There is a common misconception that the idea of rewilding involves doing nothing to your garden and letting nature take over.
In fact, rewilding is a progressive approach to conservation, repairing damaged ecosystems, restoring degraded landscapes, and creating wilder, more biodiverse habitats.
Rewiliding Britain aims for the large-scale restoration of ecosystems, to the point where nature can take care of itself without human intervention. It offers hope and the opportunity to give nature a chance at saving wildlife, tackling climate breakdown, and benefiting people and communities.
Ways Rewilding can Help
Help Fix the Climate Crisis: Trees, peatlands, saltmarshes and other ecosystems are perfectly adapted to soak up and store carbon dioxide.
Support Local Economies: Rewiliding can create a thriving ecosystem of employment, from restoring rivers to mixing livestock management with wildlife guiding – all leading to more eco-tourism experiences.
Reverse Biodiversity Loss: By allowing diverse habitats to re-establish themselves, we can give wildlife a chance to bounce back.
Improve our Health and Wellbeing: Restored landscapes are key to our health and wellbeing, giving us a place to escape, exercise, educate, and connect with others.
Clean Air and Water: Properly functioning ecosystems affect us all, filtering the air we breathe, giving us healthy soil, and clean water – all things that we cannot live without.
Strengthen Communities: Rewilding has the potential to unite people in a bold vision for their neighbourhood, giving them a sense of ownership and belonging, providing jobs, and offering opportunities for health and wellbeing.
Mitigate Extreme Weather Events: Nature is a powerful tool in helping us to deal with the effects of climate breakdown. Land that is covered in native trees and scrub absorbs more water, reducing the risk of flash flooding. Healthy soils are at less risk of wildfire than intensively grazed grasslands, plantations and damaged moorlands.
4th Corner Rewilding Banbury
On a smaller scale, rewilding can involve:
- Reducing fertiliser and pesticide usage
- Allowing patches of grass to grow long
- Planting native plants to encourage pollinators
- Building woodpiles to house insects and wildlife
- Setting up wildlife corridors in your garden
- Creating a compost heap
4th Corner maintain several rewilded areas across Banbury, including Spiceball Park, Crouch Hill, and Browning Road Orchard. Our Grounds Maintenance division, who work in partnership with Banbury Town Council, began their bi-annual cut of the wildflower areas across Banbury in July.
Using a John Deer tractor and cut-and-collect flail mower, they began the challenging task of cutting down metre-high grass and wildflowers, agitating the seed heads in the process and encouraging new seeds to drop for the next season.
Our team use a number of methods to ensure that wildlife habitats are largely undisturbed. The grasslands are cut to a height of 100mm to leave enough cover for the mice, shrews, frogs and toads that inhabit the area. Moreover, we cut in one direction rather than in circles, enabling the local wildlife to escape.
The cut grass is collected rather than dropped to avoid further fertilisation of the grass, which would prevent wildflowers from growing. It is taken to Blackpits recycling centre in Brackley, which recycles and composts green waste.
Recent Case Studies
Soft Landscaping: Banbury Mosque, Oxfordshire
