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How to Make a Wildlife Garden

Chris Baines

First published in 1985 and then re-released in 2000, Chris Baines’ How to Make a Wildlife Garden is widely recognised as ‘a definitive guide that spawned a gardening revolution’. It not only provides a detailed introduction to the techniques of habitat creation and restoration, but it also conveys important messages about the philosophy of conservation that inspire and motivate the reader to get involved in wildlife conservation through gardening.

In recent years wildlife gardening has experienced a great surge in popularity, especially since high-profile television gardeners have begun to promote it. However, when Chris Baines wrote this book in the 1980s many gardeners were either unaware of, or even actively against, encouraging wildlife into their gardens. The concept of actually planting ‘weeds’ in your garden was, at that time, a totally alien concept and most gardeners were still intent on pursuing the prevailing dogma of hitting ‘pests’ hard with herbicides and pesticides.

In this book Baines recognises the huge potential value of the 15 million gardens in the UK as havens for British wildlife. Taken together these gardens cover around 270,000 hectares, an area greater than all of the country’s National Nature Reserves combined, and what Baines saw was that if he could engage and inspire gardeners to create wildlife habitats it could have huge potential benefits for conservation and peoples quality of life.

Through this book Chris Baines showed that you can still create a spectacular garden with native species and that you can add so much to the experience of gardening by attracting wildlife into it. This book has introduced a whole new community to the conservation movement and it is now a must have book for everybody involved in conservation. Its value has now been recognised by the plant conservation charity Plantlife, who now offer it free to all of their new members.

 

Review by N. Paling

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