defining a border

Today I was helping glamorous friend define her border. Grass at the moment is drifting into beds. The lawn is without border.  The mower can drift into the fruit trees, and nobody wants that.

You can do an edge cut, of course. But what a faff. She had something much better.

Flexi-border Eco-Friendly Garden Edging in Green.

Fortunately the recent wet weather meant we had moist, soft soil - perfect for working. I sunk it into a shallow trench cut by - ta-da! an edge cutter, while the keeper of the lawn pounded pegs and locked together segments. We were able to create an elegant curve around her freaktastic Redlove Apple, this year in rampant ecstatic blossom, with surprising ease. Corners were a touch harder, but all fell to order in the end.

Grass on the bed side was duly pulled and turned over, woodchips covering the worst of the weeds. The fruit trees now stood happily in smart little beds. The lawn, already beginning to ease over the base plate, it would cover over it soon. The recycled material looked pretty smart, too.

The keeper of the lawn wasn't going to mow it today - too damp, too tired. But when he did, oh the joy of knowing when and where to mow up to.

In the usual way, the daffodils naturalised into the lawn now looked a little bit out of place. A job for another day; clear them into the wildish bank at the back of the garden, along with the three-corner leeks.

For today: no further jobs please!

an allotment is calling

It took me three goes after the message appeared on my place of work's yammer to persuade the person who knew about a place where there were allotments going to tell me where they were. By that time, of course, I was already emotionally invested.

She knew what she was doing, my allotment pusher. The question is, do I? or is this madness?

Everywhere green is expanding, unfurling, exploding, like mad new plans. It would give me somewhere to put that greengage I want so badly, a proper retreat, somewhere I could dig with reckless disregard of my soil structure, put down cardboard, recycle old junk into semi-usefulness.

Only a germ at the moment. I might see it and hate it. But just maybe...

daffodils in the green walls

London is always a few degrees warmer. Snow might fall, but it doesn't linger. I am recovering from dental surgery, stuffed with painkillers. But there are daffodils in the green walls, and in the trees in the art installation, the birds are singing.

The installation is called Library for the Birds of London, but the birds are not one of our natives (could you use Goldfinches?) but the art-installation-friendly Zebra Finch, twenty-two of them, all sociable and sentimental, allopreening and softly twittering and not quite settled in enough to be perching on rucksacks and handbags yet, but one of them is building a nest in a dangling hat. Hold your installation for long enough and you get zebra finch chicks, born to the art and habituated to the gallery environment from birth.

Whitechapel gallery is unfamiliar but I've seen Dion before; most notably his siftings from the Thames, scadalous in its day for being good art and bad archaeology, or possibly vice versa. Here the presentation includes the ethnographic shots and gathered accoutrements of the volunteer diggers, which I had not seen before, which are lovely. There's also a lot of stuff about hunting (elaborate hunting lodges, an essay entitled "On the inevitability of hunting," trophies, flags) which makes me nervous, even though when I'm running my repeat-to-myself is pretty much always "Chase the deer, catch the deer, you don't have to out-run it, you just have to outlast it," while I imagine I'm endurance hunting a Mutjac.

We want to stay and explore more of Whitechapel Gallery but we're hungry and there is more planned for the day, and the cafe contains only cake. We find a place and eat and dive back into the underground and then out into the Southbank. The concrete is warming in the sunshine; spring
comes earlier to London. The warmth of the walls and the traffic warms every pocket and fragment of soil, and green oozes from everywhere. It's too earlier for the municipal hoes and scorchers to have come out. Tiny flecks of green are appearing everywhere. The trees stretch out their shadows on the ground, beaded with swelling buds. Spring is coming.

   

In Soho, someone is trying to save a mulberry. In Trafalgar Square, tourists are dancing with the pigeons, shooting selfies in the waterspray from the fountains, under the watchful eyes of the invisible enemy should not exist on the fourth plinth. We decide to walk back to the bus across the park, even though it's late and the light is failing. The park is full of daffodils and birds billing and cooing and being a bit fancy. Then hunger strikes, and we end up bolting bowls in the glass canyons of Nova Victoria under the the smoky gaze of the Rubens Hotel Living Wall where the daffodils gleam in the darkness like living stars.

