Buczacki - Garden Natural History

EDITORS

SARAH A. CORBET, ScD

PROF. RICHARD WEST, ScD, FRS, FGS

DAVID STREETER, FIBIOL

JIM FLEGG, OBE, FIHORT

The aim of this series is to interest the general reader in the wildlife of Britain by recapturing the enquiring spirit of the old naturalists. The editors believe that the natural pride of the British public in the native flora and fauna, to which must be added concern for their conservation, is best fostered by maintaining a high standard of accuracy combined with clarity of exposition in presenting the results of modern scientific research.

F OR MANY PEOPLE, a garden is the only easily accessible place to see plants and animals, and gardening provides the readiest opportunity for interacting with the natural world. The natural history on the doorstep deserves wider recognition. Although gardening is an exercise in applied natural history, there are few publications that introduce the cast and encourage observers to follow the ecological dramas unfolding under the leaves or in the compost heap. In this book, Stefan Buczacki reviews the diversity of organisms and processes waiting to be explored. Integrating gardening lore with horticultural and ecological science, he interprets familiar observations. He also offers gardeners recommendations for management to enhance wildlife, together with ideas that will enrich their appreciation of horticultural natural history. It is hoped that this much-anticipated addition to the New Naturalist series will stimulate further work on this relatively unexplored, yet accessible, world, and encourage gardeners to notice, perhaps even welcome, the unplanned diversity of organisms, often uninvited, that shares the garden.

Well known as an author and broadcaster on various aspects of gardens and gardening, and a connoisseur of New Naturalists, owning a complete collection of titles, Stefan Buczacki is the ideal author for a New Naturalist on Garden Natural History. We are delighted that he accepted the invitation to write this book for the series.

A PART FROM Max Walters Wild and Garden Plants, no previous New Naturalist volume has considered gardens in any other than a fleeting and superficial manner, let alone had the word garden in its title. To a naturalist like myself who is also a gardener, this seems an astonishing omission. It is nonetheless an understandable one, as the garden has for long been considered something wholly artificial that has little in common with or relevance to natural habitats, somewhere that has no part to play in A Survey of British Natural History. I am privileged to be able to rectify the omission and correct the record, although for someone who thought the task would be straightforward, the exercise has proved a daunting journey of discovery. At the outset, I believed I had simply to tell a story based on my own lifetimes experience and observations in natural history and horticulture, and substantiate it with data from the scientific literature. But there was the rub. I had not reckoned on how tiny, disparate and perfunctory was the scientific literature, how sparse the studies of garden wildlife. Apart from birds, almost no group of organisms that live in gardens have been studied in relation to this particular habitat in any depth. Even the scientific literature of commercial horticulture was of little help, because arable cropping is so different in approach, practice and scope from domestic gardening.

The realisation that I had rather few facts to support my beliefs and ideas has resulted in a book that may be perceived as judgemental, dogmatic and opinionated. I make no apology for that, and whether readers agree or disagree with the views I have expressed and the conclusions I have drawn, I can only articulate the fervent wish that those in a position to do so will now take matters into their own hands. I hope my fellow scientists will at last view the garden seriously, recognise its huge importance in the overall context of a threatened environment, and embark on the studies that are so urgently needed to show how it can most effectively be used and managed for the complementary purposes of enjoyment and conservation.

It is my pleasure to acknowledge with real gratitude the patience, understanding and forbearance of Myles Archibald and the Natural History staff at HarperCollins and the support and confidence expressed in me by the New Naturalist Editorial Board.