volunteer tomatoes and knitted lemons

In high summer, tomatoes start to grow everywhere in the UK.



Sadly these volunteers, sourced from a sandwich or the discards of a pot salad will probably never get the chance to flower, let alone fruit.

A little further up the road some crafty interventionist has struck and provided a cluster of knitted lemons for a waterstressed standard Bay Tree just outside the local Wetherspoons.



Curious lemons and abbreviated tomatoes.

gardens glimpses from a car passing

We were driving through London and I was looking for the aesthetic, so rich and rising in late summer, of gardens spilling over city walls. That edge of the return to the green that we surf blithely through every year as nasturtium bindweed balsam buddleia blasts up to the sky.



Inexplicable signs, portacabins, decaying brick walls smeared with traffic filth, and over it all the spears and flags of buddleia. The nature of buddleia is irrepressible. The nature of layered urban signs is incomprehensible. Summer bleaches the late afternoon sky to pitiless white.



Here the world is fancy, the plants are fancy, the houses are fancy. Look at that palm! Or is it a Cycad? I honestly can't rememeber what Canary Palms are, but that one is very established. Look carefully and you'll see its isolate splendour in the fancy gravel is being threatened by a light froth of seasonal weeds. Next door, the lavender and bougainvillea has gone bananas. I wonder what's in the plant delivery box just inside the fancy gate? More fancy plants, doubtless.




Clune Terrace doesn't have a roof garden. Yet. But a bold shrublet has designs on that roofspace. It's struggling, though - it's had to give up most of its outer leaves and the remainder look dessicated. It's not going to die, though because it is of course a buddleia - and someone is going to have to go and get it out or it'll break that roof edge into bits.



This ziggurated modernist penthouse flat has its two floors of smart balconies outlined with tidy rectangles of clipped box. Discreet, tasteful. But something has been planted that is none of those things. It looks like Russian Vine, the invasive shed-smotherer of suburbia, and like a drunk oligarch at a cocktail paty it is having a fabulous time on that balcony.



Deep in the urban zone, a fence on a rooftop. Behind it a glimpse of grasses, maybe a bamboo wind break. Shade and shelter is key in these little spaces between the chimneys, accessed by attic windows, where every gram of soil has to be justified and balanced against the fragility of ancient beams. I love the privacy of it and I bet the owner does, too.



Then there was this. I don't know what it is. I tracked down where it was on Google streetview and it was just a sign saying "Waterside Development opportunity". Everything I've tried googling (living green rotating blinds, innovative eco building shading, new chelsea mad architecture, north bank green innovative building) had come up blank. Looks pretty exciting though, doesn't it?

keith's cacti

Keith is my cactus mentor. He started collecting cactus when he was a kid and has a beautiful, climate-controlled greenhouse. This year he gave me a Monkey Tail, though mine more has brutal, sharp-as-heck, splinterous spines. He has lovely cacti. Look at the texture on these ones:







It's not just the colour and the texture though, is it, with cacti? Here are some with more traditional appeal:



Oh, and my personal favourite:



I'm just loving the flower crown.

meanwhile, at the chemical works on the outskirts of town

Nobody can hear the landscaping pebbles around the fishpond scream.

tactful cactus on the windowsill

It's been a few years since I decided to respect the aridity of the front windowsill and hand it over to cacti. The fact that this coincided exactly with geometric concrete planters becoming available for the first time was a coincidence, pure and simple. Geometric planters are now such a design cliche that you can buy them (and I occasionally do)  at your local supermarket; but how have the plants done?



Perpetually sickly coral-type cactus continues to supply the local spiders with a ready supply of mealy bugs. I went insecticide free on all my plants during the last few years (it all went to safe disposal at my local tip) but to be honest, I find its sickliness strangely fascinating, and treat it as part of the plant's appeal. Fantastic ascending frill has outgrown its tiny pot, leading to the usual dilemma; torture it in a tiny space, or give it a chance to expand and grow? The air plant on the beach pebble is very happy; freaky flowered cactus at the back there probably had its flowers added by a florist. I can't get them off. I've tried.



The succulent in the spiky planter is one of my IKEA plants so I have no idea what it is. It outgrew the pot a long time ago, and is now subsisting as a plant in a rock crevice in a desert. Medusa - the big bolshy looking airplant in the black/silver planter - is pupping. You can just see the nose of her pup coming up the side of the pot. She was supposed to die after flowering and pupping, but she hasn't, she's fine.



Moustache is dead though - the brown air plant. It was green, once. It may have had too much light; it get bright on the windowsill. The green thing at the back is a RicRac cactus which I've had for almost a year without it doing anything. It just started sprouting, though, so to anyone who says give up after three month, I say - if it's still green, keep on trying.



