Nature's Acre
A book, a garden, and a living experiment in wildlife-friendly gardening.
Start here if you want to explore the places, plants and stories behind the book.
A true story about a small Irish garden, mental health, and learning to live with wildlife instead of against it.
Part wildlife-garden diary, part community story, part account of holding a nervous system together with soil under the fingernails.
Ebook and paperback available now
This page is a hub for everything connected to Nature's Acre on the site: background to the book, how it connects with wildlife gardening, and an index of the plants and fungi that appear in its pages.
From here you can jump to individual plant profiles, practical wildlife-gardening pages, and other parts of the website that deepen the themes of the book.
Nature's Acre follows a real garden as it grows, changes, and fills with plants, fungi, insects, birds and people. It takes a close-up look at ordinary corners: nettle patches, foxglove spikes, hidden fungi on old wood, and the lives that depend on them.
Rather than treating gardening as tidying, the book leans towards working with the life of the place: leaving seed heads for birds, learning from “weeds”, and noticing how soil, plants and creatures fit together.
Nature's Acre is rooted in a real place: a garden that has been allowed to become a shared space for people and wildlife. The work here includes wildlife-friendly planting, soil care, letting “messy” corners stay wild, and paying attention to what appears when you give nature a little room.
Around the book, the wider project includes sharing what we learn: plant notes, seasonal observations, and practical ideas for anyone who wants to make their own patch more alive.
The book is threaded through with particular plants and fungi – some chosen deliberately, some appearing by surprise. Below is an index of the species highlighted in the Notes on Plants and Fungi, each of which will have its own page with more detail.
Use this index as a way to wander: follow a plant you recognise from your own garden, or pick one you don’t know yet and start there.
You can treat this section as a companion to the book and to your own patch of ground: