shed next

One shed, two shed



Red shed



Blue shed



I need a shed for the allotment; so I can keep tools in it, and sit in it maybe, too, when it rains. But all the sheds I find look wrong for an allotment, somehow. Too new or too crap. I need a sturdy, second-hand thing really. But where to find it?

welcome to the world of barbie

All the subtle flowers have died in the drought. Only the brashest remain.

green-roof bikesheds off Abingdon Road

I got bored, on my diverted commute, of powering up Abingdon Road, and switched across to the backstreets instead. It was there that I found the first of the green-roof bikesheds of Abingdon Road.



They had a design consistency about them, as if there had been a string of people following the same instructable or being sold by the same company:




They were more and less weeded and maintained. On some native couch grass had overwhlemed the dry-bed planting, on others giant houseleeks waterfalled towards the scooters, commuters and wheelie bins. Green roofs: some maintenance required.

oh, do not cut it....

I am going to replace my last lawn as soon as the weather is good for establishing new plants. It is a tokenistic 1.5m square just outside my front door that is used mostly for tom-cat calling card turds, but this year the two nests in the front garden meant I didn't do anthing out there, and now there is no lawn, only a metres-high tangle of mint, sorrel, alkanet and grass. It looks pretty bad, but the Housemartins still haven't fledged, so it's staying for now.

If only it looked as good as this:



This is the watermeadow, on the way into work. Fluffy grassses, scattered flowers, throngs of insects. It'll probably be cut soon for hay, but for now it's green, lush and perfect.



The beauty of overgrown grass is an evanescent thing. A hard wind, a dry week, a storm, a strike, the trampling feet of some large mammal, and gorgeous glistening meadow heads into the rough; dusty, sruffy, tangled and dull.

Cut it then, for now, oh do not cut it.


 

meanwhile, in my mother-in-law's garden....

Does anyone know what the heck this plant is? Apart from dying in the dry like every single other freshly-planted plant this year.....

Edited to add: thanks to some reverse image searching, I'm guessing Celosia Cockscomb Flamingo Feather.

the rising green tide covers the concrete garden

I'm still on break from the urban greenwave series; it's just too hot. That said, this image series (produced to promote our gig last weekend) is engaging with one of the future urban greenwave items which is vegetation mats, in this case provided by a rising tide of virginia creeper.

We're in University Square, and these are halls of residence. Sat in a white van, panting in the heat, was the man who'd been sent to get this overgrowth under control, scraped back from the pavement.

The lawn below was trimmed and the creeper rolled back to the wall, but all this had been left, sweltering in the blistering heat.

in praise of cow parsley

Fluffy, frothy, fresh.



You can tell I took these photos back before it stopped raining.



Cow parsley was the constant companion of my childhood village summers.



Let it into your garden and it will take over, like jack-in-the-hedge or Alkanets, if it likes the space.



I can't quite bring myself to take home the happy basic bitch variety though (I've tried with some pretty green-flowered varieties - no dice, not as vigorous).



We had a rhyme that went with it, when I was a kid; you pick a stem and then crush the florets together into a barbie-sized bouquet, and say "Here's a bunch of flowers" then you strip the florets and toss them over the head of your giggling little sister, saying "And here's the April showers."



Oh, look at that, mixing it up with cherry laurel and Alkanets. Maybe I should bring it home. It certainly looks at home here. 

the ladybird transport experiment

There is a fence on my commute into work that always, one morning in spring, teems with ladybirds.



Well, OK, teeming is maybe an exaggeration, but there are enough to notice and it's one of my real spring-is-here moments. My guess is that the soft wood provides a perfect sheltered hibernation space, and that a few sunny mornings and frost-free nights warms the wood enough to wake them up.

This year, for the first time, I had the idea of bringing some of this population back to mine, to keep the blackfly on the broad beans and the aphid farms on the apple tree to an acceptable level. In previous years I've bought in larvae - Green Gardener are happy to fix you up with bugs of all kinds by post - but the larvae are shipped young and small and a bit nobblable by ants.

