green roofs at every level

It's been raining for a while now. It's a good autumn for fungus. I was up at Brookes again, and found that the contemplation lawn atop an underground lecture theatre or somesuch has produced a spectacular fairy ring of Ink Caps:

  

I know it was originally intended as a meditation lawn, but in practice everyone gives it the same careful berth accorded to any Oxford quad. I can't see anyone daring to dart out to pick these for a fry-up, though Ink Caps are quite tasty (though you must cook them immediately, before they dissolve into black goo).

The actual roof-level green roof is showing signs of wear and has the gardeners in. This is a beauty in season, teeming with Yellow Rattle. I quite like it in the October rain too; joining in the symphony of grey-green-browns.



  

There's still too much hardstanding around the John Henry Brookes building for my taste, but plants are given a limited priority. And there are green roofs, at different levels.

Roll out the green carpet

You catch a glimpse of something wonderful on Twitter, in this case someone giving Regent's Street (is it? I'm far from fluent in London skylines) a pedestrian makeover, and my first thought is who made that?

Designating our streets primarily for vehicle flow is not a free choice for society.

It excludes a multitude of other options and limits the huge potential of our public spaces. pic.twitter.com/VLU8qEbDbU

— Cycling Professor (@fietsprofessor) October 29, 2019

In the thread, @fietsprofessor drops in an attribution (good man) to @London NPC and I discover it's actually Fleet Street (my bad) and spend a few clicks on their website finding treasures like the Greenground map and a guide to making your own pallet bench and sweet snippets like there being nearly as many trees as people in London, and it being home to 15,000 species. But the videos on view are all in the standard high quality community engagement genre beloved of small-scale film companies across the country - perfect for loosening funding bids or being shown in assembly, but not what I'm after.

To the London National Park City* Media tweets then, to see if I can find it again. Yes, and they credit @watgdesigns who do get up to some lovely stuff (I've linked you to their media page again), but you might also want to check their very sci-fi Urban projects page.

Sadly, no sign of a little gallery of animations like this one, greening the grey of London's streets. Which is a shame, because I suspect the original digital artist who made it did not limit themselves to just one.

Back in the copy art days, my friend Al did a series of these kinds of items (static of course, and on postcards, the status updates of their day) which stripped cars and tarmac from the roads of Oxford, substituting greenery and exotic wildlife, parrots on Cowley Road and penguins in Cornmarket.

That view of the city that is not as it is, but as you would have it be. 

I grew it on the allotment

Grown this year (I'd hesitate to say successfully....)

• French bean
• Sweetcorn
• Radish
• Yellow onion
• Red onion
• Beetroot
• Broad beans
• Potatoes
• Sage
• Carrot
• Shallot
• Horseradish
• Red Orach
• Strawberries

I made it up there in a tiny stretch of civic twilight this week, just long enough to plant broad beans between the bee (or wasp) holes. I cleared a few weeds from the bed, but also left some - the chickweed is still in flower, late nectar for October insects.

The list above looks impressive, but for some things I only got one item; the singular bean and sweetcorn in the picture, for example. Others did quite well --  more radishes than one person could eat, onions aplenty, sweet and delicious.

The most consistent and reliable crop, however, remains the couch grass.

semi-abandoned concrete planters

On Tidmarsh Lane, just beyond the Registry office, the Beton Brut of Macclesfield House (which the current owners have tried and failed to have knocked down with a 21st Century glass thingy) drifts out into the verge with a series of defensive planters before-the-fact, though honestly you'd struggle to dent that massive wall, or reach the tiny, solid windows through it (maybe it was the demolition bill estimate that gave the redevelopment pause).



With County Hall, and the now very much redeveloped Westgate Centre, these buildings were a slabby, utilitarian, defiantly future-orientated retort to the tourist chocolate box aesthetic that dominates the city centre. Late 60s, shading into the flashiness of early 70s, they featured futuristic details like travelators and geodisic domes, secret gardens and innovative utility systems.

They were also built to last, as were these planters, that aren't really maintained any more, but still look pretty fabulous. This one holds a fig:



This one some kind of hardy Lonerica that honestly may be struggling a bit:



This one has lost its shrubs, but gained a scraggle of Michaelmas Daisies, along with the rubbish from the people who can't tell a planter from a rubbish bin.



