Every year, towards the end of May or the beginning of June, I catch my wife looking shifty. She always sets to work in the evening, as dusk draws in, hoping that I’ll be too wrapped up in a book to notice her nefarious activities. By some strange and unstated rule of garden administration, the hydrangeas in our two-acre plot of Kentish Weald are her preserve. After our first year in the house, when they were ravaged by slugs, she now surrounds the Annabelles and Emile Mouillères with little blue pellets of songbird – and hedgehog-killing metaldehyde. I disapprove – I run my horticultural bailiwicks on strictly organic lines – but I recognise that I am still in the minority when it comes to Britain’s gardeners.
Dave Goulson is the country’s foremost expert on bees, the author of the superlative A Buzz in the Meadow, and has now written an exquisite, compelling and quietly evangelical book about how gardeners can play their part in saving the planet. Each chapter of The Garden Jungle begins with a recipe – from home-brewed cider to mulberry muffins to Jerusalem artichoke soup. These culinary snippets paint a picture of the good life, showing how our approach to managing our gardens can lead to a deeper and more permanent re-engagement with nature, one that feeds through to our physical and mental health, as well as being a necessary counterbalance to the chemical-intensive aggro-industrial complex that is doing its best to destroy our environment.
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