I'm having a quiet few days, looking at unfinished artworks, eating snacks and reflecting on the strangeness of this year. The garden is a mass of filth, dead leaves, undone tasks. But then, it's December; if it wasn't you'd have to suspect me of doing this gardening lark professionally (I don't).
One thing I have managed this year though, is to have flowers in the house. Sometimes they were garden bouquets, scattering aphids and romping off to seed. Sometimes they were lockdown supermarket purchases, made quickly between the onions and the apples, trying not to inconvenience any other shoppers. A few came from concerned friends and colleagues, with get "well soon cards" attached. Bittersweet, those; some things will improve, others are likely to be permanent.
Videos like this are a pleasing reminder that when it comes to flowers, thinking outside the box (though hardly necessary for you or the flowers) can really give them (and you) a boost.
I had the idea, earlier this year, of not clearing things from my garden. Instead of processing the waste, rotting it down on my plot. The idea of the #circumareconomygarden might have been sound, in a year when I'd been fit and had a normal amount of leisure.
At the beginning of the year, it felt like it had worked, to some extent. I did not take any garden waste off my allotment or my garden. The rotting heaps did, indeed work - reducing, somewhat, over time. But not as much as I had hoped; and up at the allotment, this was very much mistaken for neglect.
Then the pandemic workload (already high) intensified. An early exposure lead to a fortnight lockdown at home, which gave my garden a rather different feel; more the place I drew a few anxious breaths in an abbreviated lunchtime than a space I could spend time in.
Still, I persisted. The corners of my garden became ghosted with waste woody weeds, rotting the fences and resprouting among the paving slabs. I didn't have time top get clever with anything. The neighbour's willow tree, already a concern, romped skyward in the wet weather.
The crunch moment came very late. After my car got totalled by an errant delivery lorry. After a medical accident partially blinded me, leaving me unable to drive, ergo no more trips to the tip.
Sometime in the autumn I cracked and got the brown bin, anyway. Late December, it finally turned up. I'm going to have to remodel the entire front garden to give it a good space, mind, as right now it's sitting on top of a Dicentra and a Vinca.
Full of Curry Bush, Privet and other things that can't rot fast enough to disappear in a garden as small as mine.
This year, for the first time since we moved in, no House Martins nested in our eaves.
It's possible this was my fault: last winter, for the first time, I set up a bird feeder in the front garden. This lead to a great deal of excitement (including a notable morning when Mr Sparrowhawk, of the Donnington Sparrowhawks, swooped in, caught and partly consumed a sparrow with nonchalant unconcern while ourselves and some house guests goggled from the living room window) and the establishment of an excitable, noisy and vigorous sparrow gang, regulars at the bird feeder and noisy favourites of ourselves and the cats.
When the House Martins turned up, in smaller numbers than usual, the Sparrows had words. They'd been eyeing it up the Housemartin Nest (we only had the one) as possible overflow nesting from their main lair in next door's ivy. The words turned nasty, the nest was squabbled over. One morning we came out to find it in bits at the bottom of the wall. Very small, dusty, fragile bits - no-one had chanced eggs in it. I'm not sure it would have safely taken them anyway.
It wasn't in great repair, and we are a distance from mud for repairs. But I missed our birds, in such moments of mind I had over from the many other crises of this year.
The Housemartins did not rebuild. But could I help them with that? Building a House Martin Nest Box feels like it might just encourage the sparrows. I like sparrows too of course, so that might not be a problem? But there's also the possibility of actually painting the house, now there aren't any residents, and in the long run that might even be better for the birds, who apparently prefer painted houses.
In the end, next door had to cut their ivy, and the bird feeder got closed down when it became more of a mammalian attraction. The sparrow gang are off feeding on this season's enormous glut of berries. I'm forbidden from ladder work following my stroke, so the topiary chameleon is shaggy and unkempt. But I've heard the odd explosion of chirps or whirr of wings as someone investigates the feeders out front. Maybe it's time to get the Sparrow (and Sparrowhawk) feeder provisioned and back up.
