The Web of the Wild

You sit at the centre of a living neighbourhood. The Web of the Wild is a way of noticing the eight communities around you, and the relationships between them.

← The whole Web of the Wild

The Web of the Wild

Low-growing & herbaceous plant communities

The layer at your feet that most people walk straight past.

A carpet of wood anemones under coppiced trees

Spiny black caterpillars clustered on a flowering nettle stem

Bluebells and yellow celandines in green grass at ground level

Nettles, dandelions, grasses, clovers, plantains and bluebells draw your eye to a layer we usually step over. Leaves, flowers and seeds change with the seasons, and these plants link up with grazers, pollinators and countless smaller neighbours. Nettles, for instance, feed peacock and small tortoiseshell caterpillars and shelter the aphids that ladybirds eat.

Getting to know a plant means getting to know those relationships, alongside questions about its uses. Care often grows as a patch becomes familiar. Mosses, ferns and fungi deserve attention here too, even if they don't fit neatly under the label.

You might meet

Stinging nettle
Dandelion
Daisy
Plantain
Red clover
Bluebell
Primrose
Wood anemone
Wild garlic
Cleavers

Find activity guides Back to the Web of the Wild

Safety, and where the activity guides come from

Look after yourself and others. Outdoor activities carry real risks: fire, tools, water, weather, heights, plants, fungi, animals and getting lost. Every activity guide includes safety notes, but you are responsible for your own safety and for anyone in your care. Supervise children closely, get the landowner's permission, follow the Countryside Code, never eat anything you cannot identify with complete certainty, and only light fires where it is allowed and safe. If in doubt, leave it out.

With gratitude to the lineage. The Wilding Practice Keys and many of the activities in the activity guides have been adapted from the core routines of nature connection in the 8 Shields approach (Coyote Mentoring), mapped by Jon Young and shared in Coyote's Guide to Connecting with Nature (Young, Haas & McGown).

These ways of noticing and belonging are far older than any book. They grow from the knowledge of Indigenous and land-based peoples around the world, who have lived in close relationship with the land for thousands of years and have kept that knowledge alive, often in the face of great loss. Jon Young describes 8 Shields as built on patterns of nature connection he found in Indigenous cultures around the world, and on what his mentors taught him, including the teachings passed down through Tom Brown Jr. from Grandfather Stalking Wolf. Our own ancestors in these islands once knew the land in this way too.

I offer Wilding with deep respect and thanks to all of them. It does not claim or copy any culture's ceremonies or sacred practices. It is a UK way of carrying forward simple, shared human ways of paying attention, giving thanks and belonging to a place. — Jay