Meet the Half Wild Garden

A toxic waste dump, transformed by love, becomes a vibrant acre of heartbreaking beauty.

Here’s a nice “after” photo, of loganberry blossoms in May.

To start us off, I think a proper introduction to the half wild garden itself is in order, don’t you?

We’re entering our fifth season of land stewardship, here in the garden. When we first came to see it, way back when, it wasn’t half wild at all. Fifteen years of desperate neglect and abuse had taken their toll; the land appeared quite traumatized and seemingly dead.

The prior tenants had used this space as a dumping ground. It held pieces of old rusty vehicles (with diesel spills emanating from them), alongside partially un-burned remnants from several bonfires so toxic we shuddered to even think of it: Car batteries. Mattresses. Asbestos. Plastics. And who knows what else.

(A fast forward note: Nature is incredibly resilient. Although absolutely nothing grew in the vicinity of those bonfire sites for a good three years, slowly the land has healed itself. I still wouldn’t grow food anywhere nearby, but almost unbelievably, other kinds of plants are doing just fine there.)

Strangely enough, those earlier tenants first took on this land because they wanted to grow food. Presumably, to eat.

And they must’ve been excited at the prospect, because they planted dozens of raspberry, blackcurrant and loganberry bushes, along with some really interesting flowers and specimen plants, scattered about in what are now extremely awkward and unfortunate spots around the property.

And trees. God, the trees. It’s a fiercely windy spot, surrounded by open fields where horses or cattle typically graze. So windbreaks were needed. All around the perimeter, they planted dense double rows of fast growing willow, ash and hazel, along with oaks, junipers, copper beech, horse chestnut, elders, maple, hawthorn, damson, cherry, and one sad and sickly crab apple.

(To be fair, a handful of those trees were already present, growing wild in the hedge. But only a handful.) All of this wasn’t enough to stop the wind, so they later added long rows of willow in various spots bisecting the acre itself. Yay.

Willow is basically a pioneer weed, and it grows between six and ten feet every year. Every. Year.

And all of this still isn’t enough to stop the wind. It IS, however, a royal pain in the trunk—for the trees as well as for us—that must be dealt with every single year, if we don’t want the entire acre to turn into a densely shaded woodland.

But I digress.

Anyway. When we first came to see the property, all the trees were choked by invasive vines, the ivy, bindweed and cleavers climbing over everything in sight, including each other.

See what I mean? These ones are covered in bionic honeysuckle, but…same principle.

Nature is incredibly, um, exuberant here in England, you see—at least compared to the desert conditions of California. Stuff GROWS. Not always the stuff you’re trying to grow, of course. But the natural plants, the wild ones that actually belong here, go like crazy.

So to counteract this, the previous tenants many years earlier had covered most of the ground in waste nylon carpeting or vinyl sheeting, in a rather optimistically futile attempt to keep down the weeds. Cute.

Instead, over the years a thin layer of soil settled on top of the carpets (as it surely will). By the time we came to look at it, the entire field was covered in dead, shoulder-high nettles, brambles and thistles. Yay again.

But wait, there’s more. Once upon a time this acre had been the same sort of grazing paddock as all of the surrounding fields. But without animals to graze it, the grasses need to be regularly cut. They weren’t.

So the neglected monocrop field grasses underfoot had formed a thick, spongy layer of rotten, white straw-like mass, home to myriad abandoned rodent nests. Yay thrice.

The overall vibe of this place was basically quite sad, and actually pretty creepy.

The fateful decision

For years, we’d been craving an outdoor spot to sit and enjoy a summer sunset. We live in a charming loft, and although it offers amazing views of the green fields beyond, it hasn’t got one blade of actual grass growing anywhere around it. Plus we’d been wanting to try growing a veg garden.

So we could see the potential of this unloved piece of land. But although an acre doesn’t sound like much, it’s a hell of a lot of area to transform, when it’s as desperately messed up as this one was.

After much weighing of pros (no rent! potential vine ripe tomatoes!) and cons (well…pretty much everything else), the pros eventually won out. And that’s how we came to take on this ridiculously ambitious project, of trying to bring a badly abused acre back to life.

Experienced local farmers all recommended that we clear the land and start over from scratch. They advised that we hire a contractor to bring in massive equipment to tear up everything but the trees. My gut said no.

Partly for practical reasons: The land was full of discarded metal, broken crockery, the aforementioned nylon carpeting and all kinds of crazy hidden hazards. If the driver were to unwittingly run over any of it, bringing potential destruction to their breathtakingly expensive farm equipment…well, nobody would be happy about that.

