Alexandra Palace and ideas for a garden construction

The People's Palace on the hill sometimes feels like a blueprint for how all public spaces should be. I feel at home there, among the graffiti and security guards, the temporary barriers and the street food stalls. At the bars, I see a chunky section on the list marked "lows and nos", the phrase I've been bellowing at confused barstaff for almost a year now. Happy Days.

The walk from the tube takes in the glorious wisteria pergola at Barratt Gardens, which is busy today with people hanging out and picnicking etc. under the flowers.

 

The walkways and pathways feature some elements which make a space feel like contributions and lingering and taking photos are more allowed; an illustrative mural on a terrace end, a property boundary display case (empty).  

Alexandra Park is vast, contains multitudes. Rest, recovery, green grass, tall trees. And then the palace at the centre of it all. Paths are made by human feet: there are only enough signs for safety's sake. It's usual to wander off the track a bit on the way to Alexandra Palace.

 

We were there to see Fourtet/Squidsoup (that's a link to a pre-pandemic show) and they have filled the central arena with a grid of hanging glowing tentacles, which light up, respond to, play with and track the music. They remind me of David Attenborough's glowing mucus cave-worms a little.

I found the secret library door when I went the wrong way down a road. I still have some problems with wayfinding, here and there. But when you have time to get lost, it's fun to get lost, sometimes.

Edited to add: it got filmed!

So, in the garden, my garden or yours, hangdown light trails could sit beneath a pergola, tangled with vines. I have a vine that would jump at the job: though perhaps in that context it might work better to reference grapes hanging down, or indeed, wisteria.  

neon brights and sparkle sights

The tulips have started blooming now in the garden. This year they are huge, dramatic, absurd. Even the species tulips have done amazingly well, growing in huge dramatic clumps.

I've found myself particularly fond of coronet tulips this year, though the white peony types (which become dramatically streaked with plum tones as they age) are very striking indeed. They are lighting up the garden.

Garden lighting is dimming now; we are rewilding, learning to love our weeds, resisting the dig, and with that, reducing light pollution (which seems not to be great for insects, though some birds get longer foraging times). Not that garden solar lights are what they used to be; every now and again, I dig a tiny item which long since lost its faint gleam out of a tangle of alkanet and sling it in the small electricals recycling, from where it is probably refiled into mixed waste for energy recapture. 

I remember how delightful my first set of garden solar lights were, pulsing gently white along a path through the night. Over the years, they were optimised and cheapened, became smaller and lit more weakly. and now they are gone.

I wish I could navigate back to that sparkle in the night, though. 

Maybe the approach back is through the wonder of bioluminescence. People spray coating plants in bioluminescent paint aside there's not much available though perhaps we're simply not dimming lights down far enough; I remember the shock of eating at Dans le Noir and seeing the faintest of weak glows from a weakly bioluminescent seafood dish, to frail to be seen except in complete darkness. 

Otherwise we're looking to the garden wildlife to pick up the sparkles. Dormice glow and are a safer proposition than garden scorpions and glowworms and fireflies would be lovely but they don't live round these parts. 

concrete that grows urban spontaneous vegetation

I'm a big fan of freestyling ferns, though I'll be the first to admit that they do go wrong, here and there. They prise things apart, they gather soil, they set up little biomes aorund themselves.

Concrete decays over time. Brick crumbles. The ferns gather in the cracks and gaps, with sometimes spectacular, sometimes worrying results.

Leaving concrete out to get grizzled and old automatically creates green spaces (I have plenty round the house that needs the moss scrubbing off it at the moment). So the ancient clipping I had on my wall about a specially designed four-layered concrete that turned concrete green(ish)  always had that slight absurdity about it...

Q: How do you make a green wall?

A: You stop weeding it

Though Dr Manso-Blanco's statement still stands: "just like trees and flowers, certain types of lichen and fungi flourish in different seasons, and no two cities have exactly the same mix of microorganisms in the air. In theory at least, bioreceptive concrete could provide buildings unique to their surroundings and which change throughout the year."