As far as the House Martins go, well. Let's see what happens next year.
I'm no longer so surprised by my December flowers. But this year's are quite striking. Fuchsia Grayrigg, Salvia Hotlips, some random geraniums, an Erigeron (which is happily flowering away), a rose or two from the small rose bush that got big. Another Fuchsia, one with lovely lime green leaves, some of this year's Chrysanthemum set (grown from last year's seedlings of course - I haven't been to a garden show this year) including Santa, which actually is quite strikingly red and green and from the looks of it, will be flowering for Christmas.
It was only when I got it inside that I noticed the aphids. Our cold snaps have been very snappy and not too cold, and nothing is suffering hard - yet. Including the aphids, it seems. Still, think of it as a Christmas treat for the house spiders.
A couple of years ago, one of my neighbours put pot chrysanthemums outside her front door. Lovely rich tasteful burnt orange balls of flowers. I always quite liked the look but it seemed silly when we would only be home after dark. 2020, and I was home all day, and I found some suitable flowers in Sylvester's, one of my favourite local flower pushers when I was picking up some bulbs for next year.
This is a good signt to come home to after my daily health walk.
This year has been a bumper year for lots of things. Up and down the towpath, where widening work has scarred the edges of the newly smooth cycle track, thistles and teasels have grown in cheerful profusion in the disturbed earth. We have a pretty reasonable number of goldfinches in the area, but this year they were swamped; the plants too effusive and productive to lose all their seeds. You might have heard this year described as a mast year, here and there. Mast years, when the profusion of fruiting bodies (nuts, drupes, and famously acorns) overwhelms their usual predators. When the plants lay down the future generations. In extraordinary quantities.
Somewhere in all that profusion, things like this happen. Seeds get stuck in a seedhead, and in the long damp of an English winter, they start to stir, reaching for a spring that is still a long way off, locked away on the other side of hard winter.
Teasel Seeds sprouting in their seed head during warm autumn weather.
There's a curiously unnatural aspect to this image. One of my friends likened a similar situation (with a poppy seed head) to spiders feeding on their mother's body. But there's more to this than just the visceral reaction of seeing the young feeding on their body of their parent. These seedlings are in a dead end. They won't survive the coming cold of January and February and they can't anchor themselves in a soil that is in some cases six or seven feet below them.
I don't know, do I maybe hear a tiny voice crying: rescue me?
Very pleased to pick up a curious news story about a vine growing its own greenhouse so it can fruit later in the year. I'm aware this sounds a bit bonkers so let's break it down:
The "greenhouse" is an enclosure made of leaves that grows around ripening fruit
The leaves do expand and overlap to form an enclosure though!
Plants at higher altitudes grow thicker leaves for their enclosure as they need more protection
Curcurbits (this one is called Schizopepon bryoniifolius) have flexible leaves and tendrils, good starting construction materials for imaginative leaf repurposing. The leaves are often very large too, perfect for sunshades or umbrellas.
Like many people this year I decided to try a lockdown Curcurbit, and bought a courgette seedling from a supermarket. The "courgette" turned out to be a very nice cucumber with a knobbly skin and firm, strongly flavoured flesh. But in among 2020's various thrilling plot twists that wasn't a bad one; I'm a fan of dressedcucumber. I planted it up in one of the personal plastic shopping baskets the Coop were selling at the beginning of lockdown. (Didn't see these? Imagine an absolutely basic copy of the Reisenthel Nestbasket with solid sides and plain cut handles.) They were impractical for shopping as the handles sliced through your fingers, but with holes punched through the base they make a great squash planter.
These photos shows about how impressive 2020 harvests got:
But I did like the wild tumble of leaves, which indeed often did grow over the tops of fruits, like a tiny rain umbrella. I'm definitely going to try these (or, depending on vagaries of what seedlings are available/germinate, some form of squash, who knows what) again next year.
A throwaway line at the end of the article points me at the rather more impressive (and accordingly described very much earlier) Himalayan Rhubarb Greenhouse (this very good blog post provides a fine tour of the many wonders of Rheum Nobile) and several growers in the UK reveal that you can sometimes buy it! It does look rather fine. Tempted.