  

JHB's native green roof

Brushes with mortality give you new perspective, or so they say. So it was that, giddy with anaesthetic, absense shock and surgical panic, mopping at my bloody mouth, I glanced out of the top floor window on the way out of Studental, the Dentist practice where all the staff are practicing, or at least doing their practical, and saw this; who knew? The shocking edifice that is John Henry Brookes has a green roof at a lower level, where you can look down on it; and this time of year it is yellow with Coltsfoot.



The muted browns and rusty greens, the greys and the yellows mixed in all strongly suggest this is a native green roof; the colours are exactly what is out in the countryside at the moment, down to the raucous yellow blast of the coltsfoot which has popped up in all sorts of places this year (I even saw it briefly take over a neighbour's gravelled front garden, frothing up among the bamboo they've unwisely planted).



I'm not sure what the cable-looking thing running through it is; possibly the planting was done on a seeded mat, and this held the whole caboodle down. Possibly it's water-related; come summer, this place won't be supplied by rainwater, not reliably enough anyway.





The scrubby grass growing in the margins suggests that the space is being fully colonised by the British species set, in any case. I hope someone is weeding occasionally though; or next will come buddleia, alder and silver birch.

a walk up divinity road

Last summer number 151 looked awesome:



I don't know whether they lost the wall (possibly after an unfortunate misparking) and then put the bananas in, or got the bananas and decided the wall had to go. The front of the houses is often the sunniest space in Oxford, so the temptation is clear. Lovely palm tree there, too. It's a fantastically warm street, a microclimate on a sunny slope; the camellias always do really well here. But bananas out in the ground? Ambitious.



This is how it looks now. The palm is browned; the bananas a chewed pile of stumps. Our winter has been wet and cold, even on Divinity Road.

But maybe something will return. 

the car is becoming a shrubbery

keep out/keep clear/nothing to see here

One of the interesting things about the aesthetic of the old, now demolished Westgate, was its reliance on strange, dark-brown bricks as a design element. It gave everything the bisto, jus, dark teak tang of the prestige 80s. The new Westgate is all fresh-faced greige dollhouse bricks, but across the road, a building built to the same vernacular lingers on, the HQ of a prominent lawyers, defiant in its once-smart brown brick and blind bronze-tinted windows. And off to one side it has a garden:







It's not great, is it? If it were for sale, the Estate Agent would be reaching for euphemisms - period design in place; in need of a refresh and modernisation. It's not for sale though. It's sold.



The new occupant, a Travelodge, is presumably aiming for a full rebuild, as I'm already hearing people griping about the height of the building. No word yet on whether this tree will survive. I hope so, it looks pretty busy:



 

as does the garden, stirring with the first flush of spring.

consideration of green roofs and aviaries

I've been thinking today about two of my obsessions; aviaries and green roofs. The starting spark for the green roofs was a rather confusing section in Gardener's World from James Hitchmough, who had clearly had a very substantial interview cut right down to exclude ... well, anyway.  Here's some pictures from Prof Hitchmough -- a specialist in urban planting who researches into hardy, frost-resistant dry climate plants that can help reduce the urban heat island effect (an increasingly serious problem as a result of human-caused climate change) while being robust and attractive enough to be acceptable to municipal gardeners. This is him studying plants in the wild - they're not planted.

The flat roofs of my office would be vastly prettier with these on them, but there are lots of UK plants that would also do the job. Chickweed, Sow Thistle, Knotweed, Stonewort and many others that would be totally horticulturally unacceptable as when we look at them, we see litter. and reach for the hoe. NO, green roofs should be pretty, and look like this:

That pretty picture is from a long-abandoned Tumblr, where I was clicking around for April-fool related reasons. The aviaries happened because of Instagram and BotanyGeek's image of a Ballardian Glasshouse deep in the jungle - or rather, as he elucidated in his comments, in a the world's biggest bird park.

But is Jurong's Waterfall Aviary really the biggest aviary? Or is it Birds of Eden in South Africa? Or it is India's unique and parrot-mad SGS Shukavara? All of them show only the most tantalising, tiny glimpses of their extraordinary landscaping and planting, instead showing off the flower-like beauty of their many birds; you have to intuit that from image searches and scavenges of the backgrounds of tourist shots, looking behind the birds, the smiling couples and the happy families, to try and understand what makes the enclosures sing.

This is all fantasy-land for me, of course; see below for the closest I get to exotic birds and green roofs. Moss and blackbirds are both pretty good things though.