Jennifer Owen's amazing bug studies.

In 1980, in an average sized garden in suburban Leicester (my home town), Jennifer Owen began cataloguing the wildlife found there. Over the next 30 years, she found 2,673 species of wildlife living there, including several insects previously unknown to science. A lecturer and amateur entomologist, she created a scientific study of amazing depth and value, all without any funding.

Jennifer Owen's regular suburban garden

recommended reading: One of Jennifer Owen's two books on her garden.

read a bit more about her incredible work here:
http://www.independent.co.uk/environment/nature/me-and-my-garden-how-jennifer-owen-became-an-unlikely-champion-of-british-wildlife-2131712.html

Inspired by her work, Ken Thompson from the University of Sheffield headed up some valuable studies himself, and wrote this excellent book about it:

again, highly recommended for anyone with any interest in helping the birdies and beasties and generally saving the planet.

Pop-Up Parklets

A kind of urban intervention, 'parklets' have been popping up in cities around the world, including Sao Paulo, Vancouver, Copenhagen, San Francisco and Dublin. Taking over parking spaces normally reserved for cars, these temporary, pedestrian friendly little patches of garden make a point about the amount of green space disappearing under tarmac.

Remembrance day special: the prison camp gardens of WWI

From the garden museum website:

In an encounter with (war poet and soldier) Siegfried Sassoon in parliament in 1918, Winston Churchill claimed ‘War is the normal occupation of man’. When challenged, he added: ‘War – and gardening.’

The garden museum currently have an exhibition about war and gardening, which includes the story of the Ruhleben Horticultural Society. These were the British soldiers interned in the Ruhleben prisoner of war camp, which was described as 'not fit to keep pigs in' when it was opened. In this horrible environment, with seeds and bulbs sent by the RHS, they created gardens growing not only veg to supplement their meagre food rations, but also flowers and decorative plants to improve their surroundings. They even organised flower and vegetable contests.

members of the Ruhleben Horticultural Society 

The exhibition runs until January next year.

Flowers to the people!

Grow Wild are distributing wild flower meadow packs; with seeds and more, for free to people across the UK ready for sowing in Spring 2015. Organisations can apply for them here: https://www.growwilduk.com/

Radical Gardening!

Is growing something a revolutionary act?
(In a very gentle way) it can be!

Stickers from Breakfast and Jess

From growing your own food to reduce your reliance on supermarkets, look after your health or take cash away from the capitalist fat cats; to communal growing to bolster your community and help address a myriad of social problems. You can care for the land, create a habitat for nature; or do a spot of guerrilla gardening to reclaim the concrete wasteland. You can starting your own one person recycling scheme by making your own compost, or save seed and propagate & give away to spread the gardening love... gardening can be way to stand up against wastefulness, want & the general decline of western civilisation into a greed-driven consumerist slump. Literally grassroots and from the ground up, constructive instead of destructive, gardeners make places that are often productive and beautiful in a myriad of different ways.

Not a filthy commie dissenter? No problem! Gardening is fun for capitalists & rightwingers too! In fact, one of the major joys of gardening is the way it can bring people together. No matter what your political persuasion, you can have a good old chinwag about how to get rid of peony blight or your new favourite potato variety.

So is gardening revolutionary?
This man:

Ron Findlay
certainly believes it can be. Watch his TED talk (follow the link) and be persuaded.

More gardens on wheels...

This time by Danish design group SLA:

Love the surprising contrast of the wild looking chunks of landscape in the industrial trailers.

Tyre garden by Jerónimo Hagerman

Recycled tyres containing ponds and lawns and trees. An installation by Jerónimo Hagerman in Mexico City.

http://www.lugarcero.com/index.php/archives/1319

Gardening and conflict

Some fantastic reportage on gardens created in conflict zones by photographer/journalist Lalage Snow here

Ruined palace of peace, Kabul, Afghanistan.

You can read the article she wrote for The Garden magazine here, or see her talk about the project at the Garden Museum in London on the 15th October 2014 (link here)

Another meaningful garden created in a conflict zone is this one:

A garden of tiny, jewel-like flowers sprouting from the waste products of destruction. Started by Bassem Ibrahim Abu Rahma's mother, after he was killed by a teargas grenade. For the last 8 years, local villagers have protested every Friday about the Israeli settlements taking over their land. The planters are empty teargas grenade cases, thrown at demonstrators by Israeli soldiers.

More info here

These gardens are shows of resilience and creativity under the harshest of conditions.

Wayward Plants

Wayward Plants create exciting horticultural projects such as this 'pop-up' community garden, with an emphasis on recycling and community inclusion. Inspiring stuff.

They also created this riverside recycled temporary allotments:

Fritz Haeg's edible estates

Artist Fritz Haeg, alongside his many other fantastic garden based projects, has been encouraging people to replace their front lawns with vegetables since 2005. 15 have been converted so far. And he lives in a geodesic dome...

Gardens of Gladstone Street pt.1

As proponents of community gardening have long recognised, gardening can be a fantastic way for people to make connections, encouraging people to bond over a shared love of green things.

 I saw this happening in a big way on my last allotment, where people from all walks of life & a huge range of cultural backgrounds would while away hours discussing the merits of different sweetcorn varieties, swapping cooking tips for the different veg they grew & having a laugh together in the morning sunshine. Of course, there were also some snide mutterings about the weeds on plot 34 etc, but in general it brought people together in a way I haven't witnessed elsewhere.

With this in mind, I've decided to write a set of posts on the rather lovely gardens in my local community, starting off on my street.
It's a street of terraced houses, so we all have limited space. The first garden I'm posting about is Katherine's, who has crammed in a shrubbery, box-edged fruit & veg beds, espalier apple trees, a shady fern garden under an ivy-clad pergola, a greenhouse and a summer house all in a space roughly 12 meters by 4 meters.

looking down the lush & leafy garden from the house

Looking towards the house with the blackcurrants & redcurrants on the left. The box bushes edging the bed give them a touch of formality.

You can see the zig-zag layout of the beds & the grapevine on the right. Behind me there's a little greenhouse with a flourishing kiwi vine growing over it.

Thank you Katherine!

Local greenery

A nottingham duo making the city a greener place:

I especially liked this wildflower bed:

http://www.creativequarter.com/community/projects/196687-2/
https://www.facebook.com/#!/ArticultureCQ