Paul Sterry is no stranger to the readers of this blog, having written a string of guest blogs here over the years. He is a prolific author and photographer.
This book describes the success of action, and well-informed inaction, in creating a wildlife refuge. Sterry’s half-acre garden sounds like a veritable oasis embedded in the wildlife-depleted north Hampshire countryside. But we don’t have to take his work for it – there is copious and beautiful photographic evidence too. This book is full of striking and informative images.
There are practical tips and advice about how your plot of land could be made more wildlife friendly which will apply to many gardens across the land.
However, Sterry’s book does not stop at the garden fence, he jumps over it into the wider countryside and contrasts what is happening there with what you might achieve in your garden. This isn’t a conventional wildlife-gardening book and the reader will learn much about the principles behind helping wildlife that go well beyond what a normal gardener might do, to create a scene that a conventional gardener would not seek. The section entitled Managed retreat from conventional gardening is particularly clear about this.
Sterry cuffs the planning system, Natural England and others as he looks around to see how our taxes are failing to deliver a wildlife recovery over the garden fence. An interesting chapter recounts the experiences of three other private landowners in achieving wildlife recoveries.
This is not ‘just’ a gardening book. In its almost 400 pages it covers far more ground than that surrounding Sterry’s late sixteenth-century cottage. If you read and inwardly digest its messages then you will emerge as a better gardener for wildlife, a better observer and recorder of wildlife and better informed about why things are as they are in the wider countryside. The book is well written and beautifully illustrated.
The cover? Attractive and fairly informative of what you’ll find inside the book. I’ll give it 7/10.
The Biodiversity Gardener: establishing a legacy for the natural world by Paul Sterry is published by Princeton University Press.
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