Let locally adapted self-seeders run wild, and watch your garden come alive. It’s been a wild summer in my garden – in every sense. Diminished gardening time has meant that many plants and projects have run away from me, unleashed and untamed, egged on by peaks of heat and unseasonal lashings of rain. Stuff has […]
As global heating escalates, we can’t go on gardening as usual. It’s time for disruptive gardeners’ questions – and for some serious answers from our ‘experts’. ‘Thought I’d never make it!’ A middle-aged, tanned and fragrant woman slid in through the back door. ‘What’s going on out the front?’ She dabbed sweat from her forehead. ‘We’re […]
Forget complex, resource-hungry gadgetry, and soak up simplicity: earth-friendly mulches make greenhouse watering easy and guilt-free. Gardening – especially any-weather greenhouse gardening – is a just-steps-away activity that offers us sanctuary from our increasingly busy-busy, rushed, technology-driven lives. Plants don’t go ever-faster to keep up with the latest app, or to improve their efficiency; they just grow, chasing […]
Most people buying compost still have no idea what’s in the bag – or why it matters. As the climate crisis escalates, that needs to change – and fast. I recently did a spot of crowd-sourcing via social media: Twitter, in this case. I asked – via the hashtag #peatfree – for ideas, tips and […]
Cut your ties to plastic – there are plenty of renewable options that provide plant support without microplastic pollution. Off they go, carried on the breeze – motes of pink, persistent pollution blowing up and away into our world. A small, shimmering cloud of glinting alien fragments, destination uncertain, their effect on the web of […]
As ecological crises mount, we need to take a closer and more honest look at what we’re doing in our gardens. It’s not as green out there as we think. Red lights are flashing everywhere. Natural emergencies abound. A collapse here, a crash there, a pollution calamity unfolding (air, water), climate breakdown accelerating… the more […]
As ecological crises deepen, we need to start gardening differently. On compost – peat-free, of course – the answer could be to think closer to home – and outside the bag. We often hear the term ‘blue-sky thinking’, which is consultant-speak for creative thinking that’s beyond the norm, outside the box – thinking that’s not […]
Ultra-local, infinitely renewable, and people- and planet-friendly, could gardening be the key to regenerating our town centres? If I owned a clutch of glitzy, can-only-get-there-by-car garden centres, I’d be worried. Not about tremors from our ongoing political crises. Not about the meteorological unknowns that climate breakdown is foisting upon us (bad weather means poor sales, […]
Weave magic with willow, for seasonal cheer without an entwined ecological cost. Bar a few rare leaps, my heart is apt to sink at this time of year. Often, it quietly howls, when bemusement turns to anger, then despair. I know it doesn’t sound like I’m brimful of seasonal spirit – winter solstice or Christmas; […]
As the seasonal tide of merchandise threatens to engulf us, have we reached a tipping point? It’s time to start saying no to stuff. It didn’t make much of a thud, it didn’t shatter into a thousand gratifying pieces, and it hasn’t done anything for my faith in gardening being a force for good in […]
Close the loop: a modest, well-mannered shredder can convert tough green ‘waste’ into mulching magic, and let you keep all of your garden’s fertility on site. I’ve just been absorbed in a day of magical, hands-on fun in balmy autumn sunshine. Serenaded by a gentle clatter of falling oak leaves, and by the sudden, startling […]
A simple, radical idea to protect global biodiversity – keep half of the earth for us, and give half back to nature – could take root in our gardens and allotments. Some ideas grab us gently by the throat and just won’t let go. The philosophy behind an idea, together with its aims and goals, […]
