Amid collapsing biodiversity worldwide, Mary Reynolds of Ireland is building a movement to turn gardeners into guardians of the planet by returning our own patch of land to nature and by restoring hope that individual action can create lasting change.
TRANSCRIPT
MARY: One day I was sitting at my desk looking down over my garden, and I saw a fox run past, followed by two hares, which was unusual in itself.
And then, I noticed a little hedgehog scuttling along in the same direction under the hedge.
And I thought, gosh, that sounds, this kind of reminds me of the stories of Noah's Ark when I was a kid, you know, and I went, "God, go out and see what's happening.
And I went out and walked in the direction they were coming from.
(birds chirping, grass rustling) ♪ Somebody had got permission to build a house, and they'd gone in with a digger and cleared it out very, very quickly without any thought for the creatures that called it home.
(tree crashes) I'm standing there in horror, and I thought, w- where are wild creatures supposed to go?
You know they can't go into our woodlands because our woodlands are- they're crops.
Our gardens are not safe either.
If you want to help nature, you're going to have to start with your own patch of it.
Start at home.
♪ NARRATOR: Mary Reynolds began her career as a garden designer and had phenomenal success.
At just 28, she became the youngest woman ever to win a gold medal at the storied Chelsea Flower Show in London, and was an internationally sought-after..
But the experience of watching wildlife lose their homes inspired her to change direction, from gardener to guardian.
MARY: I think gardens are part of an old world, and I think we need to build a new one.
♪ NARRATOR: The "old world" Mary knows is one that's been radically transformed by human development.
80% of her native Ireland was once covered with untamed forest.
Now, it's just 11%.
And nearly half of protected species and habitats here are in decline.
♪ But Mary believes that each person has the power to help restore nature, here or anywhere in the world.
MARY: So, I set up a movement called We Are The Ark.
And I called it Acts of Restorative Kindness.
NARRATOR: To turn any piece of land into an "Ark", Mary asks that people do something both simple and profound: give half of it back to the wild.
MARY: We need to learn how to share, you know, so if you can take half of your land and give it back to nature and restore a native plant community, you know, that would be massive.
♪ NARRATOR: Mary started We Are The Ark in 2019, but only began building her own Ark two years ago when she bought her own piece of land.
The key to restoring native plant life can often lie just beneath the surface.
(shoveling sounds) MARY: Start by working with the seed bank which is in the soil and setting those seeds free.
There's usually about 5,000 weeds, we call them weed seeds in every square foot of soil and they only need 1/30th of a second's worth of light to be activated.
We've been told that it's all just a bunch of weeds.
But when you start to see what those native plants actually support and who comes back, this is your true nature being restored.
NARRATOR: Mary encourages people to create as many microhabitats, or "layers", of native plants within their Ark as their space allows.
(bee buzzing) Each layer supports different parts of the local biodiversity.
The variety of plant, insect, and other species that live in an area.
MARY: You'll have the herbivore layer which is like the grazed area which is your lawn.
You'd have an Ark meadow, and you'd have a scrubby area, and you have a woodland, and you have all the kind of helpful areas in between like dry stone piles, deadwood, and water.
(bird chirping) It's so simple.
When you come over to my side of the fence, it's all about setting the land free of the bondages we've put upon it.
It's going to start getting less tidy, so we ask people to put up a sign, and say, "This is an Ark" and it takes away the shame of not having what society has told you, you should have.
And it gives them almost like permission to celebrate what they've been doing.
CLAIRE: Salsify.
A nice bit of fennel.
NARRATOR: Mary's friend Claire welcomed that permission as she set out to build her Ark.
CLAIRE: I do.
I mean look at that boysenberry.
You see how many little- MARY: Oh yeah.
CLAIRE: Little berries are on it already It's always going to be a challenge for most of us, living in the Western world growing up being told you keep this neat, you keep this for that particular reason.
It's all got to be neat and tidy and pristine.
MARY: If you care for nature, stop being so tidy.
CLAIRE: Yeah.
And it's in- it's real.. (indistinct chatter) NARRATOR: Over time, as Mary's idea caught on, she wrote a book to help others create their own Arks.
In it, she details each step of the process, for those with as little as a balcony to as large as a farm.
There's a method for each person to help give nature some space.
ALY: Well, Mary, this is our back garden.
NARRATOR: But the first step in Ark building can sometimes be the most difficult.
MARY: So, to build an Ark, just take your time and watch and get to know the land.
So, what I say initially is don't do anything.
NIAMH: The first thing that we did was stopped cutting the grass.
That was our very first thing.
(birds chirping) ♪ NARRATOR: That first big step makes room for local biodiversity to return, but it's important to pay attention to what pops up.
ALY: So, this is the pond, Mary.
MARY: You have to remove non-native plants, specifically non-native invasive plants.
Those plants are not part of the local food web.
ALY: So, this is the main area, Mary- MARY: Yep.
ALY: Where we took out all the non-native kind of specimen trees and plants and there was loads of bamboo there, and palms.
It was just bare ground and all of the small native trees.
