Nature and nourishment at our Gardeners' World Live show garden

We’re excited to be unveiling a new garden at BBC Gardeners' World Live this summer - which shows how you can combine food and nature in one growing space.

Our head gardener Emma O'Neill and head of organic horticulture Chris Collins designed the garden, sponsored by green mobile network Ecotalk, to showcase how diversely planted kitchen gardens can buffer the biodiversity crisis. Based around our research paper, Every Garden Matters, the specially designed show garden illustrates easy ways to maximise wildlife and manage water while growing your own food.

Every Garden Matters - a blueprint for boosting backyard biodiversity focuses on the often-overlooked potential of urban balconies, back gardens, allotments and community growing spaces. With wildlife declining by 73% in 50 years, these green spaces are a vital link to nature and act as dispersal corridors for wildlife to find food, shelter and breed.

Ecotalk Rooted in Nature highlights

Central to our show garden is a vegetable patch, packed with diverse heritage vegetables from our Heritage Seed Library, including four different types of heirloom pea and beetroot, and an array of colourful leaves. These are intermingled with companion flowers such as snapdragons, marigold, nigella and herbs – showing gardeners attractive ways to bring in vital pollinators while reducing ‘pest’ insects and the need for pesticides.

The Ecotalk Rooted in Nature garden also features a rain garden, which mimics the natural action of a forest or meadow by capturing rainwater in a plant-filled ditch. Fed from guttering, the rain garden demonstrates how gardeners can slowly divert and release water, helping to reduce the effects of flooding, soil erosion and drought.

And insect habitats are also a key feature, with a giant bug hotel at the centre, and a wildlife pond surrounded by clever bug-friendly elements such as rot holes, frog rocks and hoverfly lagoons. A composting bay comes complete with bee house, and lizards and snakes are encouraged with a hibernaculum and alpine-filled ‘vertical rockery’. Silver birch, crab apples and all-important hedges provide shelter and food for birds, with permaculture planting beneath.

Head gardener Emma O’Neill said: “With more than 520 thousand hectares of gardens in the UK, inter-linked gardens can make a big difference to nature. Our Rooted in Nature Garden shows that nature and food can be combined in a beautiful way to create a diverse, nurturing space for nature – and that small steps in small gardens can add up to something significant.”

Garden Organic would like to extend its thanks to Ecotalk for its generous sponsorship of the garden. Its mission to create a great mobile phone service with a green outcome, by using its profits to protect nature in Britain, closely aligns with the charity’s aims to help more people grow sustainably and support nature.

“The Rooted in Nature garden shows how people can easily use the outdoor space they have, however small, to help boost biodiversity,” says Dale Vince, founder of Ecotalk. “With just a bit of gardening, one of life’s unsung pleasures, you can make a difference to nature. Ecotalk uses its customers' phone bills to create and enhance wildlife habitats, so we’re pleased to support this initiative - it’s another way that we can all get involved.”

The charity would also like to thank Viridian Nutrition (viridian-nutrition.com), The Wildlife Community (thewildlifecommunity.co.uk), Melcourt Ltd (melcourt.co.uk) and Evengreener (evengreener.com) for supporting the creation of this garden.

Find us at stand GA2 and G213 in June! You can buy tickets for the show here, and find out more about Ecotalk at Ecotalk.co.uk.