My father had always taken a nature-first attitude and I resolved to do the same.” “Around 97 per cent of wildflower meadows have disappeared since 1930. “The changes I’d made in the name of convenience suddenly seemed short-sighted and selfish,” she says. As she researched how to make her garden more wildlife-friendly, she was horrified to learn that the UK’s native species of moth, bumblebee and butterfly are all in decline. The question forced her to rethink her approach entirely and inspired her memoir, The Guilty Gardener, which is proving to be a word-of-mouth hit. “I’d grown up in a beautiful garden surrounded by wildlife – how had I become so disconnected?” It obviously troubled him greatly, though, as after he died Christie found a letter tucked into his copy of Natural History of British Butterflies, urging her to start putting nature first. Her father, a keen naturalist, kept his mouth shut as she sprayed pesticides on the weeds on the drive and cleared ivy and nettles from the borders and banks. “I took out hedges, removed a pond and laid grass for a football pitch – I became spectacularly good at growing grass.” “It was wonderfully wild, but I was desperate to make it manageable and convenient,” explains Christie, a journalist and author. When Annabel Christie swapped a courtyard garden in London for a rambling cottage garden in Oxfordshire with rose beds and borders, she did what any sensible person with a job and young children would do: grassed it over.
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