Are you going to re-wild your garden?

I have got a clodhopping dog oh yes, me too, greenlady, I forgot about that!
Thanks for the tips about tubs, that might be a starting point.

Not a chance. Mind you my garden seems to have other more relaxed ideas in spite of my regular intervention. Just as well I'm up for the annual challenge.

I thought I might grow the poppies, cornflowers , daisies etc in a large tub this year greenlady because none came up despite my efforts. Of course, I realised afterwards that poppies at least do like ploughed soil, or at least softer soil

Our front lawn is, in fact, mainly weeds with scarcely any topsoil, but not the kind which makes for a pretty meadow.

Callistemon

^It's interesting seeing what comes up^
A huge number of dandelions.

I have tried this for 3 years now and have scattered wildflower seeds, scraped up soil and put in seeds, dug little holes and planted wildflowers, followed instructions, but it is nowhere near being a wildflower meadow or wildflower strip.
It is just a mess.

I could take up all the grass and put down turf with pre-planted wildflowers possibly. But will that fail too?

Those wildflower things are a bit of a con. You have to look at your garden as though you were doing any other kind of gardening....soil, moisture, aspect, microclimate, and then plant what will work. Before you do it to a lawn, same thing also you must REALLY trash the lawn first or it will choke out the wildflowers.
Its worth remembering that this isn't an all or nothing thing. Wildflowers can be grown in big tubs and if you do it this way, you can control soil and aspect and also the dear pets and the darling kiddiwinks cant trample all over them...I have got a clodhopping dog. Even trees can be grown in very big tubs. choose blossoming trees with single blooms and fruit...hawthorn, amelanchier, wild cherry....and when the leaves fall off, pile them into odd corners of the garden or onto the pots and leave them there.

www.beebombs.com
I was given a small tin of these and did get a couple of wildflowers last year, including viper's bugloss.

It is as much gardening as mowing your lawn.
And a lot more hard work M0nica!

We do have someone to cut the lawns and I asked him to avoid my wild part and a patch of violets I found last year. He laughs and says it's not a wildflower meadow, it's just a mess.
However, we have hawthorn, hazel etc in the hedge and some brambles from when it was a wild area which we've tended and they produce flowers which the bees love and blackberries for us if the blackbirds leave us any.

The garden is nowhere near perfect, it's too big to manage now, so I reckon we're doing our bit!

It's interesting seeing what comes up
A huge number of dandelions.

I have tried this for 3 years now and have scattered wildflower seeds, scraped up soil and put in seeds, dug little holes and planted wildflowers, followed instructions, but it is nowhere near being a wildflower meadow or wildflower strip.
It is just a mess.

I could take up all the grass and put down turf with pre-planted wildflowers possibly. But will that fail too?

It always looks lovely in pictures and for real, but it does sound like a lot of hard work to get established.
The wildlife aspect, particularly butterflies, would be the attraction for me.

I have a little rotting wood pile for beetles, dead trees which are left to rot for mining insects like wasps etc and every flower must be bee or insect friendly.

I don’t tidy up the garden until this time of year and have a little pond, which used to be much bigger but our dog spent all day stood in it or racking around the edges and it became a muddy giant puddle.

I garden organically, but I don’t have a lawn so can’t have a meadow?

Luckygirl Remember Geoff Hamilton? He was our guru when we started gardening On his advice we sank a bucket in the garden and filled it with water and for a while had newts. Unfortunately our garden is clay and gets very muddy and the bucket eventually filled up with mud - we never emptied it because we were always a bit worried about hedgehogs falling in and not being able to get out as it was deep.

Our garden is surrounded by various trees, some conifer, some deciduous. The garden near the house and patio is more manicured, but gets wilder away from the house. The garden isn't huge but reasonable for a modern house. We have never used weedkillers and one part of the garden has been overtaken by nettles, and the brambles and ivy get everywhere and are really difficult to control. On the plus side we get loads of wildlife - hedgehogs, foxes, field mice, loads of different birds from sparrowhawks to wrens, and a number of bees, butterflies and moths.

Even sinking a washing up bowl into the garden is sufficient to attract wildlife.

muse is right! the happy theory that all you need to do is leave land alone and mother nature will do its bit is complete bunkum. Mother nature's "bit" is to alow the coarsest most robust vegetation to take over and this usually means nettles, brambles, and so on. Areas that are genuinely re wilded need much research to find out how they have changed and what point in time you want to rewind to. Meadows were managed and used, even huge areas like the New Forest or the Moors have been shaped by human use, grazing, agriculture, game management and so on.

25 years ago when we bought this house, I ceased doing anything to one area of grass. I did proper rewilding, just leaving it and seeing what happened. I live in a village and I am surrounded by uncultivated land.

The result is a rather scruffy area of land with all the usual thugs growing there.

What Monty Don is recommending is not proper rewilding, it is fashionable rewilding, consisting of sewing wild flowers and keeping everything nice and tidy, removing the thugs.

It is as much gardening as mowing your lawn.

I have lived in my house for around 35 years and it was built on a field the year before that. We had to reconstruct the topsoil, terrace it to stop our garden sliding into next door when it rained and clear the buried junk (car steering column and axle anybody?) but its never been unwild. I had 7 trees when we moved here, have lost 5 due to disease and the fact that one tree was trashing the foundations but have added rowan, spindle, holly, mirabelle and amelanchier. The only chemical I use and that rarely is brushwood killer because if I didn't, I would have nothing but brambles. Some are allowed but they are rampant and need controlling. Its not a big garden, I would say good size for suburbia.

Ours is tiny, paved with raised beds. I don't use weed killer, and most of our plants attract pollinators. However we also have an allotment, on which we keep bees and DH planted five new fruit trees in the bee area and we are also going to seed that part with a bee friendly wild flower mixture.

Ours is not nearly big enough, so no, though it’s hardly manicured to within an inch of its life anyway, and our little so-called lawn is a mass of violets and buttercups in their seasons.

I seem to remember a gardening article in the Telegraph where a ‘small’ garden was anything less than about half an acre - ? - wherever would one put the tennis court and swimming pool?

I live in a tree lined London street and our council have asked people to adopt the tree pits in their street and plant wild flowers at the base of the tree. They have provided a label to attach to the tree so that the council will not spray the adopted pits with weed killer in the summer. We are to plant wild flowers only so that we can increase the availability of pollen for insects.

The tree pit outside my house contains a beautiful flowering cherry that brings me a lot of pleasure when it flowers so I am looking forward to getting it planted next week.

My garden is doing very well all on its own; just trying to clear away all the wild garlic.

Muse, might a forest tree or three keep the weeds under control?

I have a small wildlife pond and a small back garden but half of that has been left to go wild. Wish I had the amount of land that a lot of you have......

The little points just poking through are the tops of Northern Marsh Orchids, of which there were 52 last year. None of them planted; they just appeared and I mark their whereabouts so that they don't get mown.

These two are one step outside my back door.

My garden has been re-wilding itself for years. It is in need of some TLC, but we’ll be keeping it wildlife friendly.

My garden's wild already. Current count of wild plants is 215. I haven't identified all the mosses.

There are a few non-wild plants but most of them have to be protected from the munchings of wild roe deer.