I’m an Essex girl. South Essex to be precise. Born in Billericay, brought up in Brentwood. The part of the county that gets overlooked when visitors head north to East Anglia and east to the coast. But which was made famous in the 80s by journalists like Peregrine Worsthorne inventing the notion of Essex man and Essex girl and later notorious by shows like TOWIE. Long after Ian Dury put Billericay on the map but before Gavin met Stacey, a horticultural and ecological revolution was brewing on a hillside a few miles south in Horndon on the Hill. During my school years Horndon was just the ultimate destination of the 265 bus I caught home from school, that is on the afternoons when I hadn’t spent my bus fare on penny chews and walked home! To this Tolkien reading teen it was a place name that wouldn’t have been out of place on a map of Middle Earth. But it was nine miles from our house and I had no reason to go there.
Until last Thursday! When I joined a group from the Garden Media Guild to meet the leader of said revolution, John Little. At Hilldrop, his four acre garden which slopes gently southwards towards the container port lined landscape of the River Thames, a few miles to the south, he has created a wildlife filled space which embodies his philosophy that the more complicated the landscape the greater the biodiversity. And that those complications can be manmade and achieved in a handful of years. Gardeners and landscapers can mimic nature by making considered interventions. The date of the visit couldn’t have been more timely. Several days into the fourth heatwave of the summer and with the thermometer in the car reading 28°C, Hilldrop is the kind of garden that works in our changing climate. Teeming with wildlife and chest high with native wildflowers, it’s the perfect advertisement for John’s message of resilience to drought rather than reliance on an ever diminishing supply of water. In fact, on the day of my visit Thames Water had joined several other water companies in imposing a hosepipe ban.
Now in his early 60s, John grew up a few miles away and remembers playing in the post industrial sites in this part of Essex. His family owned a chain of shoe shops with branches in Gravesend and Brentwood. He bought Hilltop about 35 years ago. It was part of a ‘plotlands‘ site and comprised four plots and one tiny bungalow. From here and a site in Barkingside he operates the Grass Roof Company, his green roof and landscaping business as well as running workshops to ‘equip the modern gardener with the skills to design sustainable green spaces for a changing world’. His company maintains the grounds of the Clapton Park Estate in east London, and it’s his experience there of listening to the residents and what they want from the open spaces around their homes that has informed his ‘Care not Capital’ campaign. He trains gardeners to go into community gardens and share the skills they have learned to make ‘sustainable green spaces for a changing world’. His lightbulb moment was meeting Zainab, a Kurdish woman who wanted somewhere to grow the vegetables she used in the traditional dishes which she shared with other residents of the estate.
John’s answer to the challenge of gardening on heavy clay 20 years ago was to cover it with a mixture of topsoil and recycled builders’ rubble and direct sow wildflower mixes onto it. At this time of year wild carrot, fennel, teasels and knapweed abound. As do the red admiral, painted lady and gatekeeper butterflies attracted to their flowers. One of our party asked about an unfamiliar white flowered teasel growing alongside the more familiar violet flowered species. John identified it as the European cut leaf teasel. He explained that the so-called native wildflower seed mixes available when he first made the garden sometimes included non-native species. The challenge now is to counteract the encroachment of scrub and trees such as oak which favour the open sunny site.
John works closely with an entomologist, a PhD student, to record the invertebrates at Hilldrop where 1500 species have been found, at a remarkable concentration of 375 species per acre. Realising that on the heavy clay of the garden he was unlikely to attract ground nesting bees, he has introduced several piles of builders’ sand and sure enough the insects have moved in including the bee wolf and spiny digger wasp. More invertebrates means more birds, such as insect eaters like warblers.
Sand is also used in the large containers which stand on the verandah of one of the two houses built on the site. They have been filled with sand topped with one inch of garden compost, the plants germinating from the seeds in the compost. John then weeds out those plants he doesn’t want! And saves a fortune on bought in potting compost.