So, you can see them kind of punctuated up along the grass, it's- it's just new life, (birds chirping) it's just- I really do feel like I'm- have given something back.
MARY: Ah, that's wonderful.
So, guys, why are you doing this, like, because most people, they just don't get it, you know, and you guys totally embraced it.
And to be honest, like, I'm kind of, like, overwhelmed with, oh my God, they actually did it.
NIAMH: Well, we kind of have to.
We've no time left.
There's no time like the present, so I mean we had started off by doing nothing.
Uh, we could see what a difference that made.
And then Aly started reading your book and that was just a game changer in terms of we really need to act now.
MARY: Yeah.
NIAMH: So, we just .. and went for it and that's what we'll do.
♪ NARRATOR: Louise Flynn went all in too, after some initial missteps.
LOUISE: We moved here three years ago.
And we, for the first year, did all the wrong things.
Everybody does.
And put in a lawn and stuff, and then for the last two years we've been doing the Ark.
It, kind of, just takes a little shift in your mindset to appreciate- you know, it might look a little bit messy now.
But if you're able to sit in the middle of that, and really feel the life rather than sitting in like a green desert where there's, you know, nothing.
♪ MARY: The joy in creating an Ark comes from all the creatures that return.
And you end up, your heart opens to include every single one of them, and they become part of your family, and you become part of their family, and there's a trust and a- and a magic that happens.
♪ NARRATOR: Anita and Will Wheeler have seen it happen right before their eyes.
Years ago, Will and his father helped their land go wild.
WILL: We were always drawn to nature, so truthfully, it was- it was something that came naturally for us to do.
ANITA: When we heard about the Mary Reynolds, We Are The Ark project, we thought, well, we've- we're already doing that.
NARRATOR: Today, their Ark shows what three decades of growth can look like.
WILL: This area we are in now was an extremely overgrazed area with neighbors' cows, lots of animals in here.
None of these trees were here.
It's incredible just to see in 25 or 30 years how it's come on.
And now it's almost like some kind of Irish jungle, you know?
ANITA: Will's dad and Will made these beautiful ponds.
And they're fed by a stream just behind us and it creates an amazing space for frogs, tadpoles.
WILL: Yeah.
ANITA: Will, you've .. WILL: We've seen a lot, so many new animals that have- have come since we started it.
ANITA: Yeah.
WILL: Red squirrels, pine martins, badgers, woodpeckers.
Not to mention all the insects.
An unbelievable rich variety of nature.
ANITA: Anything you can give at all is like bonus for wildlife, just even somewhere for a butterfly to land.
MARY: It doesn't take much to go back to becoming guardians instead of gardeners, you know.
NARRATOR: That shift is resonating with more and more people here.
And for a younger generation, it's become a call to action.
AISLING: I think that a lot of people in my generation are so paralyzed by the climate crisis and the pressure to make change, so sometimes they do nothing at all.
And I think that there's this idea that for you to be a climate activist or for you to do something good in the world, you have to change everything.
(girls giggling) I think the important thing about the Ark is it doesn't have to be a big space at the back of the school, or your whole garden doesn't have to be a jungle.
NARRATOR: The Loreto Secondary School donated a space between fenced-off fields for students to build their Ark.
SARAH KATE: Initially we didn't have anything here, so I thought it was really important to mark the entry.
And Mr. Gunning and I came up with the idea of marking it with a threshold kind of thing.
And yeah, the colors, scheme, all of that kind of inspired me to go back to nature and go back to how simple we can all exist in this world, and basically the Ark is wild and so is the painting.
(wheelbarrow rolling) TOM: When you build a thing, you just don't know how people are going t.. but what we discovered was that when students came up, it reminded them of the benefits of being in nature.
A very important word in the Ark project is kindness.
And I think Mary says that the way we treat a piece of the Earth is how we treat ourselves.
And so, you can imagine being a teenager in the world today, social media and all the comparisons, and when you come in here, though, there's no judgment.
MOLLY: People need to be the change, and this is just one way of generating change by promoting nature and environment, and hopefully we can encourage people to make their own Arks and try and combat the climate crisis through that as well.
♪ (dogs panting) NARRATOR: Today, Mary's movement is taking hold well beyond Ireland.
MARY: There's people all over the world, there's Arks in Texas and there's window boxes in Norway.
TRACY: Our Ark is in the southwest of Western Australia and we have five acres here that we purchased in 2005.
PAUL: Another area here.
We just let go of this here.
Lots of foxglove.
MARY: There are 20,000 people in our group who all bounce ideas and share, you know, pictures of what's happening in their Arks, and how things are coming back.
We don't need to reach that many people to shift away from the old world of looking at land as something for our creative pleasure towards this one where we look at land as something to take care of, to be guardians of.
(laughing) This body of Earth that we live on knows how to support her systems of life.
So, we need to step back and let her lead.
♪ (water rushing) ♪ ♪ Patch by patch we'll.. Make a patchwork quilt of hope, that's the plan.
(dirt falls) ♪ ♪ ♪ ♪