Not just a pretty place: Four ways to keep your garden exciting

According to Lottie Delamain, you’d be hard-pressed to find anything as “deliriously simple” but rewarding as a garden.

Delamain is a UK garden designer whose new book Gardens That Can Save The World lays out all the reasons we should better value gardens, and puts paid to any idea of gardening being an indulgence.

“It feels absurd that they don’t command more social capital,” she writes, driving home what many gardeners already know: growing plants is vitally important.

The gardens profiled in this book have jobs to do. Instead of “twee ornamental Edens and immaculate confections”, there are backyard biodiversity hot spots in the UK, mushroom farms in underground car parks in France and luxuriant green spaces in post-industrial landscapes in Mexico. Delamain writes about gardens in war zones, refugee camps and prisons.

Many of these spaces are beautiful, but aesthetics are not their only reason for being. Even the smallest among them have an outsized role in reversing the biodiversity crisis, saving water, preventing drought, transforming mental health, bridging social divides, educating vulnerable children and reimagining polluting industries.

They are inspiring. They make you want to get outside post-haste. Delamain, who makes anything seem possible, shows how exciting gardening can be. Here is some of her best guidance.

Plant with ecological complexity in mind

The more habitats you can create, the more plants you can grow and the more wildlife you will support. While most of us don’t have as much space as Great Dixter or the grounds of the Knepp Castle, both in the UK, these gardens highlight the biodiversity benefits of creating a range of different conditions (long grass, billowing hedges and humps and hollows of varying soil types, for example.) And if your garden is only small? The head gardener at Knepp Walled Garden, Charlie Harpur, suggests thinking about it in relation to your neighbours’ plots: “Whatever (habitat) is missing could be an area to focus on”.

But keep other aspects simple

There’s no need for expensive hard landscaping, imported materials or even automatic irrigation systems to make a garden that exudes vitality and verve. Delamain speaks to designers who embrace what already exists, even “ugly” elements that are tweaked with low-cost, lo-fi interventions rather than being demolished and re-built.

The Californian landscape design company Terremoto is a leader in the field, making gardens that, Delamain says, feel alive in ways that others don’t.

Terremoto co-founder David Godshall details the studio’s process: use local materials, prioritise ecology, not be fixed on drawing plans, try to come to peace with existing conditions, let beauty emerge rather than be imposed and encourage clients to take responsibility for how their space develops. Do try this at home.

Reuse whenever possible

Incorporating broken bricks, builders’ rubble, sand and other materials left on site after building works doesn’t mean your garden has to look like a mess. Arrange it carefully enough and it can, in fact, be a visual – and ecological – asset. It also means you don’t have to pay to dump discarded materials only to spend more money on other landscaping products.

UK-based gardener and designer John Little is an expert in the field. He champions the value in the overlooked, gathering other people’s refuse as well as his own. No material is deemed too lowly to fashion into gabion walls, paths and mounded beds in his Essex garden, all of which is both visually beguiling and useful habitat.

Reusing rainwater is a more everyday affair, but designers are getting more innovative in this field too, especially at a sustainable housing community in Mexico. Here, water is harvested not in conventional tanks but in a lake that looks spectacular even as it is drying out. Designed by Estudio Ome, this water body contains a series of concentric rings – each featuring plants – that are revealed as the water recedes during dry seasons.

Don’t wait until you have the perfect property to start gardening

Alla Olkhovska has homed in on clematis in Kharkiv, Ukraine. Ron Finley grows vegetables on the street in Los Angeles. In Rio de Janeiro, locals grow food on land once used as a rubbish dump, while in nine Kurdistan refugee camps, displaced gardeners regularly compete for the title of Garden of The Month. For all of these gardeners, the process of gardening is central. It is an act of resilience and freedom using whatever space is to hand.

It’s a lesson for all of us who are delaying starting a garden until we have more time, a more permanent residence. It’s better to dive in. Or as Finley puts it: “Go out and do something. Change your world.”

Gardens That Can Save The World (Thames & Hudson) by Lottie Delamain is out now.

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