The big cactus is unhappy. Originally barely six inches tall, every time I've watered it, it's pumped it straight up the column to put on a few more millimetres. Every time I've not watered it, it's sulked and browned. We've stabilized on mean watering, but I've seen a five foot tall one of these in a restaurant - it may still refuse to dwarf. At the back you can see another cutting - queen of the night. It's just started putting on a single very long stem (it's now almost as tall as tall cactus).




That one at the front came from a trendy Shoreditch gallery we went to because we turned up too early for our slot at the Cat Cafe. It doesn't like living in a teaspoon full of soil, so it's gone practically maroon with stress. The Mistletoe Cactus (in the green cube) I had for years before finding out its species (from an Alys Fowler column no less). It's a reliable plant that's survived cats mistaking it for a toy on multiple occasions.



The concrete desk tidy has defeated everything I've put in it so far. Will the Jellybean plant survive it? The jury's still out. Similarly for the kind-of-rooted heart-shaped cactus leaf (cheapest valentine day flower ever - just 50p) in the supermarket geometric pot - it was a struggle to evict the plastic Aloe it originally contained. Where's the air plant that lives in the shell? Probably under the TV bench. It gets mistaken for a cat toy (but so far hasn't been chewed to death).



The end point for the tiniest concrete pot has been reached; a money plant pup. It's the only thing small enough and tough enough to cope. Everything else died, especially all of the lithops. Speaking of pups, the basic bitch Tilly's pup is looking good - and she's not died, either. Maybe it's a lie about them dying after pupping; the internet's full of poor quality air-plant keeping tips and trufax. That Aloe isn't happy with the size of its pot. It's going to have to manage.



Finally, to Stinky-feet. The flower bud you can just see if you squint has since pungently flowered, as has another, so it's had an alright summer, but the sun-facing stem is going to go, again. I wouldn't mind, but it will literally root in any tiny kiss of soil, so once again I will have more stinky feet plants as I can never resist rooting another cutting. Anyone want one?

luxury exudations of fancy hotels

On the corner of Park Lane, the fancy restaurant at the Intercontinental Hotel has spilt luxury onto the pavements. And what is luxury, in the longest, hottest summer most of us can remember? Why, it is water; or at any rate, its evidence of presence in visible, green, leafy, fancy plants.




And what plants they are; glossy, textured, varied, not a dull leaf or drab sprig in sight; gardenia, bay, euonymous, elephant grass, significant expenditure olive tree. Alongside such plants, everything seems that little bit cooler, not least because inside these pots, the substrate is soaked through. These are a step away from cut flowers. They probably came from a florist.



Not so much their sad cousins over the access road, a row of fairly geometric box shapes marooned on a baking traffic island, fainting and blighting in the pitiless heat. This one's more of a modesty shield for the endless traffic, saiming to drift the eyes straight up and over to Green Park, without the interruption of six lanes of traffic. They're not really rising to the task, but never mind; all along this road, the buildings dribble out luxury greens. Take the little yellow googlemaps figure for a walk from here to Piccadilly and you'll see windowboxes, tree screens, hanging baskets and more.

The street reaches its crescendo abruptly with the Athaneum Green Wall, which though narrow, is exquisitely planted.



Now there's true dedication to your fancy greenery.

water feature inspiration from this summer's art events

It was such a hot summer. Such a long hot summer. Water drew us like magnets to throng the riverbanks, crowd the beaches and dangle over the fountains. The South Bank water rooms were solid with wet children, and every single civic space with something similar was similarly rammed.

Water in the backgarden was more of a problem. Water planters overheated and fell to evaporation, ponds exploded with algae and blanketweed, fountains clogged and struggled to draw and in the heat our water features became containers of a kind of tepid pond stew rather than anything refreshing, bright and re-invigorating.

With autumn in the air, I'm eyeing my water planters and considering plans for next year (not least because the cracks are implying I might lose them in a frost-related incident this winter). How can we get that sense of civic refreshment on a back-garden scale?

Counter-intuitively, I'm going to go BIG for the answer and draw in two great water-related arts items from London this summer, the London Mastada and the Serpentine Pavilion.

Inspiration 1 : Floating water sculptures



High summer comes and even my tiny water pots are choked with vegetation in and around them. The water -- its coolness, its reflection -- gets easily lost. And of course you need to keep the vegetation there, to reduce evaporation, shade the water, etc. But how to hit a good balance? Could something in the water make that focal point to arrange the vegetation around? The base could also make a fish shelter, tether the horizontal and promote visibility of the water through glints of reflected colour. The water would come out both visually and (depending on the sculpture's shape) literally, though meniscal creep and evaporation. Get it right and you also have a bee island to help insects drink.

