When a voice from the past cuts through daily life, reminding you of a lost passion for nature and a magical childhood garden, you know, in an instant, you need to act.

This happened to me when I opened an old book on butterflies and out dropped a letter my father had sent me 28 years previously. 

The letter contained a heartfelt message for the future and a wish that I would always remember the pleasure nature gave me as a child. “Don’t lose the child inside you, dear Annabel, and never forget that nature brings enduring peace and happiness,” my father said.

His message was like a thunderbolt to my conscience. How could I have forgotten our special bond and the way I followed him, like a lapdog, through the jungle of long meadow grass and wildflowers that cloaked our back garden, eager to listen and learn about the wonderful plants and creatures that existed there.

He was ahead of his time back then, in the 1970s, understanding already the desperate plight of our natural world and fearing the threats brought on by climate change and other manmade disasters.   

Just being outside in the garden with my father, surrounded by nature, was all I desired when I was a young girl.

I would readily help him, whenever I could, collect and scatter wildflower seeds, hoe vegetables, plant flowers and stack sticks and fallen logs in winter for the insects and reptiles and I adored his eternal enthusiasm for wildlife. Perhaps his greatest legacy to me was teaching me that I was a part of nature too, just like the rabbits, the foxes and the hedgehogs.

So, in 2016, as I sat staring out at my own garden, a monotone, wildlife-depleted patch of Oxfordshire and with my father’s letter clutched to my chest, I made the life-changing decision to return to my past and embrace wildlife gardening again.

With my father gone (he died in 2013), I sought guidance instead from my wonderful octogenarian neighbour, Ron and with Georgie, my adorable flat-coated retriever by my side, slowly but surely restored the garden’s wildlife habitats.

Together, we planted trees and hedges, created wildlife-friendly herbaceous borders, installed a small but functioning pond, erected bird boxes, bee and insect hotels, created a compost heap and cut small apertures in all our fences to allow the animals to roam freely.

The result, recorded in my book The Guilty Gardener, was mesmerising. I witnessed, almost instantaneously, the return of butterflies, moths, bees, hedgehogs, foxes, glow-worms, swifts, house martins, goldfinches and woodpeckers and started writing down the newcomers to my garden, on a daily basis.

Above all, I learnt to love nature again, just as I did as a young girl.

“It’s a warm, mellow Sunday afternoon and I’m sitting outside lapping up the sun and being lulled by the low, Gregorian chant of humming bees. With few cars on the road and only occasional trains rumbling in the valley, it’s as if a microphone and speaker have been put in the back garden and the volume turned up to full capacity.” (The Guilty Gardener)

I have always loved reading and writing and dreamt, since I was a child, of writing a book. The Guilty Gardener is my first and I hope the first of many.

I kept diaries in my youth and wrote a nature diary at the age of 12. My first entry in 1978, entitled Ginger the Fox, resurfaces in The Guilty Gardener as the narrative weaves between my childhood and the present. Here it is, reminding me of my special bond with Dad:

The young fox in our garage is called Ginger and she has travelled all the way from Tunbridge Wells, a big town where life is dangerous and dreary for a fox. She has been forced to leave the town to find food and somewhere cosy and warm for the winter. Our garage is full of hay and it feels safe. Ginger hopes she can stay there forever and raise her young, without the fear of evil hunters. During the night, it snows but Ginger remains warm in the soft hay and sleeps like a log. In the morning she wakes up to find the ground is covered in a soft, white carpet. She’s about to venture out of her den when she smells a strong scent which reminds her of town. It’s the scent of humans and out of the corner of her black eye, she sees four brown eyes staring back at her from the entrance to the garage. They belong to a man in a thick overcoat and a young girl in a woollen hat. She’s afraid at first but the humans are smiling at her and look kind and she knows immediately that they are her friends. At last, she thinks, I have reached my dreamland. I don’t need to run anymore. I can raise my cubs here.

After spending six glorious years returning my cottage garden to nature, I’m now a full convert to wilding and its multitudinous benefits. Not only has wilding restored my garden to its former glory, rich in biodiversity, scent, sound and colour, it has also brought tremendous peace and happiness to me and my family.

I hope my green odyssey, charted in The Guilty Gardener, can inspire other gardeners to take up arms in defence of wildlife.

However big or small our private outdoor space, we can all make a difference to biodiversity and, ultimately, to our planet.

There is no doubt that our natural world is facing an existential crisis. In just fifty years, over half our native flora and fauna has sharply declined, and creatures and plants which I took for granted as a child, like the cornflower, the nightingale, the skylark, the grasshopper, the turtle dove, the hare, the barn owl, the centipede, the song thrush and the hedgehog are now a rarity, or worse, face extinction.

In my home county of Oxfordshire, sixty-three species of wild flower have vanished from our fields and woods in what seems like a blink of the eye.

But where there’s life, there’s always hope, and my wildlife garden is proof that nature has a remarkable capacity to regenerate itself extremely quickly.

With twenty-four million gardens spread across our green and pleasant land – an area greater than all the National Nature Reserves put together - it’s not hard to envisage what could be achieved, if we all become wildlife gardeners.

Together we could save the once-common turtle dove, the English bluebell and early purple orchid from extinction, and see hares, hedgehogs, nightingales and barn owls return to the countryside.

If we act now and act together, our summer meadows could murmur once again with the soft, sibilant stridulations of crickets and grasshoppers and ring out to the melodious fluting of songbirds.

Only then will our children, and grandchildren, wake to a world they deserve – a vibrant world awash with wonderful wildlife, just as I did all those many moons ago.

For photos and useful tips on wildlife gardening, follow Annabel on Instagram at wilding.at.home

How to get started with wildlife-gardening

Ben has lots of tips in his short videos from adding a pond to creating mini meadows and making log piles. 

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