Even if you have a tiny garden space, no bigger than a couple of shipping containers, you can create a feel-good garden. Even a microforest, where the summer heat recedes. So does the roar of nearby airplanes and any nearby traffic noises. Packing a garden with hundreds of native plants, you can use a decades-old but recently trending technique, known as Miyawaki method, which crowds together native plants, encouraging them to grow rapidly as they compete for resources.
Within five years, you’ll get the same oxygen production and carbon sequestration that a forest that’s 50 years or older is producing. So you can make a huge impact quickly.
Gardens Are Good For Us
The exposure of fresh air and sunshine, the sensory engagement with nature – all of that is believed to lower rates of hypertension and heart disease and improve mental well-being. But gardens can also promote health directly through their bounty, as a source of herbal remedies and medicines. It’s an opportunity many gardeners overlook.
If you aim to create a beautiful and ecologically mindful garden that supports physical well-being, it’s a good idea to prioritise plants native to your region. Even if you never harvest the plants to make teas, salads or salves, they are appealing because they tend to be low maintenance, requiring less watering and fertilizer, and they are good, collaborative citizens in the garden . When you’re working with native plants, you’re going to have a garden that is amazing for bees, for birds, for pollinating butterflies, for a whole spectrum of insects.
Many of the flowers and shrubs that are healthiest ecologically are also beneficial for human wellness. Think about purple angelica, with its radiating, umbrella-like blooms; spiky Veronicastrum and Agastache; coneflowers such as Echinacea and Rudbeckia; and various types of Monarda, also known as bee balm.
Monardas are really beautiful to design with and bee balm can be used as an antiseptic, a mouthwash and a cold remedy.
Listen to the land and what plants grow well there. Photo: The swimming pool in the garden of Deborah Needleman’s Hudson Valley home works hand in hand with nature, extracted from Melissa’s new book, ‘Natural Living By Design’, (Vendome Press).
Select The Right Mix Of Flowers, Herbs and Shrubs
This involves listening to the land and what plants grow well there. Consider planting herbal brews and remedies in secondary zones, away from the house, and keeping plants with unharvested blooms closer so you can enjoy their beauty.
On a domestic garden scale, ecologists are encouraging us to create wilder gardens, with as much biodiversity in our gardens as possible and enjoy the benefits of bringing more nature into your life. Simple actions – such as putting in a pond, letting wildflowers grow, easing up on the mowing, planting with nature in mind – can make a big difference, and can work well alongside traditional gardening.
Simple actions like letting planting with nature in mind can make a big difference. Photo: Designer Beth Webb conjured a family retreat on the Pacific Coast of Costa Rica using verdant vines to cover columns for an outdoor eating area.
Rewilding Is not Abandonment
It has to be managed. So we essentially take the role of the keystone species and mimick the disturbances created by animals. By approaching the garden with a slightly different mindset, and creating a mosaic of different habitats for wildlife, we can garden better for biodiversity and enjoyment.
Have two or three dominant species that anchor the planting throughout the year. These might include anything from sea kale (Crambe maritima), to Euphorbia seguieriana subsp. niciciana and Origanum laevigatum ‘Herrenhausen’. They are all plants that give an extremely long season of interest and they create a framework around which the other plants can come and go.
Wild gardening shows a lot can be done with limited space and budget – from small urban plots to rooftop balconies and terraces. Many gardeners feel pressure to keep their backyards looking formal at all times. There’s a never-ending list of things to prune, grass to mow, and flowers to thin out to ensure not a single leaf is out of place. But, have you considered what would happen if you just freed yourself of this obligation? You can entirely transform garden spaces into something reminiscent of a life-enhancing natural environment, simply by allowing nature to do its thing.
Wild gardening is achieved by letting go of control.
For many gardeners who have adopted formal gardens, it’s about coming to a realisation that plants and nature have their own plans. Try to not prune your roses one year and see what happens. It’s about only intervening when it becomes too much. As a general rule, though, wild gardens best come together when you allow plants to grow as they would in a native, unmaintained habitat.
Ecologists are encouraging us to create wilder gardens and let nature be nature, such as in the Milan garden of textile designer Idarica Gazzoni, featured in Melissa’s latest book, Natural Living By Design, (Vendome Press) out now.
Even A Small Urban Plot Might be Transformed
A microforest is exactly what it sounds like: a miniature forest, packed with hundreds of native plants, you can use a decades-old but recently trending technique known as the Miyawaki method, which crowds together native plants, encouraging them to grow rapidly as they compete for resources. Experts say this means outsized benefits like improving air quality, absorbing storm water and cooling down the surrounding area.
Preliminary research has shown that even microforests, small as they may be, can provide a habitat for wildlife and pack away planet-warming carbon, too. Microforests have soil that is up to 50 times more permeable than it was before, helping the ground absorb storm water and allowing the roots access to more water and oxygen. Samples also show the microbial activity in the soil had nearly quadrupled, boosting nutrients for plants.
Planted species will grow at least twice as fast compared with stand alone plantings.
Don’t worry that the competition among plants would result in only a few trees surviving. The downsides are few, and the potential benefits could be large. Because the forests start with small seedlings and require little maintenance after the first few years, microforests are one of the cheapest options for boosting nature and biodiversity in city gardens. They smell better, and just makes you feel better. To cure a headache or take a break from the heat, pop into your garden. Imagine that the world starts waking up to the ability of these tiny, plots to work as an ecological unit again.
If more and more people put these microforests in, it can make a very large difference.
Select lush trees and shurbs and let them be full, rather than purely decorative and needing to be controlled to maintain a neat look. Photo: Designer Katie Ridder and architect James F. Carter collaborated on the garden in Birmingham, Alabama, featured in Melissa’s book, Natural Living By Design (Vendome Press).
Let your Space become a Natural Environment
Select lush trees and shrubs and let them become full and take over a space.
The result will leave you with a garden bursting with life, full of thriving, happy plants growing unrestricted.
It’s as simple as shifting your mindset to appreciate plants as living things that grow and evolve, rather than being purely decorative and needing to be controlled to maintain a clean look. It’s a soft approach that doesn’t have a list of rules to follow other than making small tweaks to keep the space manageable.
