To all those gardening during lockdown: You cannot have hedgehogs and immaculate gardens

You cannot have hedgehogs,
And immaculate gardens.
Hedgehogs need shelter
Of thorns gone feral.
Leaves piled in insect-
sheltering corners.
Hedgehogs will not live
where decking meets astroturf.
Where no tree dumps its
Spiral sticky seeds on your
chemically clean car.
Hedgehogs need to tuck in
Behind a shed decorated with ivy.
They need, plants touching plants
in intimate borders.
Structure and shape to make
their maternal bed.

If you were a hedgehog,
where, in your garden,
would you sleep all winter,
or a single night?

What can the worm,
whom the hedgehog eats,
feast on, if no leaves litter your
strip of green?

there are few things
more evil than plastic grass,
hideous, vicious, life-denying
Before you rip up
patches of nettles,
know that there the butterfly eggs lie,
or thickening tree roots,
where the robin and toad hide.
Don't ask where the hedgehogs have gone,
when you pull every strand of
life-giving green from the soil,
remember that ecology
took a long time to make
the connection it lives by
so wildlife needs the plants it
evolved alongside
and not that pot of hybrid
you bought online,
hedgehogs have gone because we
took away their livelihood.
Give it back, cover the soil,
let the wild plants grow.