Wonderfully Down-to-Earth

Like most keen readers, I imagine, I collect the works of particular authors, placing the books in satisfying runs along my bookshelves. These runs are not alphabetical or chronological, since I am not sufficiently organized for that, but at least they come easily to hand. Among these are: the fiction of Jane Austen and John Buchan, the Regency novels of Georgette Heyer, the collections of poetry by John Clare and John Betjeman – and the popular horticultural science books of Ken Thompson. The last may not be a familiar name to you, but he is to me one of the most original and readable of garden writers, ever. Those two virtues, originality and readability, have become scarce commodities in garden writing in recent years, superseded very often by desperately ordinary blogs, vlogs and social media posts, many of which contain questionable or outdated information, delivered in a tone of deadening earnestness.

Ken Thompson is an ecologist and botanist and was, until a few years ago, Senior Lecturer in the Department of Animal and Plant Sciences at the University of Sheffield. He has now retired to garden in a kinder climate in Devon. His reputation among the massed ranks of thinking gardeners is based on several books, most notably An Ear to the Ground: Garden Science for Ordinary Mortals (2003), No Nettles Required (2006), Do We Need Pandas? (2010) and Where Do Camels Belong? (2014), as well as The Sceptical Gardener (2015) and Notes from a Sceptical Gardener (2020), which are two selections of articles he wrote for the Daily Telegraph, in the days when that newspaper still took gardening seriously. He has also written a book on Charles Darwin’s botanical work, Darwin’s Most Wonderful Plants, and most recently, Common or Garden: Encounters with Britain’s 50 Most Successful Wild Plants. I am keen to discuss the first three, since they are no longer in print, and I think it important that they do not drop from sight, when there are so few ecologists writing attractively for gardeners. (The only other one who comes immediately to mind is Julien Doberski, another retired academic, whose The Science of Garden Biodiversity came out in 2024.) Moreover, those three set the tone for all the books that have come since. Ken Thompson’s strength, on show in all his writings, lies in his capacity to articulate, in words that lay people like me can understand, the latest research emerging from scientific studies and written up in academic journals; he is fearless in debunking long-established nonsense, but in a way that does not offend. As he says in the Preface to An Ear to the Ground, ‘[The book’s] aim is simple: to allow you to understand why your garden is the way it is . . . Most often [the book] draws on botany, ecology and natural history in the broadest sense. In other words, from a literature that seeks not to control the natural world, but merely to understand it.’ This was by no means universally accepted thinking twenty years ago and the approach had the effect of reassuring me – a professionally trained gardener with decades of experience but with a necessarily humble attitude towards what I don’t know I don’t know – that I wouldn’t be wasting my time reading the book. An Ear to the Ground certainly doesn’t assume great knowledge, with sections on basic botany, genetics, cultivation, soil, weeds, seeds and so on, but it is all done with a lightness of touch and wit so that, although much may not be news to old stagers, it is memorably expressed. For example, when discussing plants named after botanists or explorers, he goes on to let slip that zoologists are far more likely to let themselves go. ‘So far we have Bufonaria borisbeckeri (a sea snail), Calponia harrisonfordi (a spider), and Baeturia laureli and B. hardyi (cicadas).’ Who knew? Pleasing as it is to find a brainy scientist interested in down-to earth gardening, it is even more pleasing, although hardly a surprise, that he knows and cares about the whole web of life in gardens. The subtitle of his second book, No Nettles Required, is The Reassuring Truth about Wildlife Gardening, and the whole thrust of the book is that promoting the interests of insects, in particular, is a great deal easier than you thought. Who can resist an expert who says: ‘all gar dens are good for wildlife, and . . . encouraging wildlife is entirely compatible with ordinary gardening, costs next to nothing and is almost completely effortless’? Many of his insights are based on the results of the scientific study (Biodiversity in Urban Gardens in Sheffield or, felicitously, BUGS) which he and his colleagues undertook to find out the extent of insect life in ordinary gardens in Sheffield between 2001 and 2008. This is a project which the Wildlife Gardening Forum has called ‘the most complete and