The Garden Jungle
or Gardening to Save the Planet
Dave Goulson · Vintage, 2020
The cheapest book on this shelf and possibly the one most likely to change how you garden — by changing why, rather than by giving you instructions.
What's actually in it
- Twelve chapters, each built around a group of garden organisms — and each headed, oddly, by a recipe.
- The ecology of an ordinary garden: earthworms, woodlice, centipedes, earwigs, ants, bees, hoverflies, moths, pond life, compost-heap fauna. What each does and why it matters.
- The environmental critique: pesticides and neonicotinoids (Goulson's own research field), peat extraction, plastic in horticulture, and the environmental cost of intensively-grown nursery plants.
- The argument that gardens form a connected network of tiny nature reserves.
- Practical plant lists for pollinators and birds at the back, plus a strong section on wildflower seed.
What it actually says
Specifics from inside the book — so you can judge whether it's telling you anything you don't already know.
- Earwigs are omnivores that eat aphids as well as your dahlia petals — and no, they don't crawl into ears. He also describes the female tending her eggs through winter in a burrow, occasionally eating one that refuses to take the hint.
- A two-part argument against peat that goes beyond habitat: extraction destroys peat bog, and it releases an enormous quantity of sequestered carbon when harvested.
- Pesticide spraying is named as the single most damaging thing gardeners do — and he contrasts UK practice with US mosquito control, where whole suburbs are fogged from tankers and aircraft with no opting out.
- Twelve chapters, each headed by a recipe — mulberry muffins, sauerkraut, cider, goat's cheese — plus plant lists for pollinators and birds at the back, and a matter-of-fact passage on stocking a freezer from roadkill.
Buy it if
You want to understand what's actually living in your garden, and you're willing to be argued with about pesticides.
Don't buy it if
Anyone who wants a wildlife-gardening manual with projects — that's Chris Baines, below.
Where it falls short
No garden design, no growing technique, no propagation or pruning, and no house plants. Almost no illustrations, which matters if you expected an ID resource — it isn't one. Goulson also has considerably more garden than most readers, which makes some of what he does hard to replicate. And there's thematic overlap with his other books if you already own A Sting in the Tale or Silent Earth.
Who wrote it
Goulson is Professor of Biology at the University of Sussex, with a PhD in butterfly ecology and over 200 peer-reviewed papers on bee and insect ecology. He founded the Bumblebee Conservation Trust in 2006 and is a Fellow of the Royal Entomological Society and of the Royal Society of Edinburgh. His pesticide work is primary research, not commentary. The honest caveat isn't commercial — he sells nothing. It is that he is a campaigner as well as a scientist, and the book is explicitly polemical. Read his policy conclusions as advocacy built on his own research rather than as a neutral summary.
Where it was written
UK species, UK pesticide regulation, UK conservation context. Written from Goulson's own garden and a French smallholding.
The facts
- AuthorDave Goulson
- PublisherVintage
- Published2020
- FormatPaperback, 288 pages
- ISBN-13
9781784709914 - LevelAll levels
Checked against publisher listings, UK retailers and library records in August 2026. If any of this is wrong, tell us and we'll fix it.
Where to get it
Buying secondhand? Match the ISBN above — several books on this shelf have editions that look identical but aren't.