Unlock your garden's potential to be a sanctuary

Unlock your garden's potential to be a sanctuary for you, them, land and spirit.

It can feel depressing to look across our landscape and see how much of it is becoming a barren wasteland for life - to see endless scars and no place for anything other the relentless human conquest of more to call a home - but when in these downward spirals, what a lot of philosophical schools of thought have in common from their wise words is: 'focus on what you can control'.

Your garden is land you have direct control over - you are the caretaker, you are the steward - you are the one who decides how that land is shaped and nurtured. So what will it be, wasteland or ecosystem?

Instead of thinking that the wild is some unreachable place, how about we take the land right outside your front door and turn it into a mini nature reserve?

 "But my garden is so small it won't make a difference" - to be focused on the mountain but stopping yourself from even taking a step - even little steps matter -every bit of land matters - those segments added together make a huge difference - so much so, did you know ....

 'If we combined all the gardens in Britain, with the last estimation putting that at 10 million acres, that is more land mass than all our nature reserves combined'.

Let's take the three most well-known conservation charities: the RSPB owns 332,000 acres, the Wildlife Trust owns 243,000 acres, and the Woodland Trust owns 82,000 acres, totalling 657,000 acres. When it comes to making land into an ecosystem for the collective web to thrive, there is no such thing as too small of a garden. Every little matter - every step matters on this mountain climb to restore.

 Your garden might be small, but all together, they could form massive interconnected beds within towns and cities where land for nature is few and far between. We could connect them, nurture them, and have pockets of refuge across our concrete cities.

I've seen this first-hand with the garden I grew up in. Which, at first, was hard to convince my mum of the changes to nurture her 2 by 3 meter square patch of grass back into an ecosystem - she, like many of us, still has the tyranny of tiredness flowing through her veins with Victorina-mowed grass deserts. But in a proper Victorina mindset, my mum also loves a fern (look up Victorina fern fever). Once two wild species grew in the dampest corner of the garden, a corner preciously called an 'eye saw' for its lack of grass, she started to come round to the idea.

I must admit, I have no idea how those ferns got there - they were a gift. 'I guess build it and they will come?'

But I do know how we turn the grass into a meadow and borders into hibernation zones - a couple of years of cutting grass later in the season, not raking leaves, leaving logs to lie, and our little patch of land became a haven for so many insects and wildflowers. One little being in particular came to call our tiny back garden nature reserve home - the Scarlet Tiger Moth.

The Scarlet Tiger is a striking moth that thrives in damp conditions and wetlands, and our shady garden with damp corners has become a sanctuary for the little guy. Year after year, the family grow with the last count being 12 within our 2 by 3 meter square patch. It felt like we had our own private sanctuary, a place for them to rest, reconnect and restore before heading off to the marshland nature reserve 2 miles down the road.

The garden became my first stop of the day, with a cup of tea, to ground and just be before the day started. It was energising and recharging me, while also recharging the beings around me. It was an honour and privilege to have such life and beauty literally 5 steps away from the kettle I was boiling to make my morning brew. And this is what it is all about - land can energise and restore you, if you give it a chance to repair itself.

My mornings were now spent listening to baby birds growing in shrubs, counting scarlet tiger moths, and watching crickets bounce from grass stem to grass stem - life for a snippet of time made so much sense; it was blissful - a sensation of love and being that I crave. We all crave it within ourselves. Something deep within us aches to remind us that we belong to this world.

Under the soil within your garden lies the seed of potential that could create a beautiful ecosystem sanctuary that won't only nurture you, but also your family, the generations to come, and the web of life around you. From the small, humble beginnings of an acorn, a mighty oak tree can grow in time to a cathedral of life.

Become a steward of the life around you - take the first step and let's have a free discovery call today to explore what we can do to nurture a nature reserve right outside your door.

Love and go gently,

Joseph