Urban spontaneous vegetation

Which brings me up to date and to the rather lovely Diversity and distribution variation of urban spontaneous vegetation with distinct frequencies along river corridors in a fast-growing city which discovers the value of abandonment most succinctly:

• Vacant lots in urban fringe harbored the most number of species.
• In communities on vacant lots of less urbanized areas, the richness of dominant species was greater, whereas in green spaces created by planted vegetation, occasional species were more diverse.

There is a hint here of leaving rather than planting, of valuing the volunteer and local species that grow alongside the introduced attractive greenery. 

• Green space microenvironments are hospitable to some rare species. 
• Such patterns, if linked to ecological and ornamental value, can provide a new perspective and nature-based solutions to urban rewilding and landscape design.

The weeds picking up value as volunteer greenspace, the moss elevated from decay to embroidery;

...and all along the walls, the ferns.

planting for the wet and the dry

Once again, I feel like the spring is too dry, too wet, too dry again. 

And so I am reading about multiyear megadroughts followed by record breaking rainfall (and occasionally watching friends dealing with the consequences) and the idea that a city might slow the flow rather than manage water through waterflow acceleration through urban areas via fast-drain gutters.

The duality of water, both threat to banish and resource to retain haunts my soggy city. As more gardens are paved over in the never-ending need for parkingspace, workingspace, livingspace, cookingspace, it gets hotter, more humid and drier at the same time. I plant for the dry, and my plants die in seasonal moulds and drenches. I plant for the wet, the droughts swiftly dispose. I'm left with the urban heavyweights, which increasingly means problematic, complicated, ivy firecely competitive and inclined to pry the hard standing apart. Ivy comes in, and everything else moves out.

Lush water-capturing ribbon parks with pebble rivers and tough, reliable planting are a local feature. But the "drywells" described in the linked article (holes taking the water from the stormdrains) are a commonplace concept. Soakaways, like the one outside my house.

But language does matter, and does make things more palatable; would you rather be stuck in a ditch, or admiring the irises in your bioswale?

(Later on in the article is the much-suggested idea of making people pay an impermeable land tax, where each square foot of impermeable pave-over is charged.)

But the item that really caught my eye was "green alleys". Which brings me back to ivy, and the dark threat of an ivy-overhung urban cut-through, where kids see witches and adults see muggers in the dull green shadows, and I was wondering; have people tested to see which kinds of vegetation make an alleyway feel safer, less risky?

Which leads me to Environment and Crime in the Inner City: Does Vegetation Reduce Crime? (paywalled so here's a summary on a blog) although I'll save you the read, and share the findings that, well, it can, if it's cared for and people like it. 

I'll end on a happy note with some working-out-well community alleyway transformations. They feel like a nice idea, don't they? But we all know spaces where the results of such schemes have been less aesthetic, especially five years or so in, and the odd line here and there about how much effort was involved hint at how this won't work for all.

But where it's working, what a beautiful sight!

sooty moulds and the black mould menace

Winter is black mould season in the estates up and down the UK. We tolerate it, then snap at it, we bleach it off, we dry it out, we run our dehumidifiers and hope our lungs will take the strain. 

Here are some of the things that can make your black mould worse:

• Owning stuff that produces or absorbs moisture, like books, clothes, plants and pets
• Preparing and eating food, turning on taps, washing anything and drinking hot drinks
• Keeping your house warmer than the outside world in winter

As you may have gathered, most of the things that make a house a house can also cause black mould. 

My mould garden is waiting my attention at the moment. I have a couple of spray bottles of mould killer waiting, and I'll be right on it, any moment now.

Things could be worse.

At least we don't have distilleries pumping out angel's shares of sweet ethanol into our murky skies.

Nine years ago I took apart my last mould garden, excavating down through the layers of failed anti-mould measures, finding mould in every one of them. 

This blocked ventilation brick, ironically was one of the least mouldy spaces in the room. Emboldened by that, I cleared it out and reinstated it. 

I see now why it was blocked; cold, damp air comes in through the block and instantly brings the mould to the space around it, in from the outside. 

Time to get busy with the bleach and the paint.

isolated trees and the films people make about them

Before I can put The Falls away I have one last section to revisit, and this is biography 83, Geoffrey Fallthius. This tells the story of a short, unfinished, student film about a tree isolated in building works. Recursively and predictably, the film accompanying this biography shows a short, unfinished student film about a tree isolated in building works. 

