Have you ever felt depressed at the sight of a ‘legoland lawn’? You know the kind of garden I mean? One of those perfectly trimmed and lifeless looking rectangles of grass completely free of insect, frog or bird? A lawn you walk beside, instead of on, in case you ruffle it? You might even have a legoland lawn outside your door. I do. But that’s only because I’ve just moved into a new house. What I’d really like to see is something wild inside my garden fence – a hedgehog or a butterfly…
No Nettles Required is a guidebook for for anyone with the lego-lawn blues. It shows us how easy it is to fill our gardens with everything from foxes, frogs and mice to butterflies, ladybirds and literally thousands of fascinating creepy-crawlies. Why should we? Because we’ll be promoting the biodiversity of the UK, we’ll be reconnecting with nature, getting more from our gardens, and we’ll be doing our plants a favour.
“‘Fantastic science writing for a lay audience, with sentences such as, “Hoverfly larvae look like lumps of animated snot…but they look far worse if you’re an aphid.”‘ – From a review by Steve Head in the New Scientist