The steady rewilding of these planters (for that is what is happening here) is periodically interrupted by a stealthy daff , tulip or sunflower from one of Oxford's plentiful guerrilla gardeners. A stealthy green outcreep surrounds them as soil washes out slowly through the drainage holes. Central Oxford is weeded, but this may just be beyond the reach of the hoes and the weed-torches; or it may count as Macclesfield House, and therefore be caught in a state of uncertain maintenance as these planters probably aren't crucial to incubating businesses, which is what the building is doing now.

catching up on some small green stories from the summer

With the heating on, and my feet firmly in slippers, having determined that the day is too wet for the allotment, it's time to catch up on a few bits and bobs I never quite got to this summer.

1. Birds and the Built Environment



I have some aerials, in fact quite a few, on the chimney of my house. One is tilting somewhat, so I had been considering getting them taken off. They do nothing any more, after all. Everything comes in via the cable or mobile. But I also regularly spot birds using them as perch. If I get rid of them, am I inconveniencing my local Jackdaws, Crows, Goldfinches, Starlings and Magpies? Is there such a thing as a decorative aerial for birds? (Google sent me straight to pigeon spikes, so maybe not!)

2. London Grown Over City




3. The Kia Oval Green Wall



Not every day you see this sort of thing looming up above a street. I'm delighted to find that there's some technical specs for this (not to mention lovely hi-res images) online - find out more about Barnshaws and their unrivalled in-house cold bending capacity.

4. 2019, the year fruit withered on the tree


It's been a very difficult year. All my grapes failed, through a combination of receiving too little water, then too much. It's a much less pretty sight than these pretty prunes and raisins at a friend's house.

5. Ivy bees have invaded my allotment



Ivy bees have a tiny sting that feels a little like a nettle with only one spine. I found this out pulling up the gone-over radishes. I noted that there were a bunch of odd-looking holes in the bed, but carried on anyway, and eventually a bee took objection.

Or, alternatively - it's actually Digger wasps, and one of the nests had been provisioned with a half-dead Ivy Bee. Either way, I have a lot of these holes in most of my flower beds.

Both promise interesting displays if I leave them till spring, but I'm worried that it'll look like I've abandoned the allotment entirely...

urban greenvasion: green line planting

Meet one of our local thin green lines:



It's been a wet, warm month, so growth like this is everywhere. Every crack, every crevice is sprouting green. Wherever there is a seam in the seamless urban environment, green is zipping along it, opening up a tiny garden space for weeds and algae, moss and muck.



And then comes the grass, levering the tarmac apart, opening up cracks in the pavements, harbinger of dilapidation. Nobody wants this, so out come the municipal hoes and blowtorches, if you're lucky, weedkiller if you're not.... which is a shame, because every single one of those tiny green straps, small pink or white or yellow flowers is a stepping stone for insects, for pollen beetles and bees, for hoverflies and tiny wasps, buzzing deep into our cities. Every crack and crevice picks up those particulates we'd otherwise be breathing and makes them into mulch for the green. They're quite nice to look at too, or is that just me?

Crickets.

Just me then. But wait, maybe we could make them into something a bit more intentional, and a bit more lovely, but keep the appeal to our native insect life? And maybe these thin green lines could be pressed into service as tiny threads for our smallest animals to flit and crawl and creep along through our concrete wastelands?

Stick with me, because my idea is something a lot smaller and easier to maintain than a green wall. It's more akin to a cornice, a dado, a picture rail. These planting spaces bolt onto walls, or nestle in their angles. They don't have much soil or water in them, so they're going to only take the hardiest of the hardy. How fortunate that this gives us so many beautiful and wonderful plants. All of our native weeds can mingle in with dwarf grasses and hardy alpines, Erigeron rubbing up against Golden Marjoram and House Leeks, Yorkshire fog and Timothy grass rubbing up against Sow thistle and Willowherb and hardy, grow-anywhere dandelion. It could be awesome. Consider this view:

Pretty dull, right?  Let's add a planting rail everywhere there's a seam in the dollhouse bricks:

As you can see I went quite complicated on the near wall, with a varied planting and a deeper trough, but kept things very straightforward on the ups and downs of the far wall, with just a tight little plastic planting medium holder planted with vigorous grasses and weeds. Much better, and you can feel the moist soil cooling the walls, the insects bumbling along those lines. Pigeons would perch on them, probably even nest in some of them, and you know what that means; guano.