Or maybe it doesn't, and I'm actually remembering the photo below, that I took in 2018. I'm going by my memory of the film. Although I own it in multiple formats, none are at hand right now.

Ostensibly, the film is by Geoffrey Fallthius, student pupil of Tulse Luper. Anagrammatically, actually, and narratively, all names collapse into Greenaway, which in itself feels like a recursion. Peter the stone, and the Green, away. 

This is nonsense of course, Peter Greenaway exists and has the awards to provide it. Unlike Geoffrey Fallthius. Geoffrey -

- at 19, the shortest and youngest of the Luper admirers who supported the Luper programme for the naturally evolving landscape.  The tree, a wych-elm, had been planted on the south bank of the Thames, when when the site was the garden of a London merchant who apparently specialised in the importing of timber for the manufacture of musical instruments. Now the tree was isolated in a sea of building construction, and its continued survival in the ocean of concrete  seemed  unlikely.

This vision of  isolated green islands in a sea of grey is very current to the direction of modern city trees, towards smaller, more containable, and more isolated plants that do not stab the sewers, or fiddle with the foundations. This is of course enabled by the felling of the existing mature tree stock, an expensive and protracted process marked by anger and demonstrations from some, but not all residents. 

The links above (bar the first, identification link) are from The Conservation Foundation's Elm Map, a fascinating site recording our fading elm population. It contains a myriad of notable trees of which my favourite is the Unknown Elm on Flood Street.

The sad state of our elms has been the subject of talk and more for many a year. I remember an Elm, back in the village, when as a child I was set a tree leaf quest by a science lesson, miring me in controversy when the teacher refused to believe that my leaf did indeed come from  an elm, leading to a furious signed letter from some village naturalist.  

It was the only elm in the village, putting me in mind of other famous isolates like the tree of Tenere, here summarised in a video which repeats uncritically the legend of the last tree to leave the desert.

Do you believe in the village Elm, like the last Tree of  Tenere, holding on gamely against the march of Dutch Elm disease? It certainly isn't in the Conservation Foundation's Elm database, which shows but one Elm Tree entry for the entire county surrounding that village. 

Hedgerow shrub elms notwithstanding, most mature Elms only linger on in place names nowadays. 

Last March in the Garden

Last March in the garden was rather warmer than this month. Though certain things ("rosemary in wild flower" and "propogator has toms and peppers" and "main season daffs in full flower") are more or less as last year. Last year I also had covid, the nasty immune response variant that knocks out your sense of small and leaves you feeling logie for months. 

Note here though, my first bit of learning: last year I rushed the tomatoes out into the green house and lost most of them, and last year there was snow at the end of March. Lessons here? Let the tomatoes cry in the dark of the verandah a few days longer, and don't trust March not to throw snow in your general direction. Snow certainly happened this week!

Last March in the garden was rather warmer, though there was still snow

Hellebores looking great is starting to happen this year too. I'm essentially woodland biome, and they dig the greenish gloom, glowing out of the March murk like church candles, grabbing every glimmer of weak early spring light.

Other things were concerning me, too; peat free potting compost, the overgrown tree next door, and a project to turn an old Girl's World head into a planter.

That one turned out pretty well.

(Ingredients: an old Girl's World head found in a loft, white and blue acrylic paint, a bit of compost scavenged from another planter and a vigorous stonecrop that grows like a weed in my garden).

I'm living in my own private orchid festival

I didn't make it to the Kew Orchid Festival this year. Again! As my calendar reminds me. But there's this:   

And also this:  

And this, still rattling on, though getting on a bit:

Supermarket Moth Orchids, bought on reduction, nursed through the darkness of interior life.

reindeer crossings and my desire to put beards on bridges

 There's  nothing new about the concept of bridges for animals. From motorway stock bridges to wildlife crossings from reindeer ("renoducts")  to green bridges for grizzly bears, to naturbrugge for wild boar and red deer. They exist and they make the long dark wall of a motorway or an interstate feel less barrier-like, less vast. But natural movement erodes a bottleneck. Could something this narrow cope with wildlife at undepleted levels? A herd would not interpret this as a safe space. 

