The Rewilding of Leadership

By Dr Chris Dalton

At the Royal Horticultural Society Chelsea Flower Show in London this year, one garden caught the eye of the judges, the imagination of the public and the headlines in the press like no other. The Rewilding Garden, co-engineered by landscape designers Urquhart and Hunt and (we’re told) some beavers, won Gold Medal and Best Show Garden awards. The garden represented the effects and benefits of rewilding as an approach, in this case on the likeness of a landscape from the southwest of England.

Rewilding means returning a habitat to its natural state. It is a contemporary reaction to the unintended consequences of a human obsession with looking after nature. We have looked after nature so much that our technological feats now trample it. In ecological terms, things are getting serious.

Hence the interest in changing our relationship with our environment and the idea of rewilding. The most notable aspect of rewilding is zero or minimal interference from us. And here is the tricky part; we are not used to that. If there is one thing that has defined modern civilisation, it is the ideal of control. Traditionally, control has meant creating order from chaos. Botanic gardens began as collections by vested interests looking to chart new worlds. As early maps of nature, they were places of study and understanding. Gardens then became shows of landowners’ ideals of order, design and social aspiration status, symbols of wealth and power.

Contemporary gardens come in all shapes and styles; we tend to think of them as part of nature, but they too are maps, not the real thing. Gardening stands as a metaphor for the human management of nature. It is a metaphor of limit. Rewilding attempts to find the complete and self-sustaining biodiversity of nature once again. And it is also a strategy of belief in optimism, which has been in short supply amidst the accelerating loss of habitats and species.

All that got me thinking. Is gardening analogous to the cultivation of leadership as a concept? Could rewilding leadership be the analogue of rewilding in ecology?