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The top ten things you can do to rewild your garden



When I started on my rewilding journey I didn't really know where to start - although I felt very strongly that it might be with a wildlife pond and covering my fences - which proved to be true, but it's a question I get asked a lot - so here's the actual scientific answer....


NB: Please note that this advice is for a 'typical' UK suburban garden. For other countries please use my 'how should me garden grow' app here which will personalise it based on your own region.


We tend to think of rewilding as something that happens out there; on a Scottish estate, a reflooded fen, a hillside handed back to the beavers. But some of the most valuable habitat in Britain isn't wilderness at all. It's the ordinary back garden.

There are more than twenty million of them in the UK, and taken together they cover more ground than all our National Nature Reserves combined. That makes the nation's gardeners, collectively, one of the largest landowners in the country - and in one of the most nature-depleted corners of the world, that is not a small responsibility. It's a huge opportunity.


Rewilding a garden isn't about neglect, and it isn't all-or-nothing. It's about handing a little control back to nature and getting, in return, a plot that hums and flutters and rustles in a way a paved, sprayed, close-shorn one never can. Here are ten things you can do, roughly in order of impact-for-effort. You don't need to do them all. Start with one.


1. Put the mower away

If you do just one thing, do this. A closely mown lawn is, ecologically, a green desert — but let it grow and the dormant seed bank beneath it wakes up. The conservation charity Plantlife, which launched No Mow May in 2019, has found that a lawn left unmown, or cut only every four to six weeks, can produce up to ten times more nectar than one shaved weekly. That matters more than it sounds: we've lost around 97% of our flower-rich meadows since the 1930s, and a suburban lawn full of daisies, clover, selfheal and bird's-foot trefoil helps plug the gap. To put the scale in human terms, just eight dandelion flowers can produce enough nectar sugar to meet an adult bumblebee's baseline needs for a day.

The trick is variety. Leave some grass long all season, mow a winding path or a sitting-out patch, and cut different areas at different heights. You'll get more flowers, more insects (and less to do on a Sunday).


2. Dig a pond, any pond

Nothing else you can add to a garden brings life as fast, or as much of it. Ponds are extraordinary: the Freshwater Habitats Trust reports that they support around two-thirds of all freshwater species in the UK, and the Wildfowl & Wetlands Trust notes that a healthy garden pond supports a greater range of wildlife than any other single garden habitat. Frogs, toads and newts have lost countless breeding sites across the wider countryside; your pond becomes a lifeline and a stepping stone between them.

And it needn't be grand. A washing-up bowl or an old sink sunk into the ground counts! Even one square metre of water will draw in dragonflies, water beetles and thirsty birds within weeks. The two rules that matter: make sure there's a shallow, sloping edge or a ramp so creatures can climb out, and fill it with rainwater rather than tap water. Skip the fish if wildlife is your aim; they eat most of it.


3. Go chemical-free

This one is a matter of subtraction, and it's free. Insects are in steep decline: the Bugs Matter survey run by Kent Wildlife Trust and Buglife, which counts insects squashed on car number plates, recorded a fall of around 78% in flying-insect splats across the UK between 2004 and 2023; and the drops have continued since. Every pesticide, herbicide and slug pellet you use pushes in the same direction, killing indiscriminately and travelling up the food chain into the hedgehogs and songbirds you're hoping to attract.

The rewilding move is to stop reaching for the bottle and let the garden find its own balance. Aphids summon ladybirds and hoverflies; slugs feed hedgehogs, frogs and thrushes. It's rarely as tidy as chemical control, and it takes a season's nerve to trust it, but a garden left to police itself almost always does.


4. Plant for pollinators, and think in seasons

Give the insects a reason to stay. The aim is nectar and pollen from the first warm days of spring right through to the last of autumn, so there's never a hungry gap. Reach for single, open flowers rather than blowsy double blooms - the doubles look spectacular but often carry little a bee can actually use - and lean on the RHS's Plants for Pollinators list when you're choosing as I do in my Butts & Bees packs for schools.

Distance matters too: many of our solitary bees will fly only around 300 metres to forage, so a lone flowerbed marooned in a sea of decking is little help. Buglife's national B-Lines network (a map of "insect pathways" running through town and country) exists precisely to knit these patches together. Plant a nectar-rich border, a herb pot, a patch of wildflowers, and you've added a link to the chain.


5. Grow a hedge and open a hedgehog highway

A fence is a dead end. A native hedge is a food source, a nest site and a wildlife corridor all at once; hawthorn, blackthorn, hazel and holly will feed and shelter far more than a larch-lap panel ever could. Where you can't plant one, at least make your boundaries passable.

