God has designed the world to be a place where human beings can enhance the ecosystem through intervention. As Titchmarsh’s testimony shows, the “dominion mandate,” utilised in managing gardens and parks, actually increases biodiversity, not lessens it. On the other hand, naïve environmental campaigns that seek to rewild nature may reduce biodiversity instead—abandoning the well-ordered garden in favour of something less managed is counter-productive.

Alan Titchmarsh is a well-known gardener and TV personality in the UK. He has recently defended the traditional well managed garden that exists in Britain. This defence was in response to environmental campaigns that seek to rewild many of our gardens, parks, and countryside. Titchmarsh stated in a written representation to the British Parliament’s House of Lords that a carefully kept garden actually attracts more insects, birds, and small mammals than those areas of land that have been set aside for rewilding purposes. In other words, human activity, far from harming the environment, actually increases bio-diversity, and provides food and shelter for many more months of the year.

He said:

“Domestic gardens and well-planted parks offer an opportunity to all forms of wildlife—be they birds seeking nesting sites in hedges, berried plants that provide winter food, or shrubs that offer shelter to mammals.”¹

This is borne out of his own gardening experience; he had set-aside two acres of land to grow according its own devices.

“Domestic gardens, with their greater plant diversity, offer sustenance and shelter to wildlife from March through November. Nine months of nourishment. A rewilded garden will offer nothing but straw and hay from August to March. A four-month flowering season is the norm.…This is at odds with my experience as the custodian of a two-acre wildflower meadow and garden.…The garden is patently richer—and for longer—in the variety of insect and bird species it sustains.”¹

He also drew attention to prejudice that exists against imported plants; florae which have actually helped to increase diversity of species in the UK.

“I find it worrying that misleading propaganda suggests only native plants are of any value to wildlife and the environment.…Domestic gardeners have a duty to ensure the survival of this unparalleled resource.…Should a current fashionable and ill-considered trend deplete our gardens of their botanical riches then we have presided over a diminution in biodiversity of catastrophic proportions.”¹

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