Urban Rewilding: The Glasgow Botanic Gardens
Urban Rewilding: The Glasgow Botanic Gardens
The Botanic Gardens in Glasgow have been expanding their reach toward the river Kelvin, using its unique space and environment to harness rewilding principles.
We continue LettsSafari’s series on Urban Rewilding with a look at Glasgow’s Botanic Gardens. At first sight, this is a prototypical British garden, with well maintained flower patches, beds and greenhouses. But, hidden just beyond the Botanic Gardens proper, descending on a cliff face leading down to the river Kelvin, is the wooded Kelvin Cliffsides, which the Botanic Gardens are leaving to allow for a wilder experience.
The cliffsides have been allowed to thrive on their own devices in all areas beyond the dedicated paths for human travel. This has led to unique natural sights and spaces that harshly contrast with the cleanly manicured Botanic Gardens just above, but makes for a refreshing feeling as you walk through the whole park.
The tiered elements of the topography help to produce a landscape that marries the open woodland with both wild scrub and grassland, essential habitats for any rewilding project. The space clearly revitalises itself, with trees coming down and being allowed to rest on the ground, falling to form natural barriers and the beginnings of new, rough dead hedges, which as they rot into the ground release minerals and nutrients that feed the expansive new growth visibly dotting all parts of the cliffside. A circular process, both healing the soil and providing an environment that breeds bugs which add to future soil improvement and management.
Alongside the cliffs is the river, which provides the Glasgow Botanic Gardens with essential added elements with waterways and water based environments. The river itself is obviously an essential feature, contributing to the vibrant growth on the bank side and running all the way along the cliffs, but also providing an additional space for aquatic life and plants to thrive. While it is difficult for all rewilding projects to have access to waterways, when they are there it is important such projects make use of them, as they provide essential new habitats that further the diversity of life sustained by the project.
Across the river the banks are allowed to become increasingly marshy, with longer grasses thriving, and contributing to the biodiversity of the wider space. Additionally the dampness of these soggy environments allows for greater moss growth across all parts of the bank, and provides spaces for small and medium sized herbivores to get a healthy amount of both food and water in quite a dense space.
The supervisors of the Kelvin Cliffsides have also been careful to leave the area to its own devices, whether that is leaving as much as possible the fallen trees, or allowing for scrub and wild shrubbery to expand across the space that is not walked over by humans. The absence of this human presence allows for greater diversity of growth, the maintenance of the soil quality, and the development of environments that invite new wildlife and animals into this space, a process that has worked to visibly attract birds and small mammals in particular.
The way this differs from the Glasgow Botanic Gardens proper is truly striking, with the ordered and regimentally planned space being noticeably less colourful, unique and natural than the cliffside.
It highlights the importance of allowing human intervention to fall away, enabling natural processes to return. By supporting proper biodiversity and the right kind of growth, organic life, and animals are able to build a collaborative and replenishing natural ecosystem. Unlike the traditional, highly manicured gardens which clearly require human intervention to possibly thrive, whether that is through replanting, pruning or shaping, the cliffside is able to do so on its own, highlighting the potential for such spaces to be expanded, so increasing our natural enjoyment of real ecosystems.
Overall, the Glasgow cliffside is a small but powerful project, highlighting the ability for nature to outdo the work produced through human intervention. While it has the unique advantage of the impressive river Kelvin to tap into for water-based environments and habitats, many of its approaches and methods are repeatable, whether in your own smaller-scale rewilding works, or, more importantly, in expanding such projects across the parks, gardens and green spaces of the UK and beyond, which could all serve to be more wild and natural. For our own wellbeing as much as for the planet.
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