I’ve been going on about ‘Wild Gardening’ for years, so when Stephen Anderton, Garden Writer for the Times and author of many gardening books, asked if he could come and interview us for a garden-related piece he had been asked to write for a Times supplement on ‘Rewilding’, we were more than happy to agree.

Stephen arrived with a photographer on a freezing cold February day, when the garden was looking and feeling particularly wild! Here’s the link to Stephen’s full article in which he suggests ‘how to rewild your garden in 9 easy steps’, and uses Nant-y-bedd as a case study to support his ideas. Scroll down to find us.

I don’t need to enhance Stephen’s words here, and suggest you read the article. But here are a few more pictures of Nant-y-bedd, demonstrating some of the points and Stephen’s claim that it doesn’t look a mess!

The first pic is a Veg bed in the Cottage Garden where Poached egg plant (Limnanthes douglasii), foxgloves and teasels have been allowed to self-seed to provide over-wintering ground cover and early food for pollinators before planting out Heritage broad beans.

This next image is the onion beds in the Potager with deliberately self-seeded parsnip, teasel, purple toadflax, foxgloves, ox-eye daisies, opium poppies, sorrel and wild chicory – all for pollinators and winter seed heads for the birds.

And the next…ground elder (yes, really) flowering in the Cottage Garden with Lysimachia ‘Firecracker’, oriental poppies, allium Purple sensation, 

The next one shows the picnic meadow next to the river where the management is specifically to improve the biodiversity.  Here showing pignut, thistles, meadow buttercup, sorrel.

And finally me with a bunch of flowers picked from my wild garden.

Do come and visit (but perhaps not in February) and see for yourself. If you are really keen to find out more about our approach here to ‘rewilding your garden’ I run a workshop which I call ‘Wild Gardening’, but could easily be re-titled ‘How to rewild your garden’.