Are wild gardens providing an excuse for lazy gardeners?

Having some thirty-five years experience in the landscaping business, I keep wondering to myself if people who tell you they have a wild garden are only making an excuse for laziness. What exactly is a wild garden?

Most of the people whom I meet that says they have a wild garden has nothing more than an neglected piece of land that they were much to lazy to do anything with.

It is usually strewn with all sorts of rubbish such as empty coke cans plastic bags odd pieces of polystyrene not to mention the odd milk carton that has escaped from the bin. They will then tell you that it is left like that to attract wild life.

The only wild life that most of it attracts are vermin, Rats and Mice for example.

A real wild garden takes a lot off work to manage properly, and requires just as much effort as a conventional garden, and definitely has no place in an urban area.

Now I have no intention of offending anyone who has a proper wild garden, for they do exist and I have had the privilege to see them on television on occasion. But they are few and far between and are usually part of some large estate in the country where they have personnel trained to look after them.

Who in their right mind would go to the trouble of sowing seed of the humble buttercup in a town garden, for god's sake the thing is a weed, nice to look at in farm meadow but not in a town garden. I have spent a large part of my life trying to eradicate the darn thing, now people have the nerve to tell me that it is part of their garden. Who are they fooling? A bit of the Magic suit of clothes syndrome here I think.

When asked what wild life that they are thinking of attracting to the garden the first answer is always frogs, followed by butterflies.

Without too much observation I bet you that I can attract more wildlife to my garden by planting suitable flowers and plants than any wild garden will. Frogs will not come unless there is a suitable depth of water and there never is, usually just soggy neglected ground.

With a few Buddelia and Sedum planted you will have Butterflies for most of the summer not to mention bees and hooverflies.

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