I've been absent. No particularly special story. I got ill (not covid), I had an operation to help the ill, it went wrong, I had a stroke, it took me a long time to get diagnosis (because of covid) by which you can deduce that the stroke was an odd one; atypical and paradoxical (standard presentation absent, wrong side of the body) but nevertheless I've lost about a quarter of my vision (bilateral eyesight damage, top right, in the shape of flower) and I'm exhausted. Banned from driving, on a pile of pills. I gave up the allotment (more on that another time) and haven't been able to face the garden. But the first frosts were last week. They haven't reached the ground yet, but I need the tenders away before that happens. In the Sunday dim, I found my November flowers were in bloom:
This fancy Chrysanthemum should make it to Christmas. I think it's even called Santa. I know the name of the ghostly Fuchsia below: Grayrigg. It's a curious beast, so subtle, it's almost sinister. It's growing magnificently in a big fat pot I'll have to dig out some fabulous Begonias from before they start to rot in the frost.
Not yet though because the Begonias are still flowering:
The frost has hit my roof but not descended to ground level yet. But today I whisked some fragile items indoors; Succulents, my Cycad, the Tweedia seedlings, various Pelargoniums, etc. The soft fuchsias which had finished flowering. The annuals I'll leave to go out in a blaze of glory:
I've struggled to get the nasturtiums going the past few years in the flower beds; too much competition? Too soggy ? (I'm right on the clay.) So this year they went out into my concrete troughs and some other planters and I got flowers and seeds (I cook with all parts of the plant, but favour the unripe seeds - they have a lovely peppery flavour, and can be used wherever you might add a caper).
The Abutilon present a dilemma, as ever. They should be OK outside, unless we get a crazy cold year, and they prefer it out, as long as it doesn't get too cold or too wet. But what are the chances, 2020? Are you saving up a week at -10 with evil wind chill? I got that one year and lost so. many. plants. But for now, these will stay outside.
In the relative shelter of the greenhouse, now I've wrestled the invading passion vine out of it, and removed the end of this year's tomatoes (a bad year for tomatoes, as for so many other things), the tenders are all joining my chilli plants, which have done really well this year. They're hot too! I'll string them and bring them in to dry this week some time. The Petunias are still flowering. I've left them out to die when it gets too cold, but last year a few of them survived that, and went on to flower the following year!
Then the garden will be the domain of the twelve month flowers, like Salvia hot lips and winter sparks like pansies, hellebore and winter jasmine.
So far, so much as expected. But here's really where the interest starts. The people with the technological windows really liked them. The felt like a significant status item. They would invite people in to look at them. And they could be used for work, too, and as anyone who during lockdown has plugged their work laptop into the TV knows - a biiiiiiiig screen makes such a difference with a complex spreadsheet. The fact that they could be switched to a webcam pointing at a nice exterior view was lovely, and interesting, but it felt invasive of the privacy of the people outside, in a way that a window would not be. He didn't get as far as putting up an exterior screen (window simulator?) so people outside could see into the building. That may have equalised the power imbalance, or made the experience even stranger. But - as his evidence showed really quite strongly - people would probably have gotten used to it.
Adaptation is what Kahn is talking about. How people become accustomed to fewer animals, less greenery, smaller numbers of insects, less birdsong, screens of nature scenes instead of windows looking out onto greens, tidy robot pets instead of furminators like this floof:
In the intriguingly entitled chapter, Thoughts about Windows, Kahn talks about how some people felt manipulated by their nature windows. It felt like a rip-off, a trick. They would prefer a real window. Even one looking onto a brick wall.