scientifically sound study of the garden resource, biodiversity and other attributes of wildlife in domestic gardens anywhere in the world’. The BUGS project was strongly influenced, not surprisingly, by the work of Jennifer Owen, an academic biologist who, for thirty years after 1971, minutely studied the creatures in her average-sized suburban garden in Leicester, writing The Ecology of a Garden: The First Fifteen Years in 1991 and Wildlife of a Garden: A Thirty-Year Study in 2010 (also both out of print). The Ecology of a Garden was the first account that convinced me that gardens, because of the diversity of habitat that they so often encompass – pond, walls, borders, lawns, shrubs, trees – are seriously important for wildlife, especially for insects chased out of intensively farmed landscapes. Owen found 2,673 species of plant, animal and insect, including 15 species of parasitic wasps that had never been recorded in this country, and 4 that were new to science. As Ken Thompson puts it, ‘[G]arden wildlife is all about creepy-crawlies, which outnumber the more obvious things in your garden by about a million to one.’ And because this scarcely visible wildlife is born, lives and dies in the garden, it is really ours. Ours to enjoy, protect and promote, if we can. The second half of No Nettles Required concerns how gardeners can foster wildlife if they want to, in chapters entitled, for example, ‘Lies, damned lies and compost heaps’ and ‘Garden doctor: selling your garden to wildlife’. But almost the most encouraging take from this book is that ordinary gardens do their bit for biodiversity, even when no one makes any attempt to promote it. In the very ordinary urban Sheffield gardens studied for the BUGS project, the scientists discovered a number of insect species not found by Jennifer Owen in Leicester. As Gilbert White put it in The Natural History and Antiquities of Selborne: ‘It is, I find, in zoology as it is in botany: all nature is so full, that that district produces the greatest variety which is the most examined.’ Thompson then tells the reader how ‘ridiculously easy [it is] . . . to keep our garden wildlife happy’, consisting, as it does, of simply making compost, eschewing pesticides, building log piles, digging a small pond and leaving some grass to grow long. Oh yes, and he tells us not to trouble to make a native wildflower meadow because, to begin with, it is fiendishly difficult to achieve on fertile soil and, anyway, most insects couldn’t care less where plants come from. Our native flora is only 10,000 years old, so plenty of foreign plants are very similar, after all. If it were only accurate information on offer, I might not turn to the Thompson bookshelf as often as I do. But it is the wit, allusive ness and fellow feeling, as well as an impressive willingness to admit to what he and other scientists do not know, that makes it so palatable. Which other writer of popular science quotes Oscar Wilde when discussing statistical probabilities? Or paraphrases Tolstoy with ‘all fertile habitats are alike, but infertile habitats vary after their own fashion’? Or descends to the memorably demotic with ‘Hoverfly larvae . . . look more like lumps of animated snot than anything else. Not very handsome at all but console yourself that they look far worse if you’re an aphid.’ Whatever the subject, the tone is nearly always positive, optimistic and encouraging. Unlike almost every other ecology book, there is little wailing and gnashing of teeth about climate change, although of course he accepts that it’s happening. Do We Need Pandas? is scarcely less readable, although its theme is more philosophical and, for all I know, possibly controversial in the world of professional ecologists. The author questions whether so much attention should be paid to conserving threatened charismatic species, such as the panda, when whatever is done, they will always be rare. His view is that we should put most effort into conserving ecosystems, even though that is more difficult. The panda is obvi ously a more striking ambassador for conservation projects than bacteria, say, but ‘the uncomfortable truth about biodiversity’ – the book’s subtitle – is that conserving bacteria and fungi matters far more for the long-term health of the planet. As he puts it:

Not only is rarity common, but it’s the relatively very few common species that make the world go round . . . [I]t’s the few common species that provide both the framework and the resources for the many rare ones, and the basic ecosystem ser vices that are crucial for our continued survival.

I very much hope that, while he has the light, Ken Thompson will continue to write books of this kind, for I am sure he still has many useful and appealing things to say.

Extract from Slightly Foxed Issue 89 © Ursula Buchan 2026