Inspiration 2 : Watered surfaces



These two young magpies are playing in the Serpentine Pavilion, which this year featured a shallow "water floor" - an area of the ground dropped by an inch or so and filled with slowly-flowing water. This, combined with the perforated wind-friendly roof-tile walls, created an area of delicious shade and coolness, full of sheltering mums, blissed-out babies and those two magpies, who clearly felt they owned the space. There were admittedly people put a bit off-balance by this sudden, slightly treacherous drop; observe the yellow alert placed on the corner of the water floor.



Strangely, bar a few splashing toddlers, there wasn't much paddling. It was too shallow to be a pool, and felt more functional than fun. It chilled a chill-out space, it made a rill into something broad enough to have an environmental effect, and it gave the wall a glittering bass note.

The Pavilions are too temporary to get settled and start growing moss and slime and ivy, but this style of wall-base shallow stream isn't as unfamiliar as it seems (I grew up in a farmhouse with one running along the side of the garden, albeit a rather more rustic version) and it spreads the water out, cooling and air-irrigating a wider area. A greener version of this could start to reduce the parch and translate the high summer garden into a space of deep chill and tropical moistness.

hot summer; algae; parklife

We thought it might be nice to swing by the Italianate Gardens during our swing down the Serpentine this summer. This is part of the Hyde Park/Kensington Gardens London Green Heart* area, and a fancy garden in the Italian style. Instead of being carved from stone, the decorative pallisades and sculptures are shaped concrete, periodically scrubbed and cleaned before the pollution and the water and the algae start their inexorable march again.



   

These two attendant swans, especially, seemed to be getting in in the (delicately shaped) neck from the water and the weather and yeah, about that algae. I thought I'd had difficulties with algae in ponds and planters, you might think you've had problems with algae, but this was on a whole nother scale of problem:







Who knew that if you let algae go far enough it becomes a thing of interest in it's own right? And it didn't seem to be causing trouble for the wildlife, which despite the blinding heat, was very much in evidence.



*Don't recognise the term "Green Heart"? Coming soon from Urban Greenvasion.

urban greenvasion: building waterfalls

Waterfalls and buildings are not natural bedfellows, though as ever it's the crazy-cool Chinese architecture that's leading the way. Observe the astonishing Guiyang Liebian Building in action. I've picked a fairly obscure video to minimise sarcastic commentary and offensive comments because really this needs neither criticism nor contempt. It's big enough that it simply is:

Much as I love this, it's not going to be a practical solution under most circumstances. But as anyone who has seen the results of a leaking overflow pipe knows, there is nothing that brings the green so reliably, so persistently and so effortlessly as a vertical waterdrop. Here's one I was walking past on the way into work this year:



It's like a green bleed across the bleak brown brick. Although if you click through you'll see it's screwing up the brickwork, washing out mortar, enlarging that crack along the bottom, all that. That's because our waterfall needs a few more features.

Firstly it needs a rill; this is the watertight track the water runs through, closed and watertight on three sides with the top open to the air.

The it needs a spray absorption zone, like a thin strip of green wall, to keep the moss in, get the best green benefit and keep moisture off the brickwork.

Finally you need a water source. A toilet overflow is not a great option! It would be much better to use rainwater, perhaps from a storage tank on the roof, supplemented by tap water as needed (use a ball cock like for a regular water tank) - as long as it gets a bit of a settle there shouldn't be too much trouble from purification chemicals.

Then, boom! You've got a no-frills version of this:

That ones in Mayfair, by the way - it's by Scotscape - loads more pictures of their living wall prowess through that link! Although, allow me to make some minor adjustments:

Here is one tucked into an angle on one of my favourite buildings in Oxford Court Quarter. My roof-tank is a touch dramatic; you could doubtless manage with a smaller, shallower tank. I've got it going into a tank at the bottom, you'd need a grid over that to avoid watery accidents (although (and speaking of which) it may prove more of a challenge to persuade city drunks not to use it as a urinal). The various chunks are galvanized tank contruction, so they won't last for ever, but the pieces should be quite straightforward to make. The same grids that cover the bottom tank (which contains a small water lily and some areation plants) retain the soil for the moisture absorption zone planting. An enclosed overflow takes any extra water into the drainage system. It might create a little knock-on water damage, but the urban cooling alone should make this worth the bother. You might even get urban frogs and dragonflies evolving, there's something to look forward to.

Speaking of which, let's end on a note of wild fantasy. Singapore Changhai Airport Jewel, half real, half an architectural concept-bubble. Click through, set to full screen, and let the future unfold.