'We’ve been acting like colonisers’: New TG4 series rethinks the modern garden
Eva Osborne
Homemakers may be unintentionally acting like colonisers, pushing out native plant life and replacing it with species chosen for beauty or fashion.
This is the view of Mary Reynolds, a reformed internationally acclaimed landscape designer who is behind the Acts of Restorative Kindness to the Earth (ARKs) movement.
Reynolds features in TG4's new series, Réabhlóid ar Chúl an Tí, which is focused on transforming suburban back gardens, school grounds, and community spaces into thriving pockets of native wildlife.
A turning point for Reynolds arrived in 2019, when she witnessed the disruption and devastation that can befall native plant and animal species when new homes are being built.
"My kids had gone to school and I was looking out the window. It was winter morning, and a fox ran across the garden and, chasing the fox, were a couple of hares, which is kind of weird. And so I kept watching the brambly patch they ran into and I noticed a little hedgehog running along the same direction.
"These creatures tend to avoid being out in the open during the day and, certainly, hedgehogs would generally be hibernating. It kind of reminded me of Noah's Ark," she said.
"I went up to the end of the lane where I lived at the time in Wexford and up this beautiful old thicket of a field across the road. It was about an acre of land and had become a woodland."
Reynolds thought it was an impenetrable space, full of brambles, hawthorns, blackthorns, and wild roses. But someone got planning permission to build a house there.
"They'd gone in with a digger to clear it out within minutes, practically, without any thought for the creatures that called it home.
"And I realised I'd done this myself so many times. So that was the end of that particular time in my career. I went in and started researching nature and the collapse of biodiversity and realised very quickly that all the nature has already collapsed in Ireland.
It hasn't happened in one big patch. It happened patch by patch, garden by garden, hedgerow by hedgerow, pond by pond.
Reynolds then set up the ARKs movement, which she said is based on a "very simple concept".
"It's based on the science of ecology, where we have ripped out the native plant communities, which are the foundation of all life on the planet, and replaced them with pretty garden plants.
"I feel like we have been acting like colonisers, we've been taking each patch and pushing out the natives and replacing them with things that we feel are pretty or fashionable.
"I think if we really are serious about understanding that we are in an emergency and that nature has collapsed, then we really have to bring our true nature back because all of life is based upon that foundation of the nature plant communities.
"It's a really amazing, easy, and positive thing to do. It gives people hope that nature can recover really quickly and they see how very, very quickly, almost overnight, when they start this work that creatures return.
"You can't go to a garden centre and buy an owl or a heron. Whereas if you actually start to work with the seed bank, and work with what we've labelled weeds and collect local seeds and find native plants that are actually grown in Ireland."
Reynolds said anyone can get involved and start small.
“Even if you only have a pot, I say to people to go collect local native seeds, get to know what insects have developed relationships with them over millennia.
"It’s all about becoming the wolf, becoming the deer, becoming all the creatures.
It turns people into activists that would never have thought they would be, because when they realise what nature actually is and they learn a little bit about it, they start to fall back in love with it.
"And when you love something, you protect it, and then you go back out into the world and you see all these places in your own space that are kept tidy because we've been equating tidiness with care now for years, and there isn't much care in a tidy space.”
Réabhlóid ar Chúl an Tí will stream Sundays at 8pm from April 19th on TG4 and TG4.ie.
