The potential for a grow-your-own revolution is already built into urban landscapes – all that is needed is the will and the vision to unleash it.
After over 20 years of rural living, a fortnight spent in an urban, edge-of-town setting has reinforced my lifelong belief that gardening – in all its forms – is a gentle yet powerful force for good in a world gripped by a mounting polycrisis.
Yes, the simple act of gardening can carry us away from fret and worry, but it can also germinate in each of us the seed of personal empowerment; it’s doing stuff. There are big things only governments can do – such as helping to calm our angry, increasingly unpredictable climate – but each of us can do small stuff, that together makes a big difference. Gardening is rammed with small actions with big payoffs.
The venue for my urban sojourn was originally conceived as a social housing estate, made up of a mix of housing: flats, terraced and semi-detached dwellings, and bungalows. Today it’s a mix of both rented and owned properties. Exploring on foot, what struck me turning every corner was the sheer but almost universally untapped potential for growing things – for gardening to be writ large.
There is plenty of space; some homes have large front and back gardens, and there is ample green space – largely grass that’s regularly scalped by impatient, can’t-pick-up-the-litter-first contractors (in a few spots, a tamed mowing regime is allowing spring and summer flowers to flourish). End-of-terrace houses hit the jackpot with garden (and walls) on three sides – generously sized plots crying out to be more than canine toilets.
I’m horribly judgemental whenever I’m nosing at other people’s gardens. Where there’s a prim lawn or a lifeless patio, I see a flourishing no-dig food garden; where there’s a bare wall, I see a sun-powered lean-to greenhouse brimful of vegetables and flowers; where there’s dreary decking, I see a free-standing greenhouse, powered year-round by free and renewable sunshine; where there’s a run of dismal hedging, I see a border brimming with dahlias (other plants are available) courting clouds of bees and butterflies; where there’s impermeable hardstanding for cars, devoid of life, I see a rain-catching border helping to reduce the risk of local flooding.
I came across some flowers, mostly in containers, and a few accidentally rewilded lawns replete with wildflowers, but, bar a few forgotten apple trees, no edible plants. There were a few gardens with perennials and shrubs, and the odd tree. I won’t mention the alarming number of fading hanging baskets draped with plastic tat already shedding microplastics. Or the mercifully few frontages carpeted with soil- (and soul-) killing plastic ‘grass’. Or the odd soggy sofa…
Beyond all this, what I saw was opportunity and potential: bountiful gardens overflowing with fresh, pesticide-free food, only footsteps from the kitchen; armfuls of smile-bringing flowers; sun-soaked walls trained with anything from runner beans to fruits; and greenhouses, greenhouses – little and large – everywhere. I imagined wild life filling the air, neighbours chatting, swapping seeds, keeping an eye out. I envisaged green spaces transformed into vibrant, multicoloured wildflower meadows, mown silently by scythes in late summer. I saw opportunity; possibility.
It’s clear to anyone paying attention that the future is going to look and feel vastly different to what’s gone before. The changes being wrought by our increasingly unruly climate are being felt across our planet, far sooner than scientists had predicted. The relatively benign, settled conditions under which human civilisation has flourished are bowing out.
Extreme weather events are increasing, some with fatal consequences. Ocean currents, which help to drive our climate, are faltering. Earth’s frozen continents are melting. We’ve pumped so many greenhouse gases into our atmosphere that even if we stopped tomorrow, the best we can hope for is a slightly less bumpy ride. Reaching certain planetary tipping points means all bets will be off. Unfamiliarity, uncertainty, apprehension – and, for many, danger – will be our constant companions for generations to come.
One of the main casualties of an increasingly unpredictable climate, and the extreme weather it will inflict on us, will be global food supplies. Blurred, topsy-turvy seasons, heatwaves and floods are among the signals that the settled, reliable conditions we’ve been growing in for millennia are history. Farmers and growers are already struggling to adapt – and here in the UK we’ve so far only had a taster of climate chaos, most recently courtesy of Storm Bert. Our just-in-time food chains are prone to snap under even slight pressure; even a few days’ delay in food reaching stores, and shelves – driven by selfish panic-buying – become empty.
We need to be growing our resilience to such future shocks by lighting a fire under gardening itself and growing more of our own food where it’s relatively safe from extreme weather – which is in our own back (and front) yards. The closer we bring food-growing to our back doors, the higher the chance of success to spur us on; short, strong chains are harder to break. It will also ease pressure on our pockets when food shortages kick in and inflation climbs. We don’t so much need ‘Dig for Victory’ as a slogan, more ‘No-Dig for Local Resilience’. It’s not as catchy, I know, but gardening needs to flex its educational muscles as much as it needs to get under our fingernails and help put food on our plates, flowers in our vases and joy in our hearts.
How we achieve this, and quickly – because we’ve no time to dither – is the key question. What we do know is that it will require imagination, persuasion, some political pressure, near and far, a compelling narrative, and some hard cash. It’ll take incentives for people to sheet-mulch their lawns, prise up their patios, turn walls into sun-catchers, ditch their decking, grub out hedging and plump for porous driveways.
As a first step, why not offer a greenhouse grant (for a proper, good-quality model, not some floppy plastic job that’ll take flight in the next storm) to anyone who wants to get started, backed up by regular visits and ongoing advice from their local Resilience Gardening Advisor, whose (paid) job is to coax everyone into discovering the gardening activity that fires them up? The ReGAs could also be tasked with persuading those unable or uninterested to let others tend their gardens in return for some fresh, free food. Possibilities, opportunities, potential.
Putting gardening at the heart of the (so far scant) plans to adapt to inevitable climate change makes perfect sense; it sows the empowering seeds of personal resilience. Sowing can start today. Urban living, especially, needs to be immersed in gardening and all the positives it brings: it can be productive, beautiful, life-lifting, empowering, community-building, a lifeline for nature, and blissfully addictive – however wild the weather.
It’s time for us to start doing stuff.
Text and images © John Walker
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