There's more in the book. My favourite chapter dealt with the Telegarden, an early internet art/gardening project where people could join a community looking after a (partially!) robot-tended garden where they could make decisions, look at their plants, and even manipulate a robotic planting arm. Kahn lead research on the chat logs, where people mostly talked about the usual stuff they do online, and noted that it didn't seem to be helping people connect with nature very much. But then, aren't gardens more about the flight from nature into a kind of aesthetic playground? Here's Ken introducing his innovative use of an industrial robotic arm:
The chapter where my bookmarks start to forest, though, is the one where Kahn talks about "environmental generational amnesia"which is his own adaptation of Jared Diamond's "landscape amnesia", where people forget the background environment that they or their parents lived in, and accept the current state as baseline normal. Because natural environments are seen as generous and abundant, small changes, little depletions, minor exploitations are conceived of as small harms, not important, and therefore continue until collapse. This is the ultimate outcome of human adaptation, where we adapt to a steadily degrading natural environment, celebrating weeds in cracks in the concrete where our great-grandparents swept hands through fields full of butterflies and wildflowers. And maybe we get as much pleasure from that, who knows?
More significantly he notes that "each generation of ... scientists accepts as a baseline the stock size and species composition that occurred at the beginning of their careers, and uses this to evaluate changes" - depredation and degradation becoming the norm, accepted, as a matter of course. The proposed solutions don't shy from the banal (get children into nature, tell children how it was - something that is getting easier, perhaps, with immersive high quality video) but also extend into the speculative - imagine the future, develop a descriptive nature language.
The final chapter is a lovely tangled weedbed of loose shoots heading off in different directions. In it we return to the idea of a descriptive nature language, and try to put a taxonomy onto human/nature interaction. There are interrogations of some ecological concepts - how does "leave only footprints, take only memories" interact with the human inclination to take home interesting stones, seed cases, pine cones, bones or even (as once memorably happened with my sister) an entire dead weasel? How does ecological management of an area for a particular outcome (as our local nature park is managed, to promote diversity, encourage butterflies and fat caterpillars to nurture Cuckoos and ultimately Marsh Harriers) support the human need to feel awed and humbled by the wildness of nature in an enveloping natural, unmanaged landscape? Is putting in an accessible path to a secluded, wild space so everyone can enjoy it the beginning of the destruction of that space?
travelling the winding path, travelling off path, the hunt, waiting, prospect, refuge, investigating, artisitic expression, solitude, approaching carefully, in the flow of nature's dynamics, water on feet and hands, immersed in water, plunging into water, moved by water, playing, dying, gardening, foraging, tracking, combating the destructive forces of nature, using nature to find respite from nature, climbing, running, following the light through a thicket, around a campfire, under the night sky
He has several hundred of these terms, but looking the list already betrays his interests; American, interested by hunter gatherer societies, active - probably prefers trekking holidays. My list would be different, and so would yours; individual nature languages specific to our own environments, interests and upbringings. Perhaps we might both include some things, though I suspect my list will rapidly stray into my own interests; seeing light on running water, picking up an interesting stone, finding a plant that is different to the other plants.
I came across a quiet reference to a village with an avenue of yew trees sculpted into shapes like foliage chess pieces, once part of a stately home now "open to all but oddly adrift". As a self-taught home practitioner of vernacular topiary (meet Spriggy Stardust, my front garden chameleon) I'm always curious to see other peoples' conversations with foliage.
So I went looking for views, and while there are some great ones on the Clipsham Yews website, including some deliciously shaggy views from a period of neglect, this gives you a short sharp view of the curiously clipped trees.
There's a sense of the Alice in Wonderland about them, of the Edward Gorey - a wandering line that merrily defies expectation in a flamboyant, albeit somewhat gloomy, flourish of eccentricity. How, you wonder, why?
Enter a short documentary slot rescued from an old video tape recording from a BBC series called Castle in the Country, which celebrates, through the technicolor snow of re-recording artefacts, the weird world of the plummy, chummy, shabby, snobby world of British aristocracy.
The basic brief in place: cut them any shape you wish but no two must be the same as each other, each year, each cut compounded by other ideas; characters from the village, but absolutely no women; the signature initials of gardeners and royalty; some animals; a building or two. At one time, tiny benches nestled in cutaway niches in the trees, cool in the yew shadow, but the recent fly-bys don't show these. They're a popular subject for drone flight videos - here's one from this year, parched by drought, but there are lots online.