Lots of people are looking at the problem. Meet Saferoad, whose manifesto is straightforward:

• prevent wildlife mortality due to animal-vehicle collisions;
• assure that the barrier effect of roads is reduced sufficiently to maintain viable wildlife populations, such as the construction of wildlife crossing structures

They're researching it, by the way. Not doing it. Wagendingen University are also on the case:

"It is still unclear how effective wildlife bridges and other wildlife crossings are, and whether recreational use of wildlife bridges can be combined with a function as a wildlife crossing."

Also researching it, not doing it. But plenty of people are drawing green lines across the grey of road barriers. It's the next logical stop after the signs telling us to watch out for wildlife crossing. 

Green painted bridge over a dual carriageway. 

Bridges are expensive. I've had many a conversation with a despairing colleague who is being batted back again and again as as they try to argue that humans need a bridge out of their road-bounded no-facilities new-build estates. Footbridges: too expensive, insufficiently accessible, not absolutely necessary and therefore dropping off the end of the job list. 

Risky, too, those bleak open spaces above the zooming traffic. I once saw a kid up on one exuberantly flossing at the traffic height of the Fortnite craze and what if I hadn't caught the cultural reference? What then?

If only there were a way to combine the wildlife bridge and the human bridge, while making both safer, less bleakly open to the noise and space, while keeping the bulk of animals away from our favourite terrifying carnivorous ape, the human being. If only there were some way to bring more funding and kudos onto the act of building bridges, and stop them being the job you give the least civil engineer, the architect on the bottom of the monkey tree....

Which brings me to the next proposition:

We really need bridge merkins. No, hear me out. Let's take another look at that bridge, or another, similar one (I photograph lots of bridges).

Slightly out of focus motorway footbridge with graffiti on retaining wall

We're looking up from underneath at a space that could potentially hold a pathway. Let's suspend planters along the sides, down and out of reach of the scary humans or any road traffic above. Let's link them with a concealed, small safe space, a wildlife run. Let's make sure this is inaccessible to humans with a decent, high barrier above. It'll double as a trellis, further engaging the greenery and creating an insect-friendly route across the roadway.

Under-bridge planting trough and vegetation roughly photoshopped on underside of bridge 

As you can see in the image, water dripping down and vines hanging down might create hazards. However, the disturbance of traffic should keep the space clear, so bar a cut or two it should be as manageable as a rural road. 

Maybe it would be better to call them bridge beards. The alliteration works. They could work as a retrofit or a new build. They might even make bridges a calmer, cooler, quieter space to be and encourage more people (as well as animals) to take that walk to the far side of the tarmac ocean, to see what they can see. 

continuous impenetrable glass walls and tiger stripe cities

 Like many people, I have over the years read many iterations of future cities, utopian, dystopian, and all the strange shadings inbetween. Science fiction brings them, but so do books about city planning, old consultation documents, proposals and all the other attempts we make to put a constructable pattern on the future. Trees and the city, in all their many patterns.

At the moment there's a lot of attention being paid to non-bounded cities. On one side we have the greening of the city: trees and shrubs entering the cities like long green chains along waterways and verges, along garden-chains, green edge alleyways house fronts and backs, with its attendant benefits of air cooling and freshening. Trees cool spaces, not least because in order to have a tree in the first place, you need things like adequate space, suitable surfaces, a decent water supply. But trees also fight, with utilities, boundaries, smooth surfaces. They buckle the plazas and make pavements swell, unnervingly. Maximum cooling for minimum disruption is the aim, but the tree is an entity in itself, and whether it sprawls out of control or sullenly declines is not altogether in the planter's control.

On the other we have the continent spanning imaginary megacity, a glass and steel wall of hyperconnected futurecity that puts human first, the continuous city of Neom, slicing through the desert. There's a nervousness around this, but the natural world washes around the new environment, growing novel bacterias around sewage outflows, hardy mosses on reservoir overflows. It may not be wildlife documentary-style, but it's wildlife nevertheless.

february in the garden

 It's been a warmish month, and the flowers have come on fast, indoors and out. February in the garden has brought snowdrops and bulbicodium daffodils outside, orchids inside.

