Milton Keynes, the unnaturally natural garden city

In the salon of the Parks Trust of Milton Keynes, that iconic garden city, the poster says "Working For Wildlife" and a robin is shown chirping on a tree branch. Wildlife is not exactly my choice of working partner in the garden, so I ask David Foster, chief executive of more than 5,000 acres of green space, if the poster really represents his view of the relationship between nature and gardens. It does, and he follows up with a killer blow. "So, why is it so problematic for you if Milton Keynes is rolled out across the entire southeast?" Foster, 56, runs a dedicated team of landscapers with 1,000 acres of wooded plantations, wetlands in which bittern birds now boom and the black hairstreak butterfly has reproduced. His question's best hope lies with a Liberal Democrat victory in next May's election. Clegg is promising to build two dozen garden cities across southern England. The odds against them appearing may seem even longer than those against Sir Richard Branson going far into space, but I cannot think how best to answer.

He reiterates his case, one that greenfield dreamers like me never bring themselves to consider. The beloved English countryside, he correctly observes, is an artificial landscape. Much of it is mud, impenetrable to walkers and riders, let alone to cyclists. Milton Keynes repositions the relationship, Foster explains, by bringing grassy parks and woodlands with trails into a managed dialogue with clustered housing. "If you want to ride," he tries to persuade me, "you are so much better off in Milton Keynes. You have miles of park and bridleways." It is a hard proposition to swallow if you have lived with foxhunters' memories of their free-range sport on what is now the boulevard V2.

"Garden cities have a new relevance to what people want," says Foster. "Running is on an upward trend. Cycling is 10 times more popular than 10 years ago. Ever more dogs need exercise. You are way out of date, so 1990s." So what if residents' cats escape into the garden city's woodland and go wild? Should we not rebalance the countryside from Plymouth to Dover into planned landscaped settings? They are more bio-diverse than the present mix of private woodland, boggy cornfields and a network of twinned and overcrowded towns. "Look at our Milton Keynes flock of sheep," he says. "They are safely grazing behind the John Lewis store." To illustrate them, he begins a well-chosen slideshow.

Still battling for an apt answer, I learnt so much over the next two hours. The big surprise is the trust's finances. It now invests a permanent endowment of about £90m, mostly amassed from the "tariff" levied on developers each time they are granted permission to develop. In the early 1990s, Thatcher's opposition to cosy quangos caused the Milton Keynes Development Corporation to be abolished. Much of the city's green space was handed over to the arm's-length management of a new Parks Trust, beginning with £20m from a first batch of new developments. The trust now aims at perpetuity and takes an annual income of 3.5 per cent. It spends it all on planting, maintaining and improving the land it manages, using 50 separate contractors, 150 volunteers and a retained staff of 53. Foster stresses the crucial role of this funding for the virtuous circle of a successful garden city. From its part of the developers' tariff, the trust can keep up the standards of the "garden", thereby maintaining the city's attractions for yet more housing and development. He contrasts his endowed parkland with grounds that have remained in the city council's care. Inevitably, its parks' budget has been pared to the bone and now the government insists that councils run down any surpluses. If we ever have more garden cities, the endowed trust model is the one to follow. There is talk of reintroducing the compulsory purchase of their developable land at a rock-bottom price, but it will sabotage the source of capital which keeps the "garden" in garden cities.

In 1992, the trust had £20m and in 2014 it has £90m. It surprises me with the hefty 66 per cent of its capital in commercial property. "We understand property", replies Foster, "and soon, you can book into it. We have backed a Premium Inn in Wrexham and we are developing a new Travelodge for the likes of you in Oxford." Sleep in the executive suite and help pay for replanting an MK roundabout. I like the idea, even more so when I talk to Rob Riekie, head of operations for the Parks Trust.

Riekie exemplifies the long view and notable commitment to it on the garden side of this city. Thirty-five years ago, he joined as a staff apprentice aged 17 and proudly he takes me out into his woodlands to see how the young apprentices are reducing the lower canopy on the oak trees. It is part of his long-term plan for a diversified, multistorey woodland. No private owner would do it better. We drive around his choice of good and not-so good, the latter being the wodges of overplanted monotony which the through traffic tends to see first. In the mid-1970s, he says, the corporation lost its fine old elm trees to the killer beetle. In a "dash for cover", it planted top-sized specimen trees into the heavy clay soil. The droughts of 1975-6 killed many of them and in another rapid response, the planters went for long belts of quick-growing willow, snowberry and dogwood. Riekie and his staff are working to diversify it, reshape it and do exactly what my gardening eye would prefer. By the boulevards in Campbell Park the thousands of London plane trees are a remarkable sight, but in our pest- and disease-prone era, multiculture, not monoculture, is the better way forward. Go and look at boulevard H4 on Dansteed Way to see the best of it. Autumn tints in Milton Keynes are worth a careful drive-through.

Suburbia is a habitat to which I have yet to adapt. What about those notorious symbols, Milton Keynes's concrete cows? "Their hour has come," Foster assures me. "Two of them were flown out to this year's Biennale in Venice where they fronted the British Pavilion." Are we now a nation of suburbia? At this year's South of England Show, plastic cows stood on the podium and children could "milk" water by squeezing their artificial udders.

As the slides flash prettily by, Foster fails to intercept one. It shows the concrete cows' successor, a sculpted wooden badger whose painted black-and-white snout is poking out of a garden-city sett. In real life, badgers have voted against the garden-city lifestyle and are almost never seen on the boulevards. As I drive back from the trust's uplifting enthusiasm, I succumb to habit and admire the rolling green beauty of the fields beyond Thornborough. But then I have to wonder. For gardeners, isn't an artificial badger more welcome than the real furry thing?

Photographs: The Parks Trust

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