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.  

life in the carbon dioxide induced super-glacial

After last week's news around how Exxon knew about global warming in the 70s (not really a revelation, I remember this being referenced in comics in the late 80s) I was staring gloomily at the ruinous mess left behind by the second week this winter of deep minus figures and wondering what, if anything, I could do about the cold and the wet....

And then I remembered; it's winter, in the Midlands, and cold and wet is exactly as it should be. So let's list and celebrate some of the plants that will do just fine on miserable wet soil and cope with a temperature plunge to -10° starting with one of my all-time favourites: the Hydrangea.

The Hydrangea I have out back is called Little Lime because my garden is small and the classic mop-heads can get big and I need something pale and crisp to cut through the gloom. With my alkaline soil it may pick up a speckle of pink as it gets older, if it makes it through its first few years. It's a garden show purchase, and I dithered a lot about where to put it, but hopefully it'll be happy.

Trooper #2 is Winter Jasmine, sparkling out its golden flowers on bare stems right now. I got my winter jasmine in the standard way, via a rooted cutting, and had been spreading it round the garden a bit, but in pots. When all the pots dried through this summer, many of my cuttings growing on went. But a few were tough enough to see it through. Winter Jasmine, you're going on a few more fences this year.

Trooper #3 is Bird Cherry. I have a self-seeded interloper sneaking up skyward out front. It'll take a bit of abuse so it's time to start shaping it to make sure I maximise flowers. It it already routinely baubled with sparrows and bluetits waiting to get onto the bird feeder, which is hanging off.....

Trooper #4 Forsythia. Just as spring shouts, it screams, an explosion of sunshine yellow that says spring is here like nothing else can. I took a while picking my plant: went to the nursery when it was in flower so I could get the perfect yellow spark flower mass. It's well established now, so I can start doing the brutal cutting back that you're supposed to do. Do I dare? We'll have to see.

Trooper #5 is Flowering Currant, Ribes. It's pink, and I don't always go for that, but there's something so richly basic about ribes pink I'll forgive it that. It's not subtle, but it grows tough and well and puts a cheery sparkle wherever you put it. Pleased to see you, Ribes!

So here's to it being cold enough to settle the pests and wet enough to fill the water table, and we'll manage, because a UK garden should be able to take the wet and the cold and the murk and the gloom and come up in the spring laughing.

remembering last year in the garden

Last year in the garden was not a good year. The lumpy recovery from my stroke (late 2021) smashed head on into a year with very bad weather for gardening. Now, in early 2023, I am counting the cost of groundwater pollution, drought, freeze, chaotic heavy rain and the massy overshadowing of my property by the trees of my neighbours.

Farewell the Rhododendron I had grown in a pot since the mid-90s.

Plus the two Azaleas I had carefully rescued from outside people's houses and nursed back to health. It was too hot, and too dry, for too long.

Farewell my Bay Tree. When, it started to dry out and sicken, I was puzzled, especially as a Rosemary, in a neighbouring pot, had no such troubles. It was only later that I discovered that the Rosemary had punched through the bottom of its pot and grown a root into the Bay Tree's pot, outcompeted it and sent it on its way. A year that plants fought each other to death.

I'll not say the others are gone until I'm sure, but the  dry summer, the drenching autumn rain and then the brutal plummet to minus 11 was quite the trial.

January last year, though, I had no inkling of the horrors to come.

This is my garden calendar from last year. I've kept one for a couple of years. Initially it was so that I could figure out what time of year worked for things like planting. Now it's more like a record of what happened when. I'm not sure last year is going to be a good guide for the future. In honesty, I hope not.

But there is a moment of reassurance here. Yesterday I went out to look for my snowdrops and according the calendar they're not due till the end of January. My orchids are earlier than last year, some came out for Christmas. The Crassula is in flower again, improbable tiny white flowers in winter's depths. But "things in greenhouse still alive"? 

I don't think I'm going to be saying that again this year.

All the same, life continues and there are flowers in the garden this new year, here and there.

dreams of trees that glow in the dark

I live in an urban environment. True dark lurks here and there; a shadow at the alley's end, a slope down under trees, a deep cut through a wooded area. The deep glove darkness of my back-garden, overshadowed by neighbourly, I'll-cut-it-I-promise trees that let me see, through their leaves, the stars. 

But mostly, I live in a constant light-bath. This causes me no concern. The light nights of camping and festivals, a childhood of spending high summer in a curtainless static caravan have left me calm in the face of sunshine, somnolent in the brightness of dawn. These trifles have little impact on my ability to sleep. I imagine the rufty-tufty urban blackbirds feel much the same, napping through the rush hour and hopping out to sing at terrifying volume as the night slides the traffic away to bed.

But, at the moment, people are thinking, what if street lights were a bit less, you know, light? Ecologists, mycologists, urban planners, energy savers, wildlife advocates, public health agitators and sleep hygienists, all of them looking at our steady golden urban glow and muttering, "light pollution". Could they be set to turn off or dim? Made responsive to need or presence?

This shifted a soft half-memory in my mind of  a green-sky proposal from somewhere in the noughties of a city lit by trees that glow. Eventually, this week, I found the ancient article, which linked me to an antique website, all startling justification choices and giddy optimism.

We placed genes from fireflies and bioluminescent bacteria into E.coli. Codon optimisation and single amino acid mutagenesis allowed us to generate bright light output in a range of different colours. Future applications include [deleted content] and quantitative biosensors and biological alternatives to conventional lighting. [read on]

It feels like a future leapt at and missed.That urban world where Mr Fox and a scatter of bats flicker between turned off street lamps lit into bare visibility by a soft bioluminescent glow. It's impractical, of course; the light is dim, even to the giddy young eyes of Utopian scientists.

But lots of things in life are impractical, and nevertheless happen.

A quick knock at the final paragraphs of the article links things up with Alexandra Daisy Ginsberg whose alongside work here provided the colouring for the faint bacterial/vegetal glow. The video has a similar giddy Utopian charm. Watch and spot the futures that sort of came true, if you squint a little.