I've felt frustrated by the level of flowers; mostly because it's against a bit of background of tragedy; Pieris gone, Bay Tree gone, my 20 year old rhododendron, gone.... 

 

There a sense of pallor about the flowers that come up in early February, the snowdrops and the early iris, the hellebore. So pale, so interesting, so vague in the gloomy half-light of January. Thank goodness for the Bulbicodium, a tiny hoop petticoat daffodil that is like cheerfulness in flower form.

 

Finally comes the Fuji Cherry, which I'm sure was called something else back when I bought it. It's increasingly dissatisfied with life in the pot so I'm tempted to set it free this year. The little black flower on my lockdown bench is a garden regular.

 

we are all transmission vectors for the seeds of weeds

 As a pet owner, one of my regular activities is deburring. In comes one of the furry ones, pleased as punch, carrying a little freight of seeds and burrs discovered in my garden, the next garden, the verge, the scrub behind the wheelie bins at the back of the estate.

They find them at all times of year, even the depths of winter. 

The standard weeds and seeds I brush from everything are like a skipping rhyme: Creeping Buttercup, Couch Grass, Enchanter's Nightshade, Barley Grass, Wild Oats,  Alkanet, Euphorbia, Herb Robert.

The plants my garden would be, if I'd just stop planting all that other stuff in them.

travelling in space and time

Plants, the odd exception notwithstanding, are rooted to the spot. 

But they travel far and often very fast, either generationally, in the form of seeds, or as fragments, as many parts of a plant can can take root spontaneously. They travel by wind and water, and in the stomachs of animals. They travel on you, on me.

Don't think they travel on you? Think again. Scientist carefully vacuumed samples of clothes and bags on visitors to Antarctica, and found (in common with most animals, the wind, duck's feet and indeed rocks) humans are a vector for plant propagation.

Visitors carrying seeds average 9.5 seeds per person, although as vectors, scientists carry greater propagule loads than tourists. Annual tourist numbers (∼33,054) are higher than those of scientists (∼7,085), thus tempering these differences in propagule load. Chown et el 2012

Even among the small numbers of seeds I handle, many of them are as small as dust. The ones that come from my orchids and airplants - smaller. Me and my furry assistants scampering round in service of our vegetative overlords, scattering seeds as we go.

Of course it is always important to read the research in the context of its funding. In this case, this useful summary provided by IATTO (International Association of Antarctica Tour Operators) is instructive. But it's also important to look at it in the context of prejudicial attitudes.

a world of rats and sparrows

Adverts for cruising to Antarctica bookend my experience of wildlife documentaries nowadays. The value of knowing something exists is intensified by experiencing it, seeing it, and yes - smelling it; and so we go, and so we look, and dandelions bloom in our footprints.

There's a pile of concern, but it brings discomfort, to me; a lot of the guidance and guidelines and studies come down to; I should be allowed to travel. But not you.... and that is a difficult position to take. 

Wind blows, birds fly, humans travel; and all of us with seeds in our feet, our feathers, our hair, under our nails and in the air in our lungs.

We breath in the fresh air of a new city, and breathe out orchids. 

last february in the garden

 Last February in the garden was a distracted time. I was drawn away by stuff happening elsewhere and urgent. See Feb 7: "overwhelmed by it all".

Gardening record calendar February 2022

A few things are still in my worry list: "Spriggy looking thin". This is not referring to the width of my privet hedge, but how well leaved it is. In winder nowadays it looks twiggy and a bit bare. It's still there, plus the topiary chameleon is becoming misshapen. Time for a change?

"Happier up ladders" is nice to see. I was terrified of working at height after the post-stroke treatment left me fainting. But "kept dropping twigs on face" suggests that the visual field problems were still bugging me a lot. 

Finally: "are there wild hellebore?" Yes, my hellebore are self-seeding nowadays. Like my year-on-year Nigella, I can see how the fancy hybrids produce a simpler plant, ;less doubling, clearer, smaller, paler blooms. Not wild yet, but the beginning of the process of feralization.

a count is as good as a kill

I've been re-reading the screenplay of a film I was very fond of, The Falls by Peter Greenaway. This is a surrealist experimental series of 92 short films about a "violent unknown event" (VUE) which was possibly the fault of birds (but perhaps not) and provoked a medical catastrophe for a subsection of humans who found themselves medically, emotionally, physically and linguistically changed by an event they could not understand.

