This fictional creative piece allows Wull to talk about the loss of fish life in the Moray firth in the context of 'shifting baseline syndrome'. It is the fourth in a series of 12 essays on 'Shifting baselines' looking at different ecosystems and how they have become depleted in living memory. They are written in dialect where possible to acknowledge the language around nature that is being lost concurrently with nature itself. Sit like, min. Sit ye doon out of the wind, for

The first in a 12 part series on making your UK garden future-fit for climate change In a downstairs loo somewhere in East Sussex, there is a brick. Someone's grandmother put it there in the drought of 1976, and it has sat in the cold water of the cistern ever since, slowly shedding grit, quietly doing a little good. It is a fair emblem for how most of us think about saving water: a well-meant gesture, half-remembered, rarely examined, dusted off whenever the reservoirs drop

I'm lucky, in Sussex to be close to some innovative peri-urban rewilding and growing projects - like Hackhurst Farm in Polegate, Lovebrook Farm in Kingston and Landtribe in Newhaven. I've been looking recently for even MORE innovative peri-urban growing models, and this article covers one of my favourites (though, for purists, its not strictly in line with the rest of me 'rewilding' writing - other than generally being about the reintegration of animal life into city centres)

This fictional creative piece allows he voice of Edna to talk about her beloved fenland in the context of 'shifting baseline syndrome'. It is the second in a series of 12 essays on 'Shifting baselines' looking at different ecosystems and how they have become depleted in living memory. They are written in dialect where possible to acknowledge the language around nature that is being lost concurrently with nature itself. You want to know what the fen was. Well. Sit you down, th

Author's note:- I became fascinated with dendritic chalk streams when I first moved to Sussex and learned of their uniqueness. This fictional creative piece allows he voice of cyril to talk about similar streams in Hampshire in the context of 'shifting baseline syndrome'. It is the first in a series of 12 essays on 'Shifting baselines' looking at different ecosystems and how they have become depleted in living memory. They are written in dialect where possible to acknowledge

How maps, satellites and the science of place are quietly redrawing what a rewilded garden means From the ground, a garden feels like an island. A fence on every side, a gate, a boundary you mow up to and no further. You tend your patch, and the world beyond the hedge is somebody else's business. But if you see it from above, the way a swift sees it, or a satellite, or an ecologist bent over a screen, the fences dissolve. Your garden is no longer an island at all. It is one g

On a warm afternoon in late July, walk the edge of almost any rough field, verge or railway bank and you will find a plant that the law of the land would call a weed. Common ragwort stands waist high, its flat-topped blaze of yellow flowers loud against the drying grass. Look closer and the flowers are busy: hoverflies, solitary bees, soldier beetles, the odd gatekeeper butterfly. And on the leaves, if you are lucky, a row of caterpillars in black and gold hoops, feeding shou

There is an old idea, older than pharmacies and prescriptions, that the plants growing closest to our back doors are the ones we most need. Long before the medicine cabinet, the hedge and the meadow were the medicine cabinet. The nettle by the compost heap, the elder at the boundary, the marigold self-seeding in the cracks; these were the village apothecary, tended by nobody and available to everyone. When we rewild a garden, we are not only making room for pollinators and bi

Why the river you think is healthy and the garden you think is wild are both haunted by an abundance you never experienced, and what shifting baseline syndrome means for anyone trying to bring nature back. Stand on a bridge over a lowland river on a bright morning. The water runs more or less clear. A moorhen picks along the margin, willows lean over the bank, a couple of mallard drift past. It looks, by any ordinary reckoning, like a healthy river. A nice river. The kind of