Stomp on your lawn like a buffalo to attract animals, says rewilding champion

Forget bird feeders and hedgehog boxes – to have a nature-friendly garden you should trample the lawn like a water buffalo and cover your rose bushes in pony spit.

Isabella Tree, the rewilding champion, has urged people to stop using “artificial” means to attract wildlife to a suburban garden, and instead mimic the behaviour of real animals.

Throwing wood into your pond to recreate a beaver’s habitat is another tip from Ms Tree, who owns the 3,500-acre “wild estate” of Knepp in West Sussex.

“Garden centres will sell you bird boxes, bat boxes, bird feeding tables, hedgehog boxes – all the paraphernalia that is manufactured to get creatures back into your gardens. I really would say: why would you actually do that?” Ms Tree told her audience at the annual Hay Festival.

“The natural habitat for birds is thorny protection. It’s berries, it’s seeds. If you’re having to put up bird boxes in your gardens, it’s probably because you haven’t got enough natural habitat. So instead of having a picket fence between you and your neighbour, establish a lovely, thick, native species hedge. Instead of tidying up at the end of the summer, leave seed heads for the birds for the winter.

“Most nature-friendly ponds are quite anodyne and probably have the same depth of water, with grass all the way up to them. So if you wanted to rewild your garden, you would think like a beaver – throw in some branches of wood and let that rot down for the algae, that will feed the tiny fish that will kick-start the life cycle of species in your pond.

“You would think perhaps like a water buffalo or a cow, and you would trample around the edges, creating puddles and pools where amphibians would spawn. It’s just thinking differently.”

Ms Tree told the crowd of an unusual but natural way to get rose bushes to flourish.

“What are you doing when you’re pruning the rose bush in your garden with secateurs? You’re being a proxy for a deer or a pony. If you prune your rose bush, it thinks it’s under attack from a herbivore so it throws out more flowers.

“A study has shown that if you collect some animal saliva, even if it’s pony spit or something, and anoint the little bit that you cut with your secateurs, the plant can read the enzyme in the spit and it goes even crazier.”

Also at Hay was Adam Frost, the Gardeners’ World presenter, who advised gardeners to “just back off” at certain times of year and let nature take its course.

“As gardeners, we are a little bit too tidy,” he said, adding that people should not fall for pictures of perfectly-tended gardens in magazines or on television programmes.

“Every time you see a beautiful garden in a magazine, that garden has crap bits. They just don’t photograph the crap bits,” he said.

‘I think it’s absurd’

Ms Tree was being interviewed by Ben Goldsmith, who expressed his frustration that Britain refuses to allow the reintroduction of wolves.

“What’s with this British exceptionalism that we are somehow too grand and too civilised to rewild?” he asked.

There are 22,000 wolves in Europe, he said. “I think it’s absurd, this idea that wolves can be trotting around the outskirts of Brussels or Amsterdam, or just across the water in Normandy - in suburban Normandy you can hear wolves howling from the woods - it’s absurd that we can’t have wildlife like that. And I think it’s inevitable that we’ll get back lynx and, eventually, wolves.”

Mr Goldsmith insisted that many farmers would welcome wolves, and said we should learn to live with the effect that reintroduction could have on livestock.

“One pack of wolves in Spain was observed to kill 50 deer and 50 wild boar in a single year. So those farmers are delighted with the return of wolves.

“Yes, they pose difficulties for some kinds of farming, specifically sheep farming… but all wildlife is difficult. All my chickens got killed last year by a fox. Do I want foxes eradicated?

“Would we get permission to reintroduce foxes if they were extinct in Britain? I doubt it.”