99. Re-Wilding II
Nigel Dunnett is a well-known British horticulturalist, plantsman and designer who specialises in re-wilding urban spaces. He has innovative ideas for both gardens and much larger scale urban areas, integrating ecology and horticulture to create beautiful spaces that are tuned in to nature.
He regularly exhibits at Chelsea Flower Show and has designed the planting for many of the outstanding public realm areas around Central London including The Barbican, “Super Bloom” in the Tower of London moat and “Gold Meadows” at the London Olympic Park.
Nigel’s much smaller scale ideas for re-wilding unattractive, everyday elements of the garden are brilliant - the best place to see these are in his show gardens. They are things we can all do to green up our gardens and improve our ecological footprint, no matter how small a space we have to work with. I particularly love the planting for this bin storage.
My other favourites are his “habitat walls", combining natural stone, steel inserts for bug hotels and with alpine and succulent planting along the top of the wall. He also incorporates bug hotels into the walls of buildings: in this 2011 show garden he used an old shipping container to create a garden room with living walls.
On a recent trip to Sweden he discovered this innovative way of using gabion baskets to re-wild urban residential areas, and in Malmo came across what is allegedly the largest bug hotel in the world.
These are ideas we can all use on a much smaller scale for our gardens. And they provide a whole new interesting range of surfaces to plant things on.