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

• A range of green line products to be available in the eco or building trade, boltable to walls, with a well-sealed back, sufficient drainage and water retention to look after itself once attached, ideally made of recycled plastic, with enough give in them to take plant growth and the occasional self-seeder.
• Urban wall pocket seed mixes that combine weeds and hardy plants sensitively to create a fast growing and self-sustaining plant mix suitable for wall and crevice growing.  
• A maintenance contract for yanking out the buddleia, willow, cotoneaster, firethorn, hawthorn and lonerica once it gets too big for the planting space, say once six monthly, plus the at-height green workers to deliver this.
• A shift in attitudes from seeing buildings with plants on them as dilapidated to seeing them as doing their carbon duty and performing well.
• A tolerance of weeds, bugs and mini-beasts in the urban environment, because this item is likely to dribble woodlice, spiders and earwigs, as well as seeds and weeds, onto the pavements below. 

But on the whole I'd say it's worth it. Green walls are an irrigation pest, their drama and beauty prone to failure if their water goes. But it doesn't have to start that big. Let's formalise the thin green lines already snaking through our environment, and join them up with improvised green snakery lurching across our buildings, bridges, towerblocks, shopping centres. Let's scribble on the city with mossy green crayon and grassy green magic markers and weedy coloured pencils. Let's outline everything with a fringe of greenery.

Let's look to a future where a centipede can cross a city on a tiny green tightrope, without ever having to put its feet on a road, a wall, a building. 

Let's draw a thin green line.

vegetable passion, stitchless fashion

I've been looking at fashion shows again. It's an old habit born of shivering in west country boarding houses dreaming of glamour unattainable in the brief two hour windows that I could score in the local small towns. Of course back then I had to squint at tiny photos in magazines in newsagents and bus stations. Now it's all there, at the touch of a button, to scroll endlessly or have delivered in tidy insta-packages. Then, as now, I was always delighted to find someone throwing plants into the mix.

Welcome to the hallucinatory forest garden world of Noir Kei Ninomiya:

As you can see, he has a light side and a dark side. Not to mention a savagely weird side. The faces obliterated by vegetation, the mysterious cut fabrics, all hint at a future where humans and plants lie much more intimately together.

This is human as vase, human as flower bed, human as potting medium. What grows on you enhances you. The plant is with you and in you and on you.

I'm sad to be missing Halloween this year. I can't think of a lovelier thing to dress up as. I normally pop on an owl mask for the trick or treaters. How much lovelier to pop on a lichen mask, or wear tiers of mist and clouds:

I love the way the models appear more than human, too; as in this video where they dress in rain and scatter their seeds wide across a warehouse full of fashionistas, like fabulous, feisty willowherbs.

linear wildlife burial corridors

Autumn is a good time to think about death, I find, so although the news about Prof John Aston recommending that we line motorways with linear wildlife burial corridors broke sometime back in summer, I'm going to think about that proposal now.

I'm going to come straight out and say it; I don't like the idea of being buried. I'm a burn-me type, really. Hot composting seems to split the difference - a slow fire that burns for 30 days, releasing a cubic yard of compost. It's in pre-launch at the moment, attracting investors and deflecting comparisons to Resyk. But I might last long enough that it could be on my menu, and more to my taste than a green or natural funeral, and less polluting than going up in flames, no matter how much more attractive that idea is, and if so, I'd be fine with that, I think. Compost away. Use me to mulch my allotment.

