How Do You Define a British Garden?

Plus, the Yorkshire Wold poetry benches, ethical banking and protecting our Living Legend trees.

Hello there lovely person, I’m Vicky Wren and I run Wren and the Wild. Britain is one of the most nature depleted countries in the world so I use illustration, film, photos and words to enjoy, explore and encourage the protection and rewilding of our wonderful British Isles. Subscribe for free to enjoy monthly newsletters and in between posts from Edinburgh and the land and water beyond. You can also find me on YouTube, Instagram and my digital nature connection printables are over on Etsy.

Welcome to the first Wren and the Wild newsletter of 2025! I hope that you’re settling into this new year nicely and are enjoying getting back into a routine. I don’t know about you, but even though it’s only mid January, I’ve started getting an inkling that our wild places are stirring a tiny bit. Over the last couple of days I’ve spotted that the hazel catkins and daffodil leaves have started to emerge, I’m really appreciating that the daylight is lingering that little bit longer and today I saw some small green buds on my front garden hedge. Signs of exciting times ahead!

Wild Wanderings

The weekend before last we took the train down to visit friends in the York area and ventured out on a beautiful frosty afternoon walk in the Yorkshire Wolds. A small stretch of our walk was along the Yorkshire Wolds Way which is a 79 mile National Trail starting in Hessle on the Humber estuary and ending at the east coast in Filey, North Yorkshire. As well as coastal views, the trail takes you through rolling chalk hills, woodland, valleys and (if in June or early July) vibrant poppy fields. Between 2009 - 2011, artists were commissioned to create artworks along the trail under the title ‘Wander - Art on the Yorkshire Wolds Way’ and part of these were a series of poetry benches situated at six trail locations. These curvy benches were designed and made from steam bent oak by furniture maker Angus Ross and the poems were crafted by Scarborough based John Wedgwood Clarke, who tailored each poem to the specific location of the bench. We came across the South Cave bench, which overlooks the Humber, and the poem reads:

‘We shed them one by one, by shattered field and barley seas, until the way is open for echoes of us made strange by wind, deserted barn, the shifting trade of shadows on the Humbri, Humbre, Humber, our mouths to springs that speak in tongues of thirst.’

There is an excellent Yorkshire Wolds Way National Trail page on Facebook if you’re interested in exploring the Wander art trail or the pretty wilds of the Wolds.

Wild Watch

Garden guru Monty Don has an excellent new series out on the BBC called ‘Monty Don’s British Gardens’ where he goes all over the British Isles exploring gardens spanning from those belonging to stately homes to ones grown by local residents in communal alleyways. The series descriptor reads:

‘The nation’s outdoor home. From the humble backyard to the grandest of grounds, what do Britain’s gardens tell us about our culture, climate and history?’

He also asks a lot of the people he talks to what they think the definition of a British garden is and if you look at the huge variety of gardens he visits, it turns out it’s quite hard to define!

If you want some inspiration of gorgeous green places to spend some time in this year, then I can highly recommend watching this. I’ve been lucky enough to visit some of the places featured and they all made for a fantastic day out - I’ve even made a video about my time there for a couple of them! These are; Dr Neil’s Garden in Edinburgh (see the video here) , Drummond Castle Gardens in Perthshire, The Alnwick Garden in Northumberland, Lowther Castle and Gardens in Cumbria (see above photo) and Bodnant Gardens in North Wales (see the video here).

Wild Wears

This month’s wild wear is a new bank card (and pension pot!)! One of my goals for 2025 is to make my finances greener. I’m going to do that by finding more ethical banks and pension providers through the Make My Money Matter website and then switching my accounts. In their about me section on their website they state:

‘Make My Money Matter works to transform the financial system, so it puts people and planet on a par with profit. There are trillions of pounds in UK pensions and banks - we believe that money should be moved from the destructive, harmful investments of the past, into those which help build a future we can be proud of.’

Look at their website here to learn about how the big 5 UK banks all finance fossil fuels and to explore an easy pull down list of more ethical banks such as Co-op Bank, Nationawide and Triodos.

Wild Win

In last month’s newsletter I wrote about how The Woodland Trust are working incredibly hard to protect our ancient trees. They have been petitioning to protect ancient trees so that they gain the same sort of legal protections that our ancient monuments and endangered species do. These veteran trees are irreplaceable in communities of both humans and smaller animal and plant ecosystems where they support a huge array of life. Plus, they are vital carbon stores.

The petition reached more than 100,000 signatures so on 18th November the Living Legends Petition was handed to parliament. On 9th December an All-Party Parliamentary Group for Woods and Trees met to discuss the petition and a variety of issues and examples were discussed from integrating aspects of tree protection into a new planning bill to how Poland, a country with 40% tree coverage, has strong tree protection laws so it should be possible for Britain, with only 13% tree coverage, to strike the balance between creating new developments and protecting trees.

You can read the minutes of this important meeting here. Hopefully the suggestions raised at this meeting, alongside the power of the 100,000 plus public signatures of the Living Legends Petition, will develop into a protective law for our extremely precious and remarkable ancient trees. A Tree Protection Bill has already been proposed in Northern Ireland and if passed will set a precedent for the other UK nations to make similar progress - watch this space!

Until next time, with love and wild hope,