Alexandra Palace and ideas for a garden construction

The People's Palace on the hill sometimes feels like a blueprint for how all public spaces should be. I feel at home there, among the graffiti and security guards, the temporary barriers and the street food stalls. At the bars, I see a chunky section on the list marked "lows and nos", the phrase I've been bellowing at confused barstaff for almost a year now. Happy Days.

The walk from the tube takes in the glorious wisteria pergola at Barratt Gardens, which is busy today with people hanging out and picnicking etc. under the flowers.

 

The walkways and pathways feature some elements which make a space feel like contributions and lingering and taking photos are more allowed; an illustrative mural on a terrace end, a property boundary display case (empty).  

Alexandra Park is vast, contains multitudes. Rest, recovery, green grass, tall trees. And then the palace at the centre of it all. Paths are made by human feet: there are only enough signs for safety's sake. It's usual to wander off the track a bit on the way to Alexandra Palace.

 

We were there to see Fourtet/Squidsoup (that's a link to a pre-pandemic show) and they have filled the central arena with a grid of hanging glowing tentacles, which light up, respond to, play with and track the music. They remind me of David Attenborough's glowing mucus cave-worms a little.

I found the secret library door when I went the wrong way down a road. I still have some problems with wayfinding, here and there. But when you have time to get lost, it's fun to get lost, sometimes.

Edited to add: it got filmed!

So, in the garden, my garden or yours, hangdown light trails could sit beneath a pergola, tangled with vines. I have a vine that would jump at the job: though perhaps in that context it might work better to reference grapes hanging down, or indeed, wisteria.  

neon brights and sparkle sights

The tulips have started blooming now in the garden. This year they are huge, dramatic, absurd. Even the species tulips have done amazingly well, growing in huge dramatic clumps.

I've found myself particularly fond of coronet tulips this year, though the white peony types (which become dramatically streaked with plum tones as they age) are very striking indeed. They are lighting up the garden.

Garden lighting is dimming now; we are rewilding, learning to love our weeds, resisting the dig, and with that, reducing light pollution (which seems not to be great for insects, though some birds get longer foraging times). Not that garden solar lights are what they used to be; every now and again, I dig a tiny item which long since lost its faint gleam out of a tangle of alkanet and sling it in the small electricals recycling, from where it is probably refiled into mixed waste for energy recapture. 

I remember how delightful my first set of garden solar lights were, pulsing gently white along a path through the night. Over the years, they were optimised and cheapened, became smaller and lit more weakly. and now they are gone.

I wish I could navigate back to that sparkle in the night, though. 

Maybe the approach back is through the wonder of bioluminescence. People spray coating plants in bioluminescent paint aside there's not much available though perhaps we're simply not dimming lights down far enough; I remember the shock of eating at Dans le Noir and seeing the faintest of weak glows from a weakly bioluminescent seafood dish, to frail to be seen except in complete darkness. 

Otherwise we're looking to the garden wildlife to pick up the sparkles. Dormice glow and are a safer proposition than garden scorpions and glowworms and fireflies would be lovely but they don't live round these parts. 

concrete that grows urban spontaneous vegetation

I'm a big fan of freestyling ferns, though I'll be the first to admit that they do go wrong, here and there. They prise things apart, they gather soil, they set up little biomes aorund themselves.

Concrete decays over time. Brick crumbles. The ferns gather in the cracks and gaps, with sometimes spectacular, sometimes worrying results.

Leaving concrete out to get grizzled and old automatically creates green spaces (I have plenty round the house that needs the moss scrubbing off it at the moment). So the ancient clipping I had on my wall about a specially designed four-layered concrete that turned concrete green(ish)  always had that slight absurdity about it...

Q: How do you make a green wall?

A: You stop weeding it

Though Dr Manso-Blanco's statement still stands: "just like trees and flowers, certain types of lichen and fungi flourish in different seasons, and no two cities have exactly the same mix of microorganisms in the air. In theory at least, bioreceptive concrete could provide buildings unique to their surroundings and which change throughout the year."