But getting back to the motorway and the delightfully evocative suggestion of of linear wildlife burial corridors, well. There is already quite a lot of dead wildlife lining our motorways. Car-popped badgers, flung-aside foxes, deers smashed on the deercatchers on the front of someone's much-needed SUV. Birds backdrafted onto the hardshoulder, hedgehogs pancaked and flipped into the gutter. Some will be will be food for kites and buzzards, but plenty rots down into the broad verges, planted with trees and shrubs to swallow the thrum of traffic, colonised by insects and flowers, untouched and undisturbed, apart from by our pollution...

... and herein lies my problem. Cemeteries are busy places. Lots of people there all the time. The only animals that thrive are the ones that want to hang out with us. Carp in the ponds. Cats on the benches. And people, contemplating, saying farewell, visiting, remembering. Far from giving this space to wildlife, we'll be taking it away.  Sorry wildlife, we need the verges. You can't have them any more.

If we want our deaths to give back to wildlife, rather than just contribute to turning yet another wild space into a garden, we really need to be using our bodies to construct something wildlife needs and doesn't have yet. And when that comes to motorways, what wildlife really needs is more opportunities not to be on it.

Given that the main problem wildlife has is not in walking along motorways - there are already pretty good wildlife corridors in the verges - but in walking across them, what we really need to be made into is wildlife bridges.

These bridges of the dead - and I don't really think my proposal is significantly more modest than the prof's here - could be taboo for living humans to walk. They would need to to remember their dead as they pass beneath them, automatic headlights flickering into life in the dim of the underpass. The broad wildlife bridges would encompass all funereal approaches; accommodating the cremated in construction materials and hardcore, the composted in the soil lining and the planting, and those who prefer to be buried whole in gravespaces in the embankments and secluded approaches.

And it would also create a genuinely new ecological space, rather than nibbling further into the wild, in the name of being green. 

googling green lamp posts

I'm sure I read somewhere earlier this year about Green lamp posts. You, like google, were probably thinking of the classic municipal green-painted metal lamp-posts, perhaps something along the line of these:

Not what I'm thinking of, sorry. These have a kind of planting sleeve on them, full of hard-wearing plants that strip the air of pollution and toxins while lifting our spirits when we see them:

According to the Telegraph, the pillars will "come in three different varieties; the ‘biodiversity’ blend offers a year-round food source for insects and birds, the ‘pollution relief blend’ uses a combination of purifying plants such as lamb’s ear, box and ivy, and the ‘flower tower’ blend aims to add an explosion of colour to the streets and promote mental wellbeing."

Anyone thinking, oh, will they now? may be tickled to hear that they've been picked up by that notorious pollution blackspot, Belgravia, with much talk about the potential, should it be rolled out to other areas. Apparently they don't require watering because they have a solar-powered circulation irrigation system (presumably that little black thing at the bottom of the plants in the photo is a tiny water butt) but I can't see that handling a six-week drought without a little supplementary attention, no matter how hard-wearing the plants, so (given this summer's weather) they've possibly already been trialled and failed. I originally found out about them from an article detailing the highs and lows of municipal vertical gardening, including the fate of vertical gardens when their irrigation fails, which dances around, but never quite says, they're a bit expensive for the public sector.

Nevertheless, I'm quite taken by these. They're little and light and look quite easily improvisable by a guerilla gardener with access to a maker space and a hardware store. They won't last (as anyone who has had anything powered by one of those cheap little solar panels in their garden fully knows), but then again, what does?

Lamp posts. That's what lasts. If they were cast into the lamp post and running off the lamp post's power, then we'd have something solid, potentially beautiful. Depending on the shape of the planting pockets, it might not even need planting, we could leave it to pick up dandelions and red valerian, and regretfully weed out the willow and the buddleia. I can't see them ever being no maintenance, I'm afraid, which will probably place them out of the reach of the most severely polluted areas. And it's questionable whether they're doing a great deal more than the traditional two or four-down hanging basket:



I also noted ivy in the list above of "purifying plants" (alongside box, which is hard enough to keep healthy when it's upright and at ground level!) and that more usually turns up in the "problems" column for lamp posts. After all, a moment's inattention, a vigorous climber and a lamp post is all it needs for this to happen:

...which is a bit of a green column too far, and will have to go before it blocks the light. That's a hop vine, by the way. I don't know if they purify the air, but as a native plant they are great for biodiversity and certainly lift my spirit.