10 Ways to Rewild Your Life

Author: Sydney Perry

Rewilding is an ongoing process and doesn’t just mean reintroducing apex predators! We can rewild our own lives at a much smaller level - firstly, by the choices we make in the environments we live in, but also in our mindset. Read on to see how to look at the world differently and the best projects anyone can adapt to their own life, space or garden. 

 

1. Take time to stop and look around 

In a world where we spend a lot of time looking at a screen, the variety and array of things to look at in nature can sometimes be overwhelming. If you feel like you never really spot animals or can’t identify plants, creating a focus area in your garden can help. 

This is one area where making a bug hotel or bird feeder can be ideal. A bird table can likewise be a great way to train yourself to stop and look, and opens the doors to identifying calls, noticing parents and chicks fledging, and so on. 

A homemade bird feeder, hanging bird feeder, or wooden bird table can be a way of doing this. For a squirrel proof bird feeder, you might have to make some adjustments, whilst an insect hotel like our honeycomb bee hotel are sometimes easier and you can even purchase them from us here!

Some common bird feeder birds include blue tits, great tits, robins, chaffinches, greenfinches, and more. We also look at creating a small wildlife pond later in this article, which can be a great focus point for larger spaces.

2. Cherish the interconnection 

Nothing beats adding wildlife corridors to your garden. One popular way is creating a wildflower strip from purpose-packed wildflower seed online. Any plant, garden, or wild area is inherently interconnected and focussing on these connections and relationships can help you get a more holistic view of any wider environment.

Rewilding is a process that focuses not just on our physical world but also on our minds. Rewilding your mind means seeing nature as it is, at a macro level, and re aligning with the connections that make up ecosystems in a way that allows us to see how they work and how our actions impact them. 

Wildlife corridors are just one way, but greening fences and hedges with native plants, or even just going for a walk on a footpath or public right of way can help you get a wider sense of the landscape around you. 

 

3. Go with the Flow 

To rewild garden areas or make a wildlife-friendly garden, sometimes it’s necessary to give up control. Humans have become more and more used to perfectly manicured landscapes such that we expect sometimes to be able to control everything within nature. But the flipside of this is we throw ecosystems out of balance and we end up with high maintenance gardens or areas of land that require a large amount of chemicals to maintain them.

Letting nature take over sometimes can influence your plot of land in more beneficial ways as focussing only on the things that are in harmony with your space means that you won’t experience as many failures and setbacks when trying to grow things that don’t work. 

 

4. Challenge yourself

Prior to industrialisation, most people would have been required to interact with a much more diverse array of landscapes and parts of the natural world. Whether that was scrubland and coppice to make tools and other resources, mixed farmland for subsistence living, or more encounters with animals due to the increased robustness of the ecosystem, nowadays we are exposed to much less variation and have little to no incentive to go outside our comfort area. 

Therefore, if you are interested in truly living in harmony with nature, a great way is to pick an area of your life where it is absent and try to incorporate this into your garden - whatever it may be. 

For example, if you’ve never grown your own food, it’s easy to add some vegetables to pots on a patio. Or, if you wish you walked more, a wild foraging walk can be a great way to do this.

 

5. Travel back in time 

Even 50 years ago, local plants would have been much more abundant and most landscapes would have looked very different. Similar to the message of challenging yourself, looking at landscapes not just as they are but as they were can not only train your eye, it helps you choose plants and features for your space that work well. 

After all, if they worked before, they have a higher chance of adapting to the soils and local climate and may even have knock on rewilding effects too. 

This kind of thinking can also make you see the environment in a different light at a wider level - and can embolden you to take more rewilding steps you may not have considered.

 

6. Find Value in Everything 

Natural gardening means realising that a weed is a plant in the wrong place. In fact, naturalistic gardening can even turn some of these pest species into staple parts of your garden. Comfrey is a common plant often classified as a weed that can be used to make a deep fertiliser for most vegetable species. Meanwhile nettles can also be soaked in water and tipped onto plants for a nutrient boost. 

Flowers for wildlife are not always big or showy. And, growing a wildflower lawn can sometimes mean including species you may not have considered. The flipside of this is that making a wildflower lawn means you don’t have to worry about keeping weeds in check. It’s a perfect low maintenance wildlife garden feature. Online, you can find wild grass turf and wild lawn seeds, but be sure to search for those native to your area. Commercial wildflower meadow mixes contain a heterogenous variety of seeds that may come from multiple locations and won't necessarily provide the right resources for species local to your area. 

 

7. Look deeper than Superficial Categories 

We tend to classify features of landscapes generally and broadly. For example, trees, rocks, rivers, mountains, and so on. But by looking beyond categories at what something’s actual role in the ecosystem is, we can create more interconnected and abundant habitat. For starters, native English trees can provide a crucial home for many endangered species as well as offering shelter for the exact, locally adapted pollinators that are needed to hold together the rest of a rewilded ecosystem.

Similarly, planting wildflowers in shaded areas can link woodland edges with sunnier spots, creating a wildlife corridor that benefits hedgehogs and other creatures.

What’s more, wild plants and wild grasses self-regulate and communicate with each other, living in symbiotic relationships with caterpillars as the host plants for the larvae of many butterflies. Either way, these species are more complex than their bigger categories and often very localised, so studying and getting to grips with your local area is vital.

 

8. Start Relying on Nature 

One great challenge in a world with infinite distractions is the fact that sometimes we have little incentive to notice the natural world. However, relying on nature can force us to focus on it more, and this in turn can re-align us with the environment, reducing stress and boosting wellbeing. 

Growing some crops or even just a backyard vegetable plot can help you become more attuned to the fragility and importance of the natural world. Wild foraging can likewise be hugely beneficial, re-aligning your circadian rhythm with the seasons and forcing you to think creatively about preparing, storing, planning, and being aware of the time and your surroundings and wider relationships in nature. In a world where we are used to having everything immediately accessible, relying on nature can kick our brains into gear to get us to focus more on where our resources come from.

 

9. Think Long-Term 

Thinking long-term about how nature changes over time can help reattune your life to the idea of deep time. Cycles in nature are never short or linear, but we can implement this process into human spaces in various simple ways. For those with more time, building a small wildlife pond can create a long term habitat that will have new and different influences over several years.

Furthermore, if this is connected to a rainwater harvesting system, your plot or property will have a source of water in times of drought, shortage, or other events. This can bring you back to a survivalist mentality that also helps you notice your reliance on the natural world much more and retunes you to the seasons, weather, and so on.

 

10. Remove Boundaries 

Nature works with fluid lines as opposed to rigid boundaries, and thinking in this way can help you notice the connections within it. This knowledge in turn can help you work with the land you have more creatively, such as rewilding hedgerows and thinking about how it connects to adjacent environments. Additionally, making a small wildlife pond can help remove boundaries as the flood overflow often provides a liminal home for creatures that don’t live strictly in one habitat or another. Whilst attracting wild birds to your garden becomes easier with a backyard wildlife pond, benefits go beyond this and you will see how the ebb and flow of resources, water, and prey species create new and shifting cycles that you can tune into to get away from the modern world.