I like to describe topiary as a conversation with the plant. I doubt I'm the first, but this is based on the first hand experience; of going in with plans of a smooth abstract shape, like a wave made of foliage.... and coming out with a huge comedic chameleon with a curly tail, the tail in particular feeling like it had already been in the hedge, just waiting to be picked out by my shears.
But the other thing you are conversing with, always, is the cuts of the years before. This year, for the first time, as I celebrated the end of sparrow breeding season (they like to set up in his head) by chopping in Spriggy's lines, I felt the weight and spread of the years before; the head bulging, the back drifting up out of reach in a slow upwards wave of green, eyes and legs heading off sideways in their urge to be just, you know, branches.
I'm on privet, which is a much less dense hedge-type than yew. I wouldn't be able to do relief work like this on my hedge, and it's machine cut - I use hand shears. But he's certainly starting to look a bit poddy, although still, recognisably, a chameleon.
My pick for the first day out after lockdown eased needed to be somewhere outdoors, that I am fond of, that I know well, so I can avoid the weird little bottlenecks that these places always have. Oxford Botanic Garden ticks all boxes, plus I hadn't been for a few years so there was sure to be something new.
Actually, it seemed like there was a lot new, but as I check back, it looks more like I've not been for a while, and the changes have added up. At one time, I'd buy a local resident's season pass. That was back when I was in a 90s rental house, built in the aftermath of a bonfire of building regulations that saw houses made smaller, lower and with more substandard materials than ever before. This one was nominally a two bedroom house, but I slept in the living room as you could not fit a bed into the second bedroom. We used it as a walk-in wardrobe. The back garden was similarly tiny, but had been planted with huge, oversized shrubs; most of the garden contained a massive municipal shrub with flowers that stank of cat pee; there were two column-style cherry trees, desperately competing in the rain shadow of a tall wall; and a rambunctious huge-leaved ivy that forced its way into the roofspace and through the gaps in the window frames (which were all warped, as though they were double glazed, they had been constructed with unseasoned wood). I couldn't change any of this as it was rental, so I bought a pass to the Botanic Gardens, and when I wanted to sit in a nice garden, I went there.
No spoiler to say that it's even nicer than I remember it being. Recent innovations include the Merton Borders:
These are densely and intensely planted, with weed toleration, and they buzz with native insects. One narrow walk allows you to brush past plants on both sides, as if you were pushing through the meadow. Everything about them is amazing, including the fact that they come with a plant list, like a show garden.
Another new addition is a section called Plants which changed the world, where pergolas and iron frameworks have been allowed to proliferate wildly, and productive plants grow sheltered by frames and wall, evoking the practicalities of a kitchen garden. Bits I remembered fondly are still there; the Herbaceous Border, still looking like a picture from the Ladybird Guide to fancy gardens. The rock gardens, the lily pond, the chunky Gunnera sheltering a tiny pond.
The glasshouses, wonderfully, were actually partially open. It's tight in there, so there's a shortened, one-way route (you can see them all in Google Street View but sadly without the smell of them) but that included some luscious plants and views:
My co-visitors, being fans of the Dark Materials books, also had me looking for Lara's bench. I won't give anything away, but it's quite easy to spot; you'll know it when you find it.
I let my Jack-in-the-Hedge go wild this year. I wouldn't want you to think I've been selective here, so I should add that I have also let my Dandelions, Bindweed, Herb Robert, Creeping Violet and Herb Bennet go wild. Turns out being confined to quarters does not make an amazing garden suddenly appear. I've grown more plants, but weeded? Not so much.
I really liked how the seedheads looked, so I left them up. I'll pay for it over the years, I'm sure, but it was worth it for the Jack Shadows photos I took one very bright morning before work, as the seed heads spilled across the patio and flowerbed.
Here is how my morning workspace looked. The paper is a sample of super-reflective printer paper gifted to me by a friend.
