School of Sustainability

Knepp’s rewilded garden rides out thirty-eight dry days

The rain gauge at Knepp told the summer plainly: thirty-eight consecutive dry days, with only 0.5 mm recorded on the first of the month. Around that small fact sat the larger records - 35°C reached in May, June and July, England’s mean temperature 2.4°C above average, and fire services logging 564 incidents by mid-June. In the Walled Garden, deputy head gardener Moy Fierheller describes light so harsh it seems to drain the colour until evening returns it to the spurge, butterfly milkweed and wild carrot.

This was not a bed of delicate exotics failing in familiar English weather. The croquet lawn is gone, replaced under Tom Stuart-Smith’s design - with planting advice from James Hitchmough, who chooses species from scree, dry riverbeds and American prairie - by mounds, hollows and a deliberate mixture of soils: rich compost in places, crushed concrete and sand where tougher plants are wanted. That broken ground now gives dew somewhere to linger and roots somewhere cooler to run.

The garden is holding, though not unchanged. Flowering is shorter than in cooler years, and the plants seem to be putting what they have into seed. The work has altered too: perennials raised from seed wait in the nursery rather than being planted out into a furnace; beds are not cleared too hard, because even a dominating leafy plant can be keeping a little humidity over its neighbours; bare soil is covered with sheep’s wool, compost or chopped vegetation. There are few places left to work in shade.

What emerges is less a triumph than a template with edges. A flat lawn would now be baked crust and dead grass; the rewilded ground is a patchwork of small refuges, each one made by level, soil and plant choice rather than by irrigation. Knepp’s lesson is not that every garden can copy its plant list, but that the old croquet-lawn idea of order has become expensive in water, labour and lost life.

Knepp Estate · Read the source