Book review: ‘The Accidental Garden’ by Richard Mabey

Although it seems impolite these days to refer to anyone as a veteran, Richard Mabey is undoubtedly a veteran British nature writer. His books are always beautifully written, entertaining, and thought-provoking. The Accidental Garden is no exception.

In this book, Mabey writes about his two-acre garden in Suffolk, and the many organisms that have adopted it as their habitat. Two decades ago, he decided to model the garden, which he shares with his partner, Polly, on an English common. Not for Mabey the heavily curated ‘revered pollinators’-friendly gardens that are all the rage these days; he prefers to let nature do what it does best, spreading and encroaching, slowly establishing itself, and getting on with the important business of getting on, without any need for human intervention or interference—apart, maybe, from the occasional Mabey prod.

It wasn’t until I started processing my reading notes after finishing this short book that I realised just how much I’d got out of it. It contains many thoughtful humanist insights and observations, and some genuinely moving writing:

Entropy has become a personal affair, and the usual decrepitudes of old age have slowed me down and narrowed my horizons. Bad hips, muffled ears that won’t pick up swifts’ screams even with hearing aids, an arthritic spine that brings on spells of wearying stiffness. These are hardly essential problems, but they have changed my relationship with the natural world. I’ve become more physically passive—plant-like, you might say—hoping that things will come my way instead of energetically seeking them out. Witnessing rather than acting.

At one point, Mabey reminisces about having once been unconvinced that fly orchids (which, in his eyes, only vaguely resembled female wasps) could so easily dupe their male pollinator wasps into ‘pseudocopulation’: “For once I decided to put regret and self-doubt aside and try to behave like a proper scientist.” He goes on to describe having used his microscope, augmented by his non-visual senses, to take an intuitive, personally transformative “journey into the orchid’s multi-sensorial interior”, trying to experience the flower from a wasp’s perspective:

I might have gone Darwin’s way, set up an experiment on the edge of the beechwoods, manicured the orchids, created artificial ones on stalks with and without fur, and seen what the wasps preferred. Or would I have opted for the perspective I chose for the rest of my life: observed the intimate details as accurately as I could, then created an imaginative construction around them, a coherent narrative, an orchid whodunnit, regardless of whether the reality might be counter-intuitive and undramatic. I always hope these stories can be true both to the material universe and the imaginative engagement that is our species’ special ecological gift, but I’m less confident than I was.

Mabey does himself a disservice, here. Darwin did indeed perform all manner of ‘fool’s experiments’ on orchids and other organisms, but his experiments were usually designed to test his own theory-led and observation-based imaginative constructions. The perspective Mabey chose to adopt throughout his life certainly has a place in our scientific explorations of the material universe—which, let’s face it, are the best way to explore the only thing there is to explore.

The Accidental Garden is a wonderful read.

Highly recommended.