Another day, another article reading how rooftop hydroponics will feed us, from their miraculous plastic pipes. Read a little closer, and you find that NatureUrbaine (for this spectacular Parisian roof-top garden, a must-visit for 2020 (if you can get to it), complete with its own restaurant serving some of the grown produce, is what this article is about) "most significantly is a real-life showcase for ... [a] flourishing urban agriculture consultancy" and ho-hum, more of my interest peels away.
It's true that doing away with soil does lose some of the loading issues with rooftop gardens. The pipes are lightweight, and the electricity need to run the system is (relatively) easily tappable from the building systems. Harvesting is easy as there's only one plant in any one place. It's a clever trick, growing plants with their roots hanging in damp space. Aquaponics, which puts fish into the system, is perhaps cuter, but base hydroponics like this have the edge on simplicity. It's the minimum moving parts type of agriculture. In fact, forgive me, mea culpa. The system in this article isn't even hydroponics, it's aeroponics. Less water, more sprinkling. Even fewer parts.
I get definite pleasure from the ambition of Les Parisculteurs and the powerful aim to cover at least 100 hectares of Paris's roofs, walls and facades with greenery. If the green roofs and walls don't die, they can help cool the lethal heatwaves that sweep our cities nowadays. If their hydroponic sprays and their clever drip irrigation systems don't clog and fail, and they don't catch a dry wave that locks their compost solid, then there is enormous joy in a green wall. But I have seen some sad dead green walls - I was too heartsick to photograph the ruin of the Oswestry M&S Simply Food green wall, but someone else has - and failing hydroponics, too, drippling rank water over browned plants.
So wherein my distrust? I think it maybe arises from the limited palette, the small number of parts. This isn't an ecosystem, it's more a short green line from A to B; and if any part fails, all fails. The parts, too, are custom-built by your eco-consultancy, a fancy plumbing system of plastic bits and nozzles, all requiring regular maintenance, all prone to system failure. The plants are fed by proprietary nutrient systems, bought in drums and sachets off the internet and mixed with water. This is the opposite of ecology; insects are a problem, as they throw off your balance. Birds may come, but they won't stay. The only animal presence is the human animal - and their chemistry set.
I do prefer the world where the wardrobe bong farm has taken over our rooftops to the one where they are blank concrete, tile and tar wastelands - but only marginally, and partly, I suspect, because my thoughts run like this; where there is water transport, there will be raised humidity and occasional leakage and that will drive organic plant growth, in roof-corner dirt traps and cracks, and that will be a stepping stone to the upper storey wildflower meadows our building crave and our bees are waiting for, that will surely come eventually.
And in our march towards the green striped city, any stepping stone will do.
Other things are celebrated today, but I'd like to spend today on my one of my lockdown heroes, the local meadows. We go to a few, but Iffley Meadows is the constant companion. Here are some of the highlights from the Meadow and its bounding areas (Tow Path, Bypass, A Road, River) from Lockdown 2020:
The willows are falling down. They're designed to do this; it's a feature, not a bug. This one in a backwater by Iffley Weir has been in the river for a while now. We've had some storms!
There's always a flower of the moment in Iffley Meadow. At the moment it's Knapweed. In among the standard purples I found a colour sport, with a little halo of white petals. There were a few of these dotted around, so clearly the bees don't mind.
Fasciated thistles are having a bit of a moment this summer. Maybe it's the uneven rain, but clubbed, split and freaky otherwise freaky blooms are having a year this year. I love this one, it looks like Poison Ivy spitting a curse at Batman.
Pyramidal Orchids don't grow in the Nature reserve itself, but off to one side, where Abingdon Road meets the Bypass, near Redbridge Park and Ride they grow plentifully in the verges.
The meadow walks got more worn in as the lockdown went on. There's a second path sprung up now, 2m apart from the first; a social distancing path. We tried (and failed) to find the cuckoo, but spotted Reed warblers and Grasshopper Warblers, and a Treecreeper, creeping around a tree. We've seen fledglings and swallows, mayflies and muntjac. Happy National Meadow Day, Iffley Meadows.