Here's the trailer:

THE FALLS (Peter Greenaway, 1980) from Spectacle on Vimeo.

I was thinking about it in relation to two things, the first being The Big Garden Birdwatch and the second being the RHS calling on people to record weeds. In The Falls, naturalism is viewed with suspicion, the counters and the recorders and the observers interrogated for their intentions, with parallel drawn to hunting, and the cruelty of nursery rhymes, where birds die, repeatedly, fall, inevitably, stanza upon verse upon repetition upon rhyme. 

One of the touchstone phrases in the The Falls is: a count is as good as a kill. This runs both ways; it is as good for the person (the twitcher, the birdspotter) to check the bird off the list, as to shoot it. But also the act of counting is often one of disturbance and distress: mist-nets, rings, the adrenaline rollercoaster of capture and release, and the invasion of your territory and space by giant carnivorous apes might not kill you, but it's not great for you either.  It's a stressor. It really is. 

And also for plants of course. Observation, handling, noticing, spotting. None of these actions are possible without changing what is observed. The act of study changes what it observes, and that change can easily include damage. But it's still better for the plant than yanking it up, pulling it out, burning it and destroying its seeds. A count is as good as a kill for the human doing the counting.

But for the thing being counted, it's definitely the better option. 

sea rice and ice blossoms

In April 2021, I was very ill indeed. From time to time, I would start to do things, and then stop, defeated by the complexity of placing one thought in a sequence with another.

This post, abandoned in April 2021, consisted of two lines; the title, and this:

 Lockdown and illness have beaten the garden quite hard.  

It was interesting, trying to garden through the stroke. The damage to my vision had brought difficulties with light tolerance, with feeling confident in open spaces, with watering eyes that responded poorly to changes in  light. Things appeared at the wrong distance, or blurred. At the same time I was depressed. I'm a public health professional. I know the impact that having one stroke has on future likelihood of stroke incidence. My stroke had lost my faith in the future.

And it's hard to garden when you don't have faith in the future.

What about the title, though? What about the sea rice?  Well, that I tracked down relatively easily.

could this marine grain be edible?

A few weeks before I didn't write this blog post, I had read an article about Michelin-starred chef Ángel León and his interest in whether the grains of eel grass he had found growing in the sea could be eaten. I had read how it had been gathered by humans, maybe for a long time. 

I started thinking about Octopus Gardens, and how people have started farming coral in shallow water. 

These people are hybrid farmers, farming tourists, documentary makers, university staff and travellers alongside their coral. But all farms are human farms. That's how they exist. We are this era's megafauna.

Could we add Eel Grass into our commensurate species party? Have we done so already?

All this and more I couldn't express very well in words at the time. 

the flowers that look alive even though they are dead

As far as the ice blossoms go, I would not have been talking about frost flowers. I would have been talking about the slightly darker phenomenon, where an ice storm encloses blossom, and the flowers are encased in a vitrine of ice. 

You can tell by the time of year. April is the cruellest month.

The chrysanthemum above is dead I think. Two years of neglect and some sharp snaps of cold have done for it. It's a tough cookie, but not -10 tough.

crack gardens on the small screen

Is there an abundance in your area? Do you wish there was? I'm thinking about Abundance London whose name was mumbled over on an episode of Gardener's World way back in June 2022.

There are four months left to watch it, and if you don't want the usual run of Monty, Dogs, etc. skip to 37-ish minutes in to see an urban charity planting gardens in the cracks in the tarmac and pavements.

I remember writing about this years ago, crack gardens linked together with green lines. It's pleasing to see things leaping off the screen, real and established, and making an amazing difference to their local areas. 

Abundance networks run all over the country, gathering fruit that would otherwise go to waste, distributing food, raising awareness, gardening their way through to a better world.

These are fruit of my apple tree, which did not fruit last year, the weather being too poor. Here's to this year's crop being at little better.