Urban spontaneous vegetation

Which brings me up to date and to the rather lovely Diversity and distribution variation of urban spontaneous vegetation with distinct frequencies along river corridors in a fast-growing city which discovers the value of abandonment most succinctly:

• Vacant lots in urban fringe harbored the most number of species.
• In communities on vacant lots of less urbanized areas, the richness of dominant species was greater, whereas in green spaces created by planted vegetation, occasional species were more diverse.

There is a hint here of leaving rather than planting, of valuing the volunteer and local species that grow alongside the introduced attractive greenery. 

• Green space microenvironments are hospitable to some rare species. 
• Such patterns, if linked to ecological and ornamental value, can provide a new perspective and nature-based solutions to urban rewilding and landscape design.

The weeds picking up value as volunteer greenspace, the moss elevated from decay to embroidery;

...and all along the walls, the ferns.

planting for the wet and the dry

Once again, I feel like the spring is too dry, too wet, too dry again. 

And so I am reading about multiyear megadroughts followed by record breaking rainfall (and occasionally watching friends dealing with the consequences) and the idea that a city might slow the flow rather than manage water through waterflow acceleration through urban areas via fast-drain gutters.

The duality of water, both threat to banish and resource to retain haunts my soggy city. As more gardens are paved over in the never-ending need for parkingspace, workingspace, livingspace, cookingspace, it gets hotter, more humid and drier at the same time. I plant for the dry, and my plants die in seasonal moulds and drenches. I plant for the wet, the droughts swiftly dispose. I'm left with the urban heavyweights, which increasingly means problematic, complicated, ivy firecely competitive and inclined to pry the hard standing apart. Ivy comes in, and everything else moves out.

Lush water-capturing ribbon parks with pebble rivers and tough, reliable planting are a local feature. But the "drywells" described in the linked article (holes taking the water from the stormdrains) are a commonplace concept. Soakaways, like the one outside my house.

But language does matter, and does make things more palatable; would you rather be stuck in a ditch, or admiring the irises in your bioswale?

(Later on in the article is the much-suggested idea of making people pay an impermeable land tax, where each square foot of impermeable pave-over is charged.)

But the item that really caught my eye was "green alleys". Which brings me back to ivy, and the dark threat of an ivy-overhung urban cut-through, where kids see witches and adults see muggers in the dull green shadows, and I was wondering; have people tested to see which kinds of vegetation make an alleyway feel safer, less risky?

Which leads me to Environment and Crime in the Inner City: Does Vegetation Reduce Crime? (paywalled so here's a summary on a blog) although I'll save you the read, and share the findings that, well, it can, if it's cared for and people like it. 

I'll end on a happy note with some working-out-well community alleyway transformations. They feel like a nice idea, don't they? But we all know spaces where the results of such schemes have been less aesthetic, especially five years or so in, and the odd line here and there about how much effort was involved hint at how this won't work for all.

But where it's working, what a beautiful sight!

sooty moulds and the black mould menace

Winter is black mould season in the estates up and down the UK. We tolerate it, then snap at it, we bleach it off, we dry it out, we run our dehumidifiers and hope our lungs will take the strain. 

Here are some of the things that can make your black mould worse:

• Owning stuff that produces or absorbs moisture, like books, clothes, plants and pets
• Preparing and eating food, turning on taps, washing anything and drinking hot drinks
• Keeping your house warmer than the outside world in winter

As you may have gathered, most of the things that make a house a house can also cause black mould. 

My mould garden is waiting my attention at the moment. I have a couple of spray bottles of mould killer waiting, and I'll be right on it, any moment now.

Things could be worse.

At least we don't have distilleries pumping out angel's shares of sweet ethanol into our murky skies.

Nine years ago I took apart my last mould garden, excavating down through the layers of failed anti-mould measures, finding mould in every one of them. 

