Horror in the the garden (a literary look)

First up; a poem:

Everything In The Garden Is Lovely by Alasdair Aston

Even the fat slug

That drags its belly nightly

Over dank paving

And into the heart of the lettuce

Is lovely.

And the seething myriads in the ant-hill

Are lovely.

The stealthy, disruptive mole,

The grubbing, wet-nosed hedgehog

Are lovely.

And the millipede,

The centipede,

The sexually reproductive woodlouse

Are lovely.

The dung fly and the dung beetle

Are double lovely.

The burying beetle, the emmet,

The devil’s coach-horse, the dor

Are lovely.

Bean blight, leaf scab, club root,

Rose canker, cuckoo spit, wireworm

Cutworm, carrot fly, codlin,

Woolly aphis, apple weevil,

Leaf curl, algae,

Big bud, brown spot,

Rust, smut and mildew

Are all of them lovely.

And the flowers are lovely, too-

Nightshade, broomrape, henbane,

Love-lies bleeding and dead-men’s fingers,

Viper’s bugloss, red hot poker,

Wormwood, woundwort, rue.

And the gardener himself is lovely-

With one eye on the stable clock

And the other on lovely nothing,

Flat on his back where he fell.

The lovely flies walk in his lovely mouth.

Everything in the garden is lovely.

Alasdair Aston 1975

And secondly, a look at a greenhouse full of curiosities from 1884:

Against Nature (A Rebours), by J.-K. Huysmans

He had done with artificial flowers aping the true; he wanted natural flowers imitating the false...The gardeners unloaded from their vans a collection of Caladiums whose swollen, hairy stalks carried enormous leaves, shaped like a heart; while keeping a general look of kinship, they were every one different.

They included some extraordinary specimens,--some rosy-red, like the Virginale which seemed cut out in glazed cloth, in shiny court-plaster; some all white, like the Albane, that looked as if made of the semi-transparent membrane that lines an ox's ribs, or the diaphanous film of a pig's bladder. Others again, especially the one called Madame Maine, mimicked zinc, parodied pieces of stencilled metal coloured emperor-green, blotched with drops of oil paint, streaks of red-lead and ceruse: these,--the Bosphorus was an example,--gave the illusion of starched calico, spotted with crimson and myrtle-green; those, the Aurora Borealis for instance, had broad leaves the colour of raw meat, intersected by striations of a darker red and purplish threads, leaves that seemed swollen and sweating with dark liquor and blood.

This plant, the Aurora Borealis, and the Albane between them displayed the two opposite poles of constitution, the former bursting with apoplexy, the latter pallid with bloodlessness...

Read the rest of the contents of the ghastly glasshouse here....

http://www.ibiblio.org/eldritch/jkh/r08.html

Begonias from Leicester Botanic Gardens.

wabi kusa, kokedama, kusamono, ikebana.

Everyone knows about bonsai (especially if you've watched the karate kid film) but I wanted to look at these other approaches to greenery that originated in Japan.
Firstly: Kusamono. This translates as 'grass thing' and is an arrangement of growing plants replicating a little slice of nature.

When I saw pictures of Rosetta Sarah Elkin's 'Tiny Taxonomies' they reminded me of this. She created little fragments of landscape in the tops of steel tubes, reflecting the local surroundings. Each one is like a little garden. She recreates it in different locations, using plants from the surroundings. For example her London version used plants and materials from Highgate Cemetery. 

Next is Kokedama or string gardens:

Wabi kusa is a more random arrangement, where plants are wrapped onto balls of earth, sat in water and left to sprout. It reminds me a bit of the heads you made out of tights as a kid with grass sprouting out of them for hair.

And lastly there's the art of flower arranging, Japanese style: Ikebana.

minimal & elegant.

Aquascapes

Fancy your own underwater garden in the living room? Planted aquarium enthusiasts have created some rather amazing watery worlds, with an emphasis on the plants and hard landscaping rather than the fish and other creatures that inhabit them. Takashi Amano popularised the 'Aquascape' or 'Nature Aquarium'. Here are some that he created:

And here are some aquariums landscaped and planted up by other aquascapers:

Using carbon dioxide injection, liquid fertilisation and hidden filtration these high maintenance tanks are things of beauty. I'll be posing images of my own low-tech not quite so breathtaking version later.

Gardens on wheels

Moving Forest: 100 trees planted in shopping trolleys creating a forest on the streets of Amsterdam by NL. Inspired by a fairytale about a forest that moves at night so children trapped inside can never find their way out, the idea was to give the trees away so they could roam around the city, finding new and maybe surprising homes.

Food Systems Planning in Berlin had a community-gardening orientated take on the shopping trolley garden, collecting abandoned trolleys and holding workshops for people to create their own mobile gardens.

http://www.foodsystemsplanning.com/gemuesekorb

High tech vs. low tech

This sounds like it could be interesting...
International Conference on Vertical Farming and Urban Agriculture 2014
http://vfua.org/

A technology orientated conference on urban farming. Lowering our food miles and increasing self sufficiency is something I am extremely interested in. However, I wonder if the increased mechanisation, complication & industrialisation of growing things is a self defeating aim when it comes to attempting to lower the environmental cost of agriculture. I also think that for the small scale grower, happiness and an enjoyment of this pastime are important considerations, not just productivity and profit.

This book:
the One Straw Revolution by Masanobu Fukuoka

sums up the opposite of the high-technology, high effort approach to growing things. A great read for anyone interested in permaculture, I certainly found his low impact 'slow farming' approach inspiring.

Masanobu Fukuoka in his high-yielding rice field, 

grown using a very low-tech approach inspired by carefully observing nature.

It explains one Japanese farmer's highly successful 65 year experiment with low-tech permaculture. 

These two approaches are seemingly at odds with each other, but maybe there's a place for both in our world? The appliance of science could well help reduce the environmental impact of traditional factory salad farming, and technological wizardry/growing gadgets certainly have their own appeal. As a gardener, rather than a commercial farmer, this range of choices enables us to weigh up our own environmental impact when making decisions about what we grow and how, as well as providing us with more options to play with and more fun!

Green wall light installation

Street artists Luz Interruptus use waste materials and lights to create interesting installations. This one is a green wall of plastic-encased plant cuttings, each one glowing an eerie green. They use everyday materials and install their work in unexpected places.

http://www.luzinterruptus.com/

Growbags

This company is exploring the possibilities for growing in modular bags, creating an extended container garden that can be used to create green roofs as well as on the ground:
http://www.pockethabitat.co.uk/

It's been used here to green a concrete space very effectively.

made from recycled polypropylene, a good take on the growbag idea.

Another idea; Public Farm One, was picked by the MOMA in New York to be constructed in 2008. Whilst it looks more permanent, it is actually built from cardboard tubes. Designed by Work Architecture Company, the green roof of fruit, vegetable and herb plants shelters a farmers market, a kids grotto, benches, swings and a pool, and the supporting columns provide solar energy outlets for charging electronic devices, and inbuilt speakers create different 'sound environments'.

http://www.publicfarm1.org/index.php?/ongoing/about/