aspiration: zero green waste

When I started off up on my allotment, I'd take heavy bags of couch grass down to the tip. It was while I was tipping one of these enormously heavy piles of waste away that is occurred to me that I was removing biomass (and therefore fertility, topsoil and nitrogen) from my land.

So I progressed to making heaps of upended turfs of couch grass with the initial soil clearance, and drowning the couch grass in a trug for weeded shoots and volunteers. Periodically I'd discard the stinking mass into a disposal cylinder, and pour the water over a bed. Wherever I poured it, couch grass sprouted. It's no magic bullet, drowning and desiccating; couch grass can some back from both.

So then I started using weeds and turfs as a mulch, turning over the top layer of soil. This doesn't really work either, but as you steadily compress the biomass down you can push the weeds into small barriers, and open up planting beds in between.

Nothing leaves the allotment now. It's all to be fed back in.

As is so often the case, things began to drift back down from the allotment into my back garden. Refreshing and hacking back my herbs, I found a lot of waste woody growth. In earlier days, I might have loaded it into a sack or two for the tip. This year I ended up experimenting with twig mulches:




Rocks go to planters. Twiggy growth back to my bug-pile behind the compost bin. I haven't figured out how to use everything yet. What to do with ivy trimmings? Blue Douglas? Cherry Laurel? But I will get there, and in the future, nothig will end up at the tip.

urban greenvasion : gutter ruffs

This week featured some very heavy rain, and when that happens, gutters overflow. Water pours down the outside of downpipes, slooshes over the edge of gutters, plashes down on you at random from on high. The thing about England is that no weather lasts for very long, so optimising for heavy rainfall as some areas do (huge drains, rain chains, etc.) isn't really pointful, and though the last few years have pushed that envelope from time to time, they have also featured long dry spells.

During those dry spells, there are sometimes smears of green around gutters:

Which brings me back to a moral problem I have with gutters. They treat water as a problem, rather than an asset. It must be whisked away, tidy and quick, dumped into the surface water drainage ASAP and whisked away from the urban areas and dumped on the outskirts of town, via creeks, soakaways, rivers and drains.

This act of - frankly - water theft steals from urban areas that desperately need cooling, sluicing,  irrigation and cleaning, who then have to rebuy water from the mains to do all of these jobs. We aren't talking about urban rainwater storage tanks here (though they are a good idea) but we are talking about using some of that gutter overflow for vegetation, to reduce run-off and enable urban cooling. 

You get the idea. This one has been executed in lead to match the flashing on the roof, and has accepted the fact of that leaky sloping pipe and used to grow low maintenance vegetation irrigated by the water from the roof. It's all probably a bit leady, so something that can strip that out (willow, fescue, pennycress) is probably a good choice. Here's a problematic downpipe:

What a lot of rust is on that downpipe! Water must stripe down the outside in heavy rain. So, let's formalise that, with a clamp-around vertical planting container. If there's a flat roof it's draining, you could also slow and cool things down before it even hits the drain with a no-maintenance brown roof covered with gravel and plants that happily desiccate and reinflate when the water returns. 

Feels a little bit too challenging? Well, here's a simpler proposition:

Lets just extend out that top bucket a little, add lightweight granules and planting medium, and there we are, a very simple green bucket drain.

And because I don't want regular houses to be missed out (these are all quite municipal examples), let's have a look at a basic urban house with soffits and curved pen gutters. My house looks like this, except that I don't have any soffits because I prefer having housemartins (two broods this year! my housemartins are heroes!)

Aside from what will be an ivy problem the moment it hits the eaves (soffits don't stop ivy), this is not a very green looking house. So, let's fix that with am overflow soffit, that accommodates a shallow planting trough which picks up overflow from a notched gutter:

It has a nice air, somewhere between Ballardian decay and aspirational Wisteria, and because everything is resin, it's all pretty light and hard-wearing. So, gutter ruffs, what do we need to get from here to there?

• Shift of attitude toward water in the urban environment from vector of decay to irrigation and cooling prospect.
• Some new products coming onto the market.
• Super-light planting mediums.
• Plant testing to find ones which tolerate this kind of envioronment well and without causing structural damage.
• Shifting attitudes towards having green stuff sprouting from your gutters from indicator of urban decay to aspirational/decorational
• Availability of at-height gardening (maybe from roofing firms).

I'm not sure it'll stop the problem of occasionally water jetting down from on high. Greenery being what it is, it may even expand that algal and mossy slick of green. But it will create an interesting urban environment, it will cool buildings, and it will, simply, be very cool.

garden inspiration: new zealand farm camp

Our wedding anniversary wasn't just about crocodiles. We also had a jaunt out to The Delaware Road, a one day experimental music festival/dark exploration of experimental electronica based on speculative performance fiction about the BBC Radiophonic Workshop. It was performed this year in New Zealand Farm Camp, a skirmish village used for troop training exercises in urban conflict zones.