But mainly my gut was saying no for another reason. This bulldozing approach seemed much too brutal. We wanted to clear the dead brush, certainly. But it seemed to us the land had already been through quite enough, without us adding to its pain.

So we did it by hand.

All through the autumn months, Steve and I slowly cleared the dead brush, and freed as many of the trees from their tangled vine prisons, as we could safely reach.

The dead, matted field grass underfoot turned out to be incredibly tough and resistant; neither our mower nor our strimmer (that’s a weed whacker, for you Americans) could even touch it. Eventually I got down on all fours and chopped it by hand, six inches at a time, with hedge clippers.

Yeah, I know. I can’t believe I did that either.

We took up old rotting boards and a certain amount of carpeting, in the process exposing a multitude of abandoned rat runs. (I’ve lost count of the yays, here. Four?)

And we offered our apologies to the many ants and snails—the only living inhabitants we encountered—as we disturbed their homes. We removed empty rodent traps and pesticide containers we found slung in the hedge, and brought in bird feeders and compost bins.

And then the winter rains came. This part of the countryside regularly floods, and that piece of land was no exception. Lacking any drainage ditches, the rain poured in off the surrounding saturated fields, turning it into a mucky mess punctuated by stagnant ponds.

It was time to stop and take stock. After hundreds of hours of work, the land was still an eyesore; still in a miserable state; and as far as we could tell, still dead. We really weren’t sure whether or not to even bother picking up where we left off, in the spring.

Transformation

But then something kind of magical happened. It seemed that Nature itself had noticed our efforts to be kind to the smallest bug, while tending to the needs of the largest tree. I had no explanation for it at the time, but the place itself did pretty much all the rest of the work for us.

(Note: I have since come to recognize that vibrant, joyful magic is simply how Nature rolls. But back then, I was gobsmacked by it.)

Come spring, the rest of the densely matted, rotten straw melted away all by itself (!), leaving plenty of room for new spring grasses to flourish. Trees, shrubs, dog-roses, poppies, lilies, lilacs, iris, honeysuckle and hundreds of showy specimen plants all burst into joyous bloom.

Rows and rows of those mature berry bushes (which we hadn’t even realized were there until that point) suddenly awakened into vibrant vitality, laden with buds promising an abundant summer harvest.

The surprise discovery of a hidden berry patch

Treated with neither pesticides nor herbicides, the grassy expanses were soon jostling for space with wildflowers of every kind. Pheasants, partridges, a family of woodpeckers, bats, owls, hedgehogs, toads and dozens of other species arrived.

The air hummed with moths, butterflies and every kind of bee. Grasshoppers and crickets not seen or heard since Steve’s childhood merrily added to the population explosion, along with more creepy-crawlies than you probably need to hear about.

By early May, the sickly crab apple tree was brimming with health, spilling over with perfect pink blooms, brilliantly alive with the buzzing of hundreds of bedazzled pollinators.

Weeping willows, formerly limp, yellow and disease-ridden, now cloaked themselves in vibrantly healthy velvet foliage hanging majestically to the ground.

If you were to walk through this wondrously lush springtime field, and choose just one word to describe the vibe it gave off—that word, incredibly and improbably, would be ‘LOVE.’

And to this day, people feel it. You don’t have to be sensitive to Nature, you don’t have to be a fan of the woo. Anyone who walks through the gate pauses and invariably says, “Wow. It’s so peaceful here.”

They’re feeling Nature’s love.

And why is it half wild?

Because at the far end of the property, beyond our vegetable beds, greenhouses, brassica cages, wildflower meadows and meandering grassy pathways, we decided to leave several large, untouched islands of nettle, bramble and thistle, along with the riotous cacophony of whatever other naturally occurring weeds and decomposing detritus happened to be there.

Because Nature deserves to be able to express itself in the way it chooses.

There is no original wilderness left in the UK. Not one centimeter. It’s all ‘managed’ woodland, which is a very different thing from what used to be primeval forest, or natural scrubland.

So yeah, we wanted to do our tiny bit to bring the wildness back. And holy moly, did it work.

Each of those untouched weed islands promptly grew up into a dense, shoulder-high thicket. The thickets provided food and cover for dozens, or maybe even hundreds of species, including one beautiful, large red deer.

He graced us with his (surprisingly un-annoying and non-destructive) presence for a few days and nights, stealthily munching on black currants in the early dawn hours before retreating to his secluded thicket for a daytime nap. And then he left, never to return.

Note: I have since come to see visits from deer as a bit less of a delightful gift…

But that’s a story for some other post.

This essay is very loosely adapted from The Fricken Map is Upside Down, my 4th and most recent book, which can be read for free on my other Substack.