A small case for letting one corner go

The biggest biodiversity wins in a garden come from doing less, in the right place.

We spend most of our working lives making gardens neater: pruning, edging, weeding, mowing. But one of the most valuable things we ever do for a client is convince them to stop maintaining one small corner of their garden entirely.

It does not need to be large — a 3-metre square is enough. It does not need to be beautiful in the conventional sense. What it needs to be is undisturbed: uncut, unweeded, unraked, left to do whatever it is going to do.

Within a single season, that corner will develop a structure that no amount of planting could replicate. Tall grasses will provide cover for ground-nesting insects. Nettles — the most unloved plant in Britain — will feed painted lady and red admiral caterpillars. A pile of old prunings, left to decompose, will become a habitat for beetles, slow worms and hedgehogs.

We call these “quiet corners.” They are not untidy — they are intentionally unmanaged. And they do more for the local ecosystem than an entire border of shop-bought pollinator plants.