As gardeners we already disrupt the ground by planting a tree, creating a pond, planting for pollinators, installing compost bins. At every turn in this garden there are examples of more interventions which change the topography of the garden and make it such a biodiversity hotspot. Using all manner of recycled material: sand, dead wood, metal grids, crushed aggregates. Even shipping containers. This is Open Mosaic Habitat (OMH) translated into a garden setting. It’s no coincidence that over a fifth of the country’s Special Sites of Scientific Interest (SSSI) are in post industrial sites. A short distance from Hilldrop, a former oil refinery in Canvey Wick is now a nature reserve where 2000 invertebrate species have been identified.
A few of the invertebrates found in the garden have very specific host plants. For example, the bryony bee which feeds on white bryony (Bryonia dioica) growing near the house and one particular solitary bee which feeds solely on the small number of red bartsia (Odontites verna) plants in the garden. Anthills in one area have been marked with small flags to protect them during the programme of cutting back the garden over winter. Cutting back is done in sections rather than all at once, so as to minimise disturbance to the invertebrates.
Several large round compost bins are located throughout the site. Constructed from standard weld mesh clipped together, they are used constantly to deposit dead material from the garden and save having to barrow it to one dedicated compost bin area. But more importantly they create yet more habitat for animals. I imagine that hibernating toads might find them a cosy place to over-winter.
A number of different materials have been used for the paths throughout the garden. As well as crushed granite over recycled aggregate from which the main routes have been fashioned, there are narrower walkways and steps made from metal grating. Here’s another opportunity to increase habitat and attract pollinators, by placing them over sand for bees or planting them with scented thyme.
I was intrigued by a large cockle shell mound to one side of the path. John was offered the material by a local Thames Estuary cockle fishery and is experimenting by planting sea kale which has welcomed the salty residue in the shells.
If you don’t have a hollow tree on site to create an environment in which overfly larvae thrive, John’s response is to make one with a plastic pipe attached to the trunk of a dying hornbeam. Dead wood features throughout the garden in various forms. In one place beetle activity has displaced the bark of a dying tree and the beetles are now working into the smooth wood beneath. He reminded us of the importance of topping up logpiles. When I got home I checked on the small pile I introduced three years ago to one side of the garden and found it had rotted down almost to ground level.
At the foot of the hill, to one side of the drive to the house, is a large wildlife pond. Never let it be said that Essex natives don’t have a sense of humour: neatly tucked into the unmistakeable structure of a metal shopping trolley at the water’s edge is a moorhen nest! Like most ponds this summer the water level has dropped considerably. Driving past at the end of the visit I noticed a pair of mallards swimming on the pond.
The last place I expected to see a dry stone wall this summer was in south Essex! I’ve been lucky enough to admire them in very different landscapes over the last three months in the Borders, Northumberland, North Yorkshire and Somerset. Hilldrop’s version uses Essex demolition waste instead of the local stone available in other parts of the country. The spectacular wall cost £40 in materials and £1400 for the expertise of a skilled stone waller! Next year John plans to bring in local bricklayers to learn the drystone walling technique. He also showed us a quicker version where he had filled a gabion with demolition waste. John is also experimenting with using cob as a building material and recently held a workshop on the subject. A cob column topped with an old fire pit stands near the house and it’s hoped that it might eventually provide a habitat for solitary bees.
John’s wife Fiona’s section of the garden is a little more conventional than the wider garden: including a poly tunnel containing very healthy looking tomato plants. But John’s influence is clear with a series of elegantly shaped raised beds fashioned from disused grain silo panels. The plant choice here is wider than the wildflowers growing throughout the wider garden, but all appear to have been chosen for their drought resilience.
Hornets have nested in a hole in the trunk of a willow tree in this part of the garden and could be seen flying in and out. The tree also hosts woodpeckers and starlings.
Beside the drive is a grass roof covered shelter faced with mini gabions filled with a variety of potential habitat materials: long hollow canes, squat log lengths drilled with holes. Resin bees have moved in and demonstrated their intriguing practice of stopping up the nesting holes with plugs of resin harvested from nearby trees.
We need ‘disrupters’ to shake up the received wisdom about many aspects of modern life and John Little is doing just that in the world of horticulture where we cannot sustainably carry on gardening in the same way that our parents and grandparents did, without further damaging an already debased environment.
Kew Gardens. 2 August 2026