But as these ideas often do, it came to nothing - I didn't have enough aphids yet to justify a kidnapping, the Ladybirds dispersed too fast, I didn't fancy the faff of catching adults who are a bit feisty and inclined to hostile urination attacks. But then, a few weeks later, the fence (and the walls in the surrounding gardens) were busy instead with ladybird larvae:



And not little ones either - big savage looking beasties halfway to ladybird, and here was me with my apple tree's leaves now curling over under the weight of the ant-farmed mid-greyfly. So when the fence was still busy in the evening I deployed my cutting jar and home they came.




Several months on, there are still aphid farms on the tree. But only one or two - overall I'm pleased.

urban greenvasion: green gutters

Gutter gardens are typically evanescent items; adventurous weeds today, washed away tomorrow. Nevertheless I am a fan. They have a hectic enthusiasm, little scatters of the wild growing up out of our urban environment practicalities.




But would it be possible to design in these awkward little threads of green?

This is a concealed drain in my local mall which is open-style; rain and weather blows in, and needs to be shifted from the hardstanding. A slight slope in the paved area draws water down into the central runnel (the dark streak dead centre) from where it is whisked off into the local drainage system and away. So far, so bare. Now let's look at how the drainage runnel is doing just outside the roofed area, near a decorative garden:

You'll notice a built-up, almost what one might call a substrate, blocking the runnel, made of particulates, dust, plant debris, leftover building materials (a list to make our hardy urban plantset rootdrool) and the first moment it rains I rather think that this might happen:

Of course, this is the rough and ready sort of greenvasion. The first proper hard rain will wash those tiny seedlings away. But with a little planning, could we make our green gutters more structured, more considered, more permanent?

Here very roughly is how our concealed drain is working. Slowing down that wash-away might bring other benefits, too - cooling the area, reducing run-off. Let's work on that.

Here a grill has been added, containing hard-wearing plants. Hydroponic plus, they grow in debris with roots dipped in water. The little green grid creates a pedestrian speedbump that slows traffic and creates a natural milling-spot just outside the social (a convivial cafe-space). The gap halfway up is a throughbridge for wheeled traffic like wheelchair users, pushchairs and service vehicles, but it's expected and understood that this will be trodden on. Plants will live and die in this space. Lots will never make it past seedling, and anything too big will need to be weeded out in any case.

My original conception, above, retains more of an air of mystery, of green bubbling up through the cracks in a pavement (more on pavements is coming soon!). This one would suffer less from evaporation, but would be harder to maintain -- it might require easily liftable blocks. I think it might be worth it though, especially in areas like walkways and balconies.

The raw material greenery photo for my final design is worth a look, as it is the original design inspiration, and always in my mind when I'm thinking green gutters. This drain has long since fallen to the winds and waves of urban improvement, but in its day it was downstream from a coffee van, and a regular recipient of water, ice etc. dropped off the van at the end of the day, and occasional flushes of coffee grounds when something went wrong. The plants grew in it with tiny abandon, delighted with their little garden spaces:



So, they obviously exist already, but are equally obviously evanescent, rather than year-round planting. They're also only ever accidental, never intentional.

Towards intentionality

Building in spaces for the weeds may be the easiest way to green cities. There's no expensive planting to coddle and manage; watering takes care of itself (or doesn't, during droughts); and bad weeding out the saplings, maintenance is low.

But to the urbanite's eye this communicates messy, tatty, urban decay. To the building services manager, it is roots to clog and prise and tweeze and penetrate. To the street cleaning crew, it's a job for the pressure washer and the hoe.

If these are to stay they are going to need to communicate intentionality, effectively.

Practicalities

So what do we need, to get from here to there?

• Pre-moulded building parts made of durable materials with space for gunk and green to gather, but enough drainage not to cause puddles
• A list of safe and unsafe plants, according to which have roots inclined to penetrate and damage, and which can be safely relied up on to matt (green roofs should have this, and more on them later)
• A shift in attitude to see the volunteer greenery within an area as part of the building assets rather than a litter problem to be cleared (perhaps lead by identification posters, or ones that give statistics about drainage and cooling)
• A better knowledge of our urban plant habitat, and an understanding of the species web we can support withing the urban environment (perhaps a book called Flowers of the Urban and Built Environment)
• Someone to build this idea into a striking new town centre scheme.