Nurturing nature in the gardens of new suburbia

The pace of change on the fashionable coastline round the corner in Clew Bay turns my infrequent trips to town into Rip-van-Winkle revelations. A whole new road bursts forth to meet us from Westport; a new pilgrim park, with ponds, is carved out under the Reek. New houses appear from one weekend to the next, some with their doorsteps so close to the tide as to show a quite striking faith in future sea-level.

The municipal trimmings now settling in apace along the littoral from Westport to Louisburgh adorn a chain of affluent, picture-window villages (Murrisk, Lecanvey, Old Head) linked by new and passably convincing dry-stone walls which, topped with dollops of concrete, will never fall down. It's not the scrubby, rambling coast it used to be, but the pagan hulk of the mountain and an ever-more-wilful ocean will keep much of it passably wild.

In this indulgent mood, it is even possible to find some ecological promise in the lava-flow of suburbs now pouring out across Ireland. Could it be that low-density suburbia with generous gardens and a decent density of trees will have a better mix of plants, birds, animals and insects than the land they have replaced?

It depends what kind of land it was. If a new estate supplants a monoculture carpet of rye-grass, mown twice a year for silage, the chances are that, even on a mere 10 per cent of ground left open for gardening, the final biodiversity will be near-Amazonian by contrast. If, on the other hand, it has been carved out of a patchwork of old meadows full of wildflowers and bumble-bees, and lichened stone walls smothered with honeysuckle, brambles and ivy, the story must be one of loss.

The wildlife that builds up again as a new estate greens over depends, of course, on what is planted there, but also on what leafy corridors remain to link species with potential new homes. Old tree-lines, hedgerow banks, canals and even railway lines can all serve a flow of wild things to some desirable residence in Meadowview or Oaklea Heights.

Now that developers and their architects know the sales appeal of retaining mature trees and hedge-banks, and gardens ready-spread with fresh brown loam, many estates make it easier at least to imagine creating one's own nature-friendly bower filled with butterflies and bird-song. There are really two levels of wildlife gardening, apart from the mere minimum of not sprinkling toxic slug-bait everywhere and letting earwigs chew on the dahlias. One is to create a conventional garden, with lawn and borders, but use plenty of shrubs with winter berries for the birds, and the kind of plants that butterflies come to for nectar (buddleia, hebe, aubretia, sedum spectabile and so on).

Along with nut-feeders, a compost heap and a firm attitude to cats, this will certainly help to make a lively, Temple-Barbistro of a garden, where birds and insects gather for food and shelter. Some thought for providing ground-cover and hideyholes of every size, ivy on the walls and a few nest-boxes could begin to make it more than just a well-stocked takeaway.

To go much further means trying to reproduce natural habitat types - hedgebank, woodland edge, wild meadow, wetland area and so on - in which species can move towards something like a resident diversity. One that many people can manage is a pond - say two metres by three - which, furnished with some aquatic plants, a few shovels of lake mud and a dollop of frogspawn (but not fish, they eat too much) will soon fill out its own ecosystem.

There are now good books about this more determined kind of wildlife gardening, and an Irish source I would suggest for basic advice is a booklet called Go Wild At School, first published in 1996 and now reprinted. This is the manual by Paddy Madden, whose wildlife garden at Scoil Treasa Naofa on Dublin's South Circular Road is a continuing inspiration. School gardens seem a world removed from the teenage vandalism that smashes suburban trees, wrecks vegetable allotments and leaves bare grass as the irreducible solution for open space. But we can only persevere, not least in the hope that more local communities can reach out to the environment beyond their front gates.

This is what was hoped for in that aspirational blueprint from the Rio Summit, known (often rather vaguely) as Local Agenda 21. Now taking shape as a governmental ethic, it aims to recruit individuals, communities and NGOs to the decision making process of "sustainable development". In Ireland, so far, Local Agenda 21 has inspired a few impressive initiatives - Cork City's consultative forum on environmental planning, for example, or the landscape management programme of the Wicklow Uplands Council. In Britain, action plans for habitats and biodiversity are a big part of the Local Agenda 21 framework, and the 485,000 hectares of gardens in England and Wales have found a newly-important role in nature conservation.

In its long campaign for a national landscape policy, Terry O'Regan's Corkbased Landscape Alliance has always insisted on including city and suburb within its thinking. The European Landscape Convention, signed in Florence last October by 18 countries (but not Ireland), endorses the right of local people, including townsfolk, to have a say in their surroundings.

The report on landscape policy due any day from the Heritage Council is sure to make similar points. It is not enough to scorn suburbia as degraded countryside. As the place where most people rub shoulders with the natural world and take pleasure in making things grow, it can be given a richness and diversity that puts most farmed countryside to shame.

Go Wild At School is available for £7.20 (p&p included) from Scoil Treasa Naofa, Petrie Road, Donore Avenue, South Circular Road, Dublin 8.