Creating garden ecosystems in Wellington
In December 2021, Anita Roy looked at Transition Town Wellington, and how to make gardens and wildlife areas in towns more sustainable both now and in the future.
First, you plant a seed.
Sometimes, with a bit of luck and a bit of time, that seed sprouts.
With more luck and more time, it might grow, thrive, flower and bear fruit. You never quite know…
“Wouldn’t it be cool if we could get everyone in town to look at their garden as part of an ecosystem? And that gardening can be a way to improve wildlife?”
That was the seed of an idea that the Transition Town Wellington group floated one day in 2019. How could we do this? How could we get the idea across that gardens aren’t just private places for our own enjoyment but vital pieces in a fragmented jigsaw of habitat.
At the heart of the whole campaign was a map.
Now, a map might be a simple thing – a way to find the best route from A to B – but it is also more than just about not getting lost. A map is a way of organising information: it represents a particular way of seeing the world, emphasising some features, ignoring others. Think of it like a filter, or a pair of ‘rose-tinted glasses’ that makes everything look pink. A street map gives you loads of information about roads and buildings, but not much about the bits in between. On the other hand, if you’re using an OS map, you can see the contours of the land, the physical geography: the hills and valleys, escarpments and rivers. What we wanted to do was to look at our town as the wildlife might see it, not as humans. We wanted to take a ‘bird’s eye view’! Where might kingfishers find their supper? Where are the hedgehog highways? Where are the hot spots for butterflies and bees and bats?
The seed of an idea germinated. Along with the map, we decided to create a booklet on Gardening for Wildlife – with a list of 30 different things you could do to improve your garden and make it more biodiverse. From making a bog garden to putting up bat boxes, or even just leaving a pile of twigs undisturbed for insects and amphibians to hide in.
If you ticked 10 boxes, you could get a bronze certificate; 15 would get you silver, and 20 or more and you got not only a gold star certificate delivered to your door, and a wooden sign for your garden, but your house on the map with a gold star! The idea proved so popular, we soon needed a second print run.
Other villages and towns started to contact us asking about how to create a similar map and booklet for their area. We also gave out hundreds of packets of wildflower seeds.
We shared all our work under a ‘creative commons’ license and allowed other people to use it, free of charge. Versions of the booklet and map have now come out with groups in Wedmore and Frome, and others in Bagborough, Wincanton, Honiton, Drayton and Taunton are planned. In autumn 2021, the Somerset Wildlife Trust used the material from Transition Town Wellington to help turbo-charge local groups with their own projects.
Our next step will be to launch an interactive map, Wildlife Map – Interactive map of biodiversity where all these different groups can start linking together. This interactive map is currently under construction. We’re also working out how to capture all the information about wildlife sightings and feed that back to the Somerset Environmental Records Centre. This will help build up a more accurate picture of our ecosystem – and hopefully stop its decline.
In the course of our research for the map, we discovered that of the total area of land in our town that is covered by private gardens is a whopping 24% - the national average is just 8%! So now, when we look around us, we see a place that is rich in potential habitat, and where, with the right kind of ‘glasses’ on, humans and animals can live alongside each other in a thriving ecosystem.
Like I say – you plant a seed… and you watch it grow… and you’re never quite sure where it will end up!
For more information about Transition Town Wellington and to download the Wellington wildlife map or Gardening for Wildlife booklet, please visit Transition Town Wellington (ttw.org.uk)
About the author:
Anita Roy is a writer, editor and environmentalist based in Wellington, Somerset. She is the author of A Year in Kingcombe: The Wildflower Meadows of Dorset. She co-edited a nature almanac with Pippa Marland called Gifts of Gravity and Light. Anita is currently chair of Transition Town Wellington and one of the directors of the Wellington Mills Community Interest Company. More about her and her writing at: Home - Anita Roy