first experiments with the closed economy garden

The tips are closed, and garden waste collections have been halted - not essential. The two bags of formerly green, now very brown, waste that I have lurking in the shed will need to be moved to accommodate an exercise bike. And yet, we will all be spending a lot more time in the garden. Mine's already looking quite a lot tidier. But I'm not getting rid of any of that waste!

So let's start the experiment. First stop - the vine, with its half-alive, half-dead bendy stems, that need a bit of . The Winter Jasmine, which at this time of year puts on a massive growth spurt. Let's cut need for garden string and wire to a bare minimum:

Then there's the Passion Vine, as usual half dead and all up in the wrong places. Normally I'd cut off all the dead bits and discard, and tie in all the live bits, but this often leads to all the live bits dying in April cold snaps. so this year I'm going to keep the dead stuff and wind that in with the live so it gets a bit of protection:

Then I need to trim back the Douglas Fir and Cherry Laurel privacy hedge installed by my back neighbour. I like this hedge, but in its place. This would normally give me a bag of somewhat sour clippings; both Douglas and Laurel leaves decay slowly and foul the ground for other plants. But, they are great shelter for insects - hordes of lovely ladybirds hibernate in them every winter. So, meet my hedge clipping high rise bug hotel. Bonus - the flexible Laurel and Fir twigs are great for anchoring back the Passion Vine stems and may even shelter the plant a bit:

I've been in this garden for a few years now, and as for all paved/bed gardens, the beds are drifting upwards, mounding up into informal raised beds. Next to the compost bin, where worm action is at frenzy level, the problem is so bad that I'm using my Grape Vine prunings to make a cosy ad-hoc raised bed for my potato vine:

 

They won't last, of course, but that's hardly the point; there will be always be more twigs and trimmings to replace the ones I used today. They might sprout as the sap rises, but is that a bug or a feature? Time will tell. But bet you're thinking, ah, ah now. What about those devils of the garden, the perennial weeds? Well, my bindweed has well and truly landed for the season. So I made it into a hat for my water butt:

There we go, zero waste garden session achieved for today. Oh, and here's one I made earlier:

There was an old dead Passion Vine stem that needed clearing growing over a battered garden arch in the wrong place. Tim & I shifted it over a bench, stabilising the rotting arch with cut Hazel suckers, spare bamboo and wire, and then I wove in the old Passion Vine, some dead, some alive, some blackcurrant, a bit of Honeysuckle, some Red Jasmine, and hey I'm pleased with this.

so, it looks like we're all going to be spending a lot more time in the garden

Clockwise from top left - floofy cat with Hoop Petticoat Daffs, Hellebores in full flower, first tulips, gardener with early perennial wallflowers. I'm in isolation, but the garden is doing its best to cheer me up.

 

Ay Corona.

a portal onto other people's gardens

So, a few days into the crisis I rolled my sisters into a whatsapp group. At the time it was just that I felt I had to do something to keep them safe. But then something curious started to happen. Conversational pictures of each other's gardens slid into the chat almost immediately. Then one of my friends encouraged me to do a little garden tour on Facebook Stories. I started to notice other people doing the same. Everywhere, people's gardens in little squares or rectangles, windows into their green spaces. Gardens were linking up via light chains of data, green spaces flowing together. Whose tulips were those? Were they mine or someone else's? Were they everyone's now?

Each medium has its own nature and quality. The supereightish muzz of my Fire Tablet trying to run Zoom, or my old laptop lurching through Jitsi. The slightly smoothed views of the conferencing apps on the modern phones and fancy desktops, where everything is lightly, slight enhanced. The muted colours of Google Hangouts, the primped and simplified brassy brights of FB stories , the tweaked tones and subtly matched palettes of Instagram videos.

It's not the reality of other people's gardens. There's no scent, and what sound you can hear comes from small speakers, tiny microphones. A garden at the bottom of a long dark digital well. But right now, I'll take that.

a tiny forest in Witney

In the frantic scramble to complete some last few local projects before lock-down, Witney become the lucky recipient of the UK's first Tiny Forest.

The Tiny Forest concept (formerly known as the Miyawaki Forest) is a charmer, and popular worldwide. The organisation that helped with Witney's tiny forest is Dutch (some lovely photos through that link) and this explainer video is from India:

The trees very from country to county, but the principle remains the same: condition and prepare your soil, plant it up densely with trees to these ratios: 50% the five best growing trees in your area, 25-40% other common trees in your area and 25-10% minor native species (exact ratios can be adjusted for needs like non-toxicity or attractiveness to certain animal or insect species). Water, weed, mulch and maintain for the first two years and then you have a forest you can leave. Here's a pretty solid how-to in case you have space and want to make your own. 

