Review by Annette Marshall

THE ACCIDENTAL GARDEN

by

Richard Mabey

Richard Mabey has authored 30 books since becoming a full-time writer in 1974, a number of which have won awards, including the East Anglia Book Award, National Book Award and Whitbread Biography Award. He sat on the UK’s Nature Conservancy Council in the 1980s, has been awarded two Leverhulme Fellowships and three honorary doctorates, and became a Fellow in the Royal Society of Literature in 2011.

I selected this book to review because I found it charming and challenging and very informative. Like many of us in the DLCI I am a keen but relatively novice gardener and I thought it might be of interest to consider Richard and Polly’s approach to their new garden – where they chose to garden ‘by’ wildlife and the challenges they faced and the extent to which nature can thrive itself when human involvement is minimized. The first few pages pulled me straight in:

‘I feel as if I’ve been shuttling back and forth across that wire all my life. I’ve been drawn by the fusions we have made between nature and culture, especially in language and landscape. And then cheered every time the natural world cocks a snook at our hubris and goes its own way. Rarer to find are moments of a middle way, of cohabitation rather than manipulation. It would be glib to suggest that the immeasurably complex problems of a whole world are mirrored in the small confrontations and challenges of the garden. But maybe the mindset needed for both is the same: the generosity to reset the power balance between ourselves and the natural world’.

This book embodies Richard and Polly’s individual approaches to gardening and how stepping back from traditional Gardener’s World techniques (heaven forbid) have brought over 120 species back into their garden over the last 20 years. He introduced me to the untold benefits of insects other than butterflies and bees - the army of ants in the garden and how they are responsible for the colonisation of cowslips as they feed the little fat globules on cowslip seeds to their grubs. The seeds are distributed far and wide as the ants transport them around resulting in beautiful meadows of them.

Richards says in a recent interview:

I’ve been astonished by the inventiveness of our fellow beings when allowed a little leeway to do their own thing. When we drop our paternalistic attitude, our belief that we know best what should live where. Gardens are often compared to theatres, with the gardener as writer, director, set designer rolled into one. Can’t they also be open stages where uninvited, unsupervised species and ancient processes of colonisation and decay can improvise their own landscapes? In the 20 years we’ve been here one half of our plot has transformed itself into a kind of common, with patches of tree land and open grass, and a total of over 150 wild plant species arrived largely of their own accord. A garden is only in the smallest sense a microcosm and metaphor for the planet. But in it it’s possible to glimpse larger lessons about neighbourliness and cooperation, and the fact that the natural world is not intrinsically a victim, in need of constant intensive care.

Reading this book has certainly made me stand back from my garden which we planted only two years ago and made me reflect on how we plan for the future of it and manage the wider grassland under our stewardship. I found this book a delightful read and can highly recommend it.