As official drought is declared in parts of England, here are some measures to preserve and future-proof gardens
With British gardens facing record temperatures, drought and hosepipe bans, it’s time for emergency measures. It’s particularly important because during drought, additional mains water is drawn from wild sources, affecting struggling wildlife. Here are some of the things you can do.
Continue reading...Charity says extreme conditions a ‘watershed moment’ and it is planning for long-term hot weather
The National Trust has reported significant effects across its estate from the recent extreme heat including bats in distress, heather struggling to flower and historic water features drying up.
At Wallington in Northumberland, bats were found disoriented and dehydrated in the daylight during the hottest days this summer, while in Cambridgeshire, a waterwheel that powers a flour mill has had to stop turning due to low river levels.
Continue reading...RHS Hyde Hall has made a virtue of its position in the driest county in England by embracing adaptable plants
It has not been artificially watered for 22 years, yet this garden, on an exposed slope in Essex, the driest county in the UK, is bursting with bloom.
A dry bed at the Royal Horticultural Society Hyde Hall dominated by cool greys and pale greens, and full of Mediterranean, Australian and African shrubs and flowers, could this be the future British garden?
Continue reading...National Trust garden at Castlefield Viaduct is inspired by New York public park and features 3,000 plant species
A “park in the sky” at a former viaduct in Manchester is to open at the end of the month, the National Trust has announced.
Situated along the Grade II-listed Castlefield Viaduct, the 330-metre temporary park is inspired by New York’s High Line public park, and features 3,000 plant species in gardens created by architects and community groups.
Continue reading...Victoria and Oleksiy Manoylo, who were in Milan when Russia invaded, have poured their trauma into garden
A burnt-out cottage decorated with embroidered cloths and surrounded by swaying barley, designed by a Ukrainian couple unable to return to their war-ravaged village, is set to be one of the unexpected highlights of the RHS’s largest flower show.
Victoria and Oleksiy Manoylo, landscape designers who were at a garden festival in Milan, Italy, when Russian troops invaded their village near Bucha and destroyed their home, have poured their trauma and defiance into the garden, which will feature at the RHS Hampton Court Palace garden festival next month.
Continue reading...After years in the wilderness, fungi are finally getting the attention they deserve from gardeners, scientists, designers and doctors
Joe Perkins, like most gardeners, has typically been more animated by what’s going on above the ground than below it. The quality of the soil was important, no question, but what was really going on down there felt mysterious and impenetrable. As for fungi, it usually meant one thing in a garden, and that wasn’t good news.
“On a domestic level, our relationship and understanding of fungi in the past has very much been that it’s something about decay, it’s about disease, and it’s something that we don’t particularly want in our gardens,” says Perkins, a 45-year-old landscape architect based in Sussex, who won three awards at the RHS Chelsea Flower Show in 2019. “It’s fair to say that, as gardeners, we’ve not always fully understood – and I still don’t – the importance of these systems.”
Continue reading...Half an hour a week of activities such as gardening, sit-ups or yoga could help reduce the risk of dying from any cause by a fifth
Half an hour of muscle strengthening activity such as lifting weights, push-ups or heavy gardening each week could help reduce the risk of dying from any cause by as much as a fifth, according to a new global analysis of studies conducted over three decades.
Health guidelines recommend muscle strengthening activities, primarily because of the benefits for musculoskeletal health. Previous research has indicated a link to a lower risk of death, but until now experts did not know what the optimal “dose” might be.
Continue reading...There is a wealth of exciting growers, collectives and designers whose posts aim to broaden know-how and help the would-be green-fingered to cultivate their passions
Alessandro Vitale has become an Instagram and TikTok guru for urban gardeners growing their own food. The Italian tattoo studio manager films his experiments in vertical farming and organic gardening for fun- and information-packed posts. If you’re wondering about the username, it’s a reference to his chilli obsession – he has seeds for more than 600 varieties.
Limited outside space needn‘t stop you growing an impressive display of flowers and edibles, installing water features or even having a stab at keeping bees
Continue reading...Salomé Jashi’s film follows the journey of hundreds of mature trees as they are uprooted across Georgia to populate a rich man’s garden
Like a sad, greedy king in some fairytale or parable, the Georgian billionaire and former prime minister Bidzina Ivanishvili set out, six years ago, to buy and uproot hundreds of magnificent mature trees and transport them at colossal expense and difficulty across Georgia to be transplanted in his own huge private garden. It sometimes involves taking a tree by water, along the Black Sea coast – a truly surreal image.
Salomé Jashi’s fascinating and deadpan film shows, in a series of tableau-type shots, the effect that these purchases are having up and down the land. Local workers squabble among themselves at the dangerous, strenuous, but nonetheless lucrative job of digging them up. The landowners and communities brood on the sizeable sums of money they are getting paid and Ivanishvili’s promises that roads will also be built. But at the moment of truth, they are desolate when the Faustian bargain must be settled and the huge, ugly haulage trucks come to take their trees away in giant “pots” of earth, as if part of their natural soul is being confiscated. (Surely at least some of these trees will have died en route, although this is not revealed.)
Continue reading...John Ystumllyn was abducted from west Africa in 1746 and taken to Gwynedd, north Wales
One of Britain’s first known black gardeners has been honoured with a rose named after him in celebration of his life.
John Ystumllyn, whose original name is unknown, was abducted as an eight-year-old boy in west Africa around 1746 and taken to Gwynedd, north Wales. There he became a servant in the household of the Wynn family of Ystumllyn, whose estate he was named after, and learned horticulture in the gardens.
Continue reading...Soon after 9/11, I moved into an old building by Ground Zero. First step? Plant an unlikely patch of green
If you listen, I mean really listen, you will hear your garden speaking to you