It has a very distinct concrete-first aesthetic:




Halfway between farm outbuildings and the sort of things that happen when you leave a bored builder near a piece of land you have no particular plans for, the whole thing nevertheless feels curiously gardenish. It's outdoor, it's an area of play and pretence, it has paths and boundaries and buildings and indoor/outdoor rooms. It even has planting:



Check out that on-trend grid fencing and the native clematis picking up on the swirls of razor wire. In front, a green screen made from perfect-for-pollinators nettles. The green roof of native grasses on the minecraft-esque garden shed really completes the look.

Elsewhere I found a stumpery:



A rock garden:



Some fence-trained soft fruit (love the yellow lichen on the concrete fence panels):



A moss garden:



And one of my personal favourite garden decorations, a staircase that doesn't really go anywhere:



The maze has a certain minimalism at the moment, but the murky, mucky corners and edges carry a promise of Sow Thistle, Willowherb and Buddleia to come:



While the fences are a perfect combination of defensive planting and defensive construction:



The garden buildings have utilitarian construction and use no-frills materials, to great effect:



Note the chilli-plant and plastic lobster dash garden on the van. The porta-loos are just in for the festival of course, but projectors are cheap nowadays and simple buildings take lighting well:



Large amounts of aggregate, hard core and gravel creates a utilitarian surface which will nevertheless grow you wildflowers, no matter what height you chop it to:



Mature Trees provide screening, wind break and shelter. Zinc alloy climbing frameworks here access a water tower, but could equally lead to a breakfast platform.



This is surely going to eb the look everyone is chasing at next year's Chelsea. It's sustainable, political, low maintenance, wildflower-friendly and provides a practical reflection on and response to the unfolding apocalypse. Beautiful.

One last look at that rather fine colour scheme; concrete grey, creosote brown, nettle green, interspersed with alert sign primaries; blue, red, yellow. Grey skies bring out the best in a space like this; and rain always makes it look good.





A proper English County Garden.

a new cat in the garden

If this looks like quite a small cat, that's because he is. Mulberry is barely six months old, and this is his first outside exploration. That huge tail isn't because he's spooked (he's loving it) he just has a huge fluffy tail. Which he promptly filled with creeping buttercup burrs, because damn I've not weeded very much this year.

You can just see an overladen branch hanging down from my dwarf apple tree in the big purple pot. It's done well this year, overproducing but certainly producing some excellent fruit. The thing in a pot next to it is an aloe scavenged from a friend's garden. It'll have to come under cover for the winter.

Not so sure about Mulberry. He seems to relish getting wet, rubbish weather and muck and dust. He's been coming in with everything in his tail. For the moment he's on supervised outside visits only, but soon this will be his territory, as well as Scribble's. Scribble's opinion on this? He quite like Mulberry, possibly because he's a bit of a mini-me and possibly because he's almost still a kitten himself - barely three.

seen while taking my cat to the vet

You can buy products which will green up lamp-posts. Or you can simply plant something quite feisty and twiny under them. Ivy, Virginia Creeper, Wisteria, Hops, Jasmine...

It's probably politer to use and annual creeper, otherwise sooner or later, someone will have to come and rescue the streetlight.

spriggy's summer trim; he's going to need some eyeball lifting

Timing the topiary is tricksy since the sparrow gang set up residence inside his torso. I don't have a 100% confirmed nest this year, but still decided to err on the side of caution. The house martins in the eaves (two broods this year! we even saw a fledge!) are also a bit spooked by my presence out front. Not very spooked, but enough. So Spriggy's trim was late:



As you can see, he's looking a bit clumsy this year; the curly tail has gone a bit angular, the shoulders are a bit clunky and the eyeballs have - there is no other word for it - descended. The brown in the green is a common feature of privet at the moment; it's finding the timing of rain and the long gaps between rainfall challenging.



Remedial trims are a pain of course, but I think I'm going to need one to get that head back chameleon-shaped. And as for the eyeballs? They may need to go altogether....

an unusual planter for native species

Walking down a local lane, I chanced upon a parked-up vehicle that has been colonised by the brambles of summer. Here's a couple of nice views of it:

I'm quite pleased by the pleasant sense of the human world sinking back into the green, though I wonder if someone is going to get back after a long summer holiday and blow their top. There's a reason brambles are nicknamed mile-a-minute after all. This might only represent a few week's growth!

frogs in the water planters

These little guys just turn up, year on year. My next door neighbour has a big pond, but it has fish in it, so maybe the frogs flee into my garden. The planters are really very small - you can see that the water lily is lunging out of it. But not too small for frogs!