The simplest example is the hedgehog. These much-loved animals roam one to two kilometres a night in search of food and mates, which a single sealed garden can't provide, and their numbers have fallen sharply, with the western European hedgehog listed as near threatened on the IUCN Red List in 2024. The Hedgehog Street campaign's fix is almost comically small: a 13cm by 13cm hole at the base of a fence, roughly the size of a CD case; big enough for a hedgehog, too small for most pets. Cut one on each side of your plot, persuade your neighbours to do the same, and a row of gardens becomes a connected commons. (This is the heart of the matter, and we've explored it in more depth in our piece on habitat corridors.)


6. Leave the mess

Tidiness is the enemy of biodiversity. The bare, swept, hard-edged garden gives wildlife nowhere to shelter, breed or overwinter — so the kindest thing you can do is relax.

Build a log pile in a shady corner and let it rot; decaying wood feeds beetles, fungi and the larvae that birds depend on, and offers hedgehogs and amphibians a place to hibernate. Leave the fallen leaves where you can, rather than bagging them; leaf litter is a whole world of woodlice, worms and the creatures that eat them. Let seed heads stand through winter for the goldfinches, and leave hollow stems for overwintering insects. A deliberately wild, unmanaged corner of nettles, brambles, long grass, a heap of prunings will quietly become the busiest square metre you own.


7. Lift the paving

Britain has quietly paved over an enormous area of its front gardens, and every slab and resin-bound driveway is habitat lost and rainwater sent rushing into overwhelmed drains instead of soaking into living soil. Reversing that is real rewilding.

You don't have to dig up everything. Swap a corner of paving for a border or a gravel garden threaded with drought-tolerant, pollinator-friendly planting. Replace a solid drive with permeable materials, or leave planting gaps between the pavers. Every square metre you return to soil is a square metre that can grow roots, host invertebrates, absorb a downpour and cool the air on a hot day. In an era of flash floods and heatwaves, unsealed ground is doing quiet, valuable work.


8. Go peat-free

What you grow in matters as much as what you grow. Peatlands are Britain's single largest natural carbon store; they hold more carbon than the forests of the UK, France and Germany combined; yet they're dug up and bagged for gardens, releasing that carbon and destroying a rare, beautiful habitat of sundews, bog moss and breeding birds. The great majority of England's deep peat is already degraded, and the government has now moved to ban the retail sale of bagged peat compost in England.

So make the switch permanent. Choose peat-free compost; bark, coir, wood fibre and wool-based mixes all work well, though they water and feed a little differently, and, best of all, make your own from kitchen and garden waste. A compost heap is a two-for-one rewilding act: it closes your garden's nutrient loop and becomes a warm, teeming habitat in its own right, beloved of slow-worms and, once again, hedgehogs.


9. Put up homes

Modern buildings and manicured gardens have stripped out the nooks that wildlife once nested in, so it's worth putting some back. A bird box or two, a bee hotel, a bat box tucked high on a wall - each offers a home the tidy built environment no longer provides.

Match the box to the need. Nest boxes with different hole sizes suit different birds; leaving a rough bank of bare, sunny earth gives ground-nesting solitary bees somewhere to burrow. If you have the roofline for it, consider a swift box; swifts have suffered steep declines and are now red-listed in the UK, and they'll only nest in cavities under the eaves. None of this is expensive, and watching something move in is one of the quiet joys of a wilder garden.


10. Dim the lights, and rethink "tidy"

The last one is half practical, half a change of heart. Artificial light at night disorients moths, disrupts insects' feeding and breeding, and interferes with bats; so use outdoor lighting sparingly, on a timer or a sensor, warm-toned and pointed down, and leave dark corners genuinely dark. Small change, real benefit.

And the change of heart: rewilding asks us to find a new idea of beauty. A garden that's alive is a little untidy by the old standards; grass that's gone to seed, a corner left to its own devices, a few chewed leaves as proof the food chain is working. Learning to see that as success rather than neglect is, in the end, the thing that makes all the rest possible. Do more, as the saying goes, by doing less.

You don't have to become a purist, rip out your borders or let the whole plot run to bramble. Rewilding a garden is a direction of travel, not a finish line. Pick one thing from this list - put the mower away, sink a bowl of water into a border, cut a gap in the fence - and sit back and let the garden show you what happens next. It will surprise you. And somewhere down the street, another garden waking up to the same idea is only a hedgehog's night's walk away.


References & further reading

 
 
 

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