You need a minimum of 3-4 msq, but let's face it, it's a better use of your space than a back-garden pool or tennis court.

the week we all came home from work

So, over the past couple of days we've been sent home. Open plan offices, infection incubators. As the week went on, the tow path got quieter. When I darted back to the office for a few last things on Thursday, it was just people moving fast on urgent chores, myself included. One tall middle-class man stared with interest at my Ole & Steen bag from his bike; promise of bread to be had if he picked up his pace. I fed the crows nuts, for the last time in a while; already I was starting the swerve-walk, keeping my distance, watching for passing places.

Up the road, a man in dark clothes disappeared into bushes in exactly furtive enough a way to make me clutch anxiously at my back-pack, full of home-working equipment hastily grabbed from the office. But it was the middle of the day, I was being silly. Plus my rucksack didn't exactly look like a thrilling prize. As I passed the place he'd disappeared, a very expensively dressed man irritably finished a cigarette next to the bin, and disappeared at a clip down a well-worn path into a thicket-choked bog that had been puzzling  me for weeks. OK, weird.

It wasn't until I saw another very expensively dressed but slightly twitchy person heading at a fierce pace towards the same location, where doubtless the furtive man was waiting for them with some crucial lockdown supplies, that I twigged that I was looking at another form of panic-buying. I felt a bit better about my backpack full of bread, cheese and technical equipment. And also crossed the path off my list of little mysteries.

I'm not worried about the crows. They won't get food from me, but I know they cache a lot of my nuts anyway, and without humans around making a noise and a mess they'll be able to forage much more effectively. But I've left a pot plant at work. It's a Dracena, so the toughest of the tough, and I gave it a good water. But all the same. Nobody's sure when we'll be allowed back again. Will it survive?

I originally found the plant discarded in a bin, in a job three offices ago in an organisation that doesn't even exist conceptually any more. It was a withered stem with a tiny puff of brown leaves but when I scratched the top of the "trunk" I saw green underneath. So I took it back to my office and nursed it back to first uncertain, then sturdy, then rude health. Is that the plant that was in the bin, asked a colleague who'd seen me rescue it, or did you get another one?

It's the plant I found in the bin. It's the plant that was discarded, unwanted, half dead, rubbish. My rubbish plant that revived, recovered, thrived. The one that the others laughed at. Nobody wanted it so I took it in, my waif, my stray. Inevitably, the plant became imbued with thoughts about my career.

It came home during a restructure that came with a pot-plant ban, but drifted back when it became clear that this was one of those rules that wasn't. The wellbeing arguments were clear, after all, and while the plants were nominally an office resource now, rather than being individually owned, there did tend to be a person making sure it got the right amount of water, and they were usually sat quite close to it. When our screening Plane trees were felled in the Westgate redevelopment, all our plants became even more important, and in the bright light of the open-plan I spun the pot to give the Dracena a spiral trunk; one of the classic tricks for this species.

Maybe it'll do OK. The entire floor has been mothballed, so no-one will be coming round with water, but they are a really tough desert plant and the mothballing also means the heating will be off, so it should just go into spring drought dormancy. Or maybe the heating will stay on, and it will dry to a crisp; or the opposite might happen, if someone in the building rescues the plants to the ground floor, where they will likely suffer a dark, overwatery fate.

I like Dracenas. I had one all through school and another all through college and another through my shared houses. You can keep them inside, in rough, inhospitable spaces, and they just sit there, happily growing, just enough drama in their striped leaves to be entertaining, without ever being fussy about how they're treated or how hapsadaisical you've been about the watering.

Although I obviously have killed them. You can tell by how many I've had. The one that died when it got taped into a box and sat in Big Yellow Storage for three months is only the worst example of my occasional neglectful ways. This one may be joining the ranks of those Dracenas. It's out of my hands now.

do trees make rain?

I was reading about how clouds form rain around particles and these particles are often living. The writer suggested that these particles may originate in, or be fed by, volatiles from tree canopies. But everyone knows that trees cause rain, right?

