Habitat Creation In Garden Design by Catherine Heatherington and Alex Johnson

Habitat Creation In Garden Design by Catherine Heatherington and Alex Johnson

This book was released on August 1st, 2023, and the subtitle is A Guide to Designing Places for People and Wildlife.

Let me share two compelling excerpts that capture the essence of this groundbreaking work.

The first speaks to a common misconception many of us have about wildlife gardens as messy:

There is a tendency to equate messiness with naturalness and the idea that witdlife gardens need to be untidy and unkempt (and have a nettle patch) persists even though there is research that shows this need not be the case (Gaston et al., 2005).

In some respects ecosystems are messy: vegetation intermingles, brambles scramble and engulf, leaf litter and fallen branches decompose.

But there are other cases where we see patterns in the dispersion of perennials and the tapestry of moorland, in the horizontality of a carpet of bluebells and the vertical forms of trees. We will discuss how to balance the desire for a garden that looks attractive throughout the year with the need for some measure of untidiness.

Landscape architect and academic, Joan Iverson Nassauer's (1995) influential paper, 'Messy ecosystems, orderly frames, was written nearly three decades ago but much of what she says remains relevant today. She points to the necessity of designing 'cues to care that 'provide a cultural context for ecological function' (Nassauer, 1995: p.161). These cues draw attention away from the appearance of messiness, indicating that the ecosystem is, in some way, cared for.

At its simplest this could be mowing an edge strip along a hedgerow or a path through a meadow, as suggested even before Nassauer by ecologist Oliver Gilbert (1989).

The second excerpt beautifully articulates the book's core mission:

Nevertheless, when gardens are connected across towns or cities, they have the potential to form an extensive vegetated area and thus support a huge range of habitats.

It is important to point out that this book is solely about gardens: it is not about creating habitats in nature reserves or about returning places to nature or about rewilding. We are not trying to replicate natural places, and the suggestions we make about plant choices and other interventions are specifically made with gardens in mind.

We will show, in the following chapters, how gardens have the potential to support and benefit plants and creatures, together with their human visitors, and how they can be enjoyed while also educating and inspiring. And, most of all, we hope that by experiencing and working with legible habitat gardens we will all gain a better understanding of our interconnectedness with wild things and places."

What makes this book particularly special is that it's written by two experienced garden designers who understand both the aesthetic and ecological aspects of garden creation.

Catherine Heatherington brings her academic expertise with a PhD from the University of Sheffield, while Alex Johnson contributes forty years of practical garden design experience and a background in Botany and Ecology.

Together, they've created Design Wild Associates, a practice that integrates design with ecology.

The book tackles essential topics that every modern gardener needs to understand:

• Creating shelter, food, and water sources for wildlife
• Understanding how to layer plants in both time and space
• Mastering planting design that serves both beauty and biodiversity
• Using mass and void effectively in wildlife garden design
• Creating wildlife corridors and extending gardens into the broader landscape

This book is particularly valuable for those of us who want to move beyond the false dichotomy of "messy wildlife garden" versus "tidy human garden" to create spaces that truly serve both purposes.

This book is 176 pages of practical wisdom to help you create beautiful spaces that serve human aesthetics and wildlife needs.

You can get a copy of Habitat Creation In Garden Design by Catherine Heatherington and Alex Johnson and support the show using the Amazon link in today's show notes for around $21.