What regeneration actually looks like on eight acres

The single biggest thing we have done is mow less. Areas that used to be cut short are now cut once or twice a year, and what has come back — the insects especially — arrived without us planting anything.

This is unsatisfying as a project because it looks like neglect for the first eighteen months. Then it does not.

Slowing water down rather than moving it away. Letting the wet bits stay wet. A pond that was tidy is now messy at the edges, which is where everything lives.

Planting is the visible part and the slowest. Hedges laid rather than flailed. Native species over ornamental. The honest note is that most of this will look like something after we are gone, which takes some getting used to as a way of working.

Plenty. Trees planted in the wrong place. A season of over-enthusiastic clearing we regret. Regeneration is not a plan you execute, it is a long argument with a place, and the place is usually right.