This video, from a slower gentler time, talks about how trees capture moisture mechanically, with some lovely camcorder footage as accompaniment. The date and time on the camera seem weirdly charming nowadays; the idea that people once timestamped their reality visibly, rather than tucking it into footnotes.

six trends for 2020

The spring and summer catalogues have landed, with a deliciously glossy thud, on the doormat. Seductive swathes of bedding, pretty-princess perennials and the as-yet-unexperienced delights of new varieties. I save them up, going through them when I need the green. Days that are too grey, too stressy, too anxious. Lift them with flowers. Imaginary flowers. The fashionable faces of the season. As ever, some patterns begin to emerge. Is this the look of the season?

• Velvety goths Oh the black, purple and burgundy foliage that always looks better in photos than against your English mud. These ones, though, are piqued with flowers in dense deep washes, like lace dyed by colour-leaking cotton. Sink into your darkness with Rhodochiton atrosanguineus Purple Bells, Ipomoea SunPuma Purple Princess and Begonia Viking Red on Chocolate. 
• Candyflip pinks Too hot to handle, barbie-does-a-backflip, screaming pinks and nigh-fluorescent magentas. Go hot and go home. Get pinked with Erysium Winter Orchid, New Guinea Busy Lizzie Roller Coaster Hot Pink, and Begonia Funky Pink. 
• Washed-out blues Distressed denim colours, speckles and flecks and flakes of white, faded patterns. Creased stonewash and decorative damage. Get ripped with Erysium Plant World Lemon, Sweet Pea Earl Grey, Petunia Sweetunia Starfish, and Petunia Lavender Sky.
• Shredded heat Reds and crimsons given a dying fall by delicately shredded falling petals. Hot yet demure. Delicate yet flaming. Like a fanciful waterfall made of boiling lava. Embrace the contradictions with Fuchsia Triphylla Eruption, Echinacea Pallida, Begonia Bossa Nova Night Fever Papaya and the stunning Fuchsia Rocket Fire.
• Beetle wings Insect-mimic petals, Carapacial sepals. Plants that flip the insect switch in the brain, that double take with their double flowers. Some delightful creepy-crawlies are Rhodochiton atrosanguineus Purple Bells, Dicentra formosa Bacchanal, Fuchsia Blacky and Fuchsia Bella Olivia, 
• Acid yellow lime  Cooler than hot, foliage has gone yellow this season, in a good way.  Get your greens yellowd with Erysium Plant World Lemon, Petunia Sophistica Lime Green, and last year's plant of the year, Sedum Atlantis.                                                                                    

Right, time to do an order or two.              

the primitive beginnings of gardens

On a full day's training in an old canal town, feeling restless at lunchtime, I went for a walk, in the spring mud, along the canal. There, lit by uncertain spring sunshine, in the backs of a working area, all warehouses and workshops, I found this, the very beginning of a garden:



A door in a wall, and a path worn through the vegetation. Here, very standard British shadeland scrub, brambles and ivy, cleavers and cow parsley. It's too early for nettles, but they will be right along in a moment. There wasn't a fag butt in sight so I don't think this is the smokers' exit. My guess is it's the night janitor, or the daily commute.



This one shows a small evolution towards tended space: trellis to mark the ownership of the wall, and protest graffiti. In the deep shade under the trees, the door light was on.



I liked the contrast of the single green leaf and the turquoise door here. In sheltered spaces, deciduous trees have been holding a few leaves through the winter. That three-stemmed ash, which has been trimmed back from encroaching on the door, strikes an elegant note.



Here, the paint is fresh and the ivy has been cut. A forbidding red door; one imagines a pot of paint inside the doorway, ready to paint out graffiti the moment it lands.



This one had almost a clearing outside it, as if a regular mill of people kept it flat; but not a scrap of rubbish. It is tidied, it is kept, it is, however basic, a garden, guarding the door, that point of ingress, a shade-point between the public space of the path and the canal, and the private work-space of the industrial estate. An owned verge.



I did wonder if the clearers of the space were drinking teens, but the absence of even a scrap of the usual garbage of such spaces (bottles, condom wrappers, fag butts) suggested these doors were in some sense verboten, not available, closed. Of course, this is catnip to a tagger.



Halfway down the canal backs, I found a broken bridge end which was the actual teen hangout; vodka bottle grass ground into the grass in the traditional style. While these puzzling warehouse gardens with their sinister tree guardians were left, bar brief graffiti-motivated excursions, clearly used, but also strangely deserted.