![](https://substackcdn.com/image/fetch/w_1456,c_limit,f_auto,q_auto:good,fl_progressive:steep/https%3A%2F%2Fsubstack-post-media.s3.amazonaws.com%2Fpublic%2Fimages%2F1332babf-603e-478d-909c-1d9f074ed890_3024x4032.jpeg)
I have been lucky enough to visit the walled garden at Knepp twice now: once very early on, the year after it was planted, and again recently two years on. Designed by Tom Stuart-Smith, the garden, like Knepp’s mammoth rewilding project, is an ambitious experiment designed to stretch our imagination of what a garden can be. Formerly a traditional kitchen garden and a croquet lawn, it is now an incredible mass of plants designed to resemble a wild landscape, and planted not into rich soil in the manner of a traditional border, but into substrates of sand, gravel and rubble. The idea is that in this very poor soil, a greater number of plants can thrive without thuggish weeds like thistles, nettles and docks taking over, so you get the diversity that encourages a wider range of insects and other wildlife. To stretch the diversity even further, the garden was landscaped into mounds and troughs, some areas covered with a thick layer of crushed rubble and others with more topsoil, providing multiple microclimates suitable for different plants. All the plants have been chosen above all for resilience and once established, they are never watered.
Keep reading with a 7-day free trial
Subscribe to Bud to Seed to keep reading this post and get 7 days of free access to the full post archives.