The phone rang on a grey spring afternoon during the first lockdown of 2020. Like many people, I had retreated into the greenhouse by necessity. My plants were keeping me sane, just about!
When I answered, a neighbour was on the line. She asked if I might be interested in using part of a walled garden in the centre of the village. I walked past those walls for years without knowing what was inside. I often wondered.
A few days later, I stepped through the gate for the first time. Behind ten-foot brick walls along the main street of Stamullen, County Meath, was a Victorian walled garden that had once been a working kitchen garden. It had fallen into a bit of neglect. Nettles and brambles had taken hold. Paths had disappeared. It was quiet, overgrown, and full of possibility.
At first, I approached it the way most gardeners do: clear the ground, restore the beds, bring it back into order. That idea didn’t last. As the weeks passed, and I spent more time in the space, something shifted. The garden wasn’t empty. It was full of life, already just not the kind of life we tend to value when we think about gardens. Insects moved through the long grass. Birds used the walls and hedges for shelter.
Instead of forcing the garden back into a tightly controlled system, I began to take a different approach. Vegetables were grown, but without chemicals. Flowers were planted among the crops, not separated from them. Some areas were left entirely alone. The aim wasn’t to dominate the space, but to work with what was already there. Slowly, the garden began to change.
Pollinators began showing up in greater numbers. Birds became more visible. Something else happened, too. People began to visit. Neighbours who had never been inside the walls came through the gate. Conversations started. Seeds were shared. Seeds were planted by small hands. What had been a hidden and neglected garden became something more open and shared.
Local schools began to visit, children who were used to seeing food only in shops were able to see it growing in the soil. They could watch insects buzz between flowers, the details of an ecosystem at work, the feel of the air in the greenhouse, the heat of the wall, the smell of the tomatoes. I could see that they were beginning to understand, in a direct way, how food, plants, and wildlife are connected in ways that could not be taught in any classroom.
One school went on to create its own small pocket woodland after visiting. Neighbours have started planting and growing in their own gardens, rewilding parts of them. The garden’s impact extended beyond its walls. None of this was planned at the start.
It came from a gradual shift in how the space was treated. Instead of seeing the garden as something to control and perfect, it became our teacher and collaborator. The more space that was given to nature, the more life returned.
That approach runs against most of what we are taught about gardening. We are encouraged to tidy up, to manage, and to remove anything that looks out of place. But in doing so, we can strip away the conditions that allow wildlife to thrive.
What the walled garden showed me is that even small areas of land can become meaningful habitats if we allow them to function as living systems. It doesn’t require large-scale rewilding or major interventions. It can begin with simple decisions: leaving a patch of ground undisturbed, planting native species, avoiding chemicals, and adding a pond. Over time, those small decisions add up.
The garden is not finished, and it never will be; the best gardens are never complete. It is a place that continues to change, shaped by seasons, by people, and by the life that makes it a home.
This experience became the basis for my book, Nature’s Acre: An Irish Garden Memoir of Making a Place Where Life Grows. But the book is only one expression of the story. The more important idea is that this kind of change is possible in many places.
We often think of environmental action as something that happens at a large scale: policies, national projects, global agreements. Those are important. But there is another level at which change happens quietly and steadily, in small pieces of land, in gardens, in school grounds, in community spaces. We can form a web of wildlife-friendly spaces.
When those places are treated differently, they begin to support life again. That is something anyone can take part in. The walled garden in Stamullen is not unique. It is simply one example of what can happen when we step back slightly, pay attention, and allow a place to become what it is capable of being.
Every acre is nature’s acre. We just look after it for a short time.