This blocked ventilation brick, ironically was one of the least mouldy spaces in the room. Emboldened by that, I cleared it out and reinstated it. 

I see now why it was blocked; cold, damp air comes in through the block and instantly brings the mould to the space around it, in from the outside. 

Time to get busy with the bleach and the paint.

isolated trees and the films people make about them

Before I can put The Falls away I have one last section to revisit, and this is biography 83, Geoffrey Fallthius. This tells the story of a short, unfinished, student film about a tree isolated in building works. Recursively and predictably, the film accompanying this biography shows a short, unfinished student film about a tree isolated in building works. 

Or maybe it doesn't, and I'm actually remembering the photo below, that I took in 2018. I'm going by my memory of the film. Although I own it in multiple formats, none are at hand right now.

Ostensibly, the film is by Geoffrey Fallthius, student pupil of Tulse Luper. Anagrammatically, actually, and narratively, all names collapse into Greenaway, which in itself feels like a recursion. Peter the stone, and the Green, away. 

This is nonsense of course, Peter Greenaway exists and has the awards to provide it. Unlike Geoffrey Fallthius. Geoffrey -

- at 19, the shortest and youngest of the Luper admirers who supported the Luper programme for the naturally evolving landscape.  The tree, a wych-elm, had been planted on the south bank of the Thames, when when the site was the garden of a London merchant who apparently specialised in the importing of timber for the manufacture of musical instruments. Now the tree was isolated in a sea of building construction, and its continued survival in the ocean of concrete  seemed  unlikely.

This vision of  isolated green islands in a sea of grey is very current to the direction of modern city trees, towards smaller, more containable, and more isolated plants that do not stab the sewers, or fiddle with the foundations. This is of course enabled by the felling of the existing mature tree stock, an expensive and protracted process marked by anger and demonstrations from some, but not all residents. 

The links above (bar the first, identification link) are from The Conservation Foundation's Elm Map, a fascinating site recording our fading elm population. It contains a myriad of notable trees of which my favourite is the Unknown Elm on Flood Street.

The sad state of our elms has been the subject of talk and more for many a year. I remember an Elm, back in the village, when as a child I was set a tree leaf quest by a science lesson, miring me in controversy when the teacher refused to believe that my leaf did indeed come from  an elm, leading to a furious signed letter from some village naturalist.  

It was the only elm in the village, putting me in mind of other famous isolates like the tree of Tenere, here summarised in a video which repeats uncritically the legend of the last tree to leave the desert.

Do you believe in the village Elm, like the last Tree of  Tenere, holding on gamely against the march of Dutch Elm disease? It certainly isn't in the Conservation Foundation's Elm database, which shows but one Elm Tree entry for the entire county surrounding that village. 

Hedgerow shrub elms notwithstanding, most mature Elms only linger on in place names nowadays. 

Last March in the Garden

Last March in the garden was rather warmer than this month. Though certain things ("rosemary in wild flower" and "propogator has toms and peppers" and "main season daffs in full flower") are more or less as last year. Last year I also had covid, the nasty immune response variant that knocks out your sense of small and leaves you feeling logie for months. 

Note here though, my first bit of learning: last year I rushed the tomatoes out into the green house and lost most of them, and last year there was snow at the end of March. Lessons here? Let the tomatoes cry in the dark of the verandah a few days longer, and don't trust March not to throw snow in your general direction. Snow certainly happened this week!

Last March in the garden was rather warmer, though there was still snow

Hellebores looking great is starting to happen this year too. I'm essentially woodland biome, and they dig the greenish gloom, glowing out of the March murk like church candles, grabbing every glimmer of weak early spring light.

Other things were concerning me, too; peat free potting compost, the overgrown tree next door, and a project to turn an old Girl's World head into a planter.

That one turned out pretty well.

(Ingredients: an old Girl's World head found in a loft, white and blue acrylic paint, a bit of compost scavenged from another planter and a vigorous stonecrop that grows like a weed in my garden).