land for something like 400 million years. It's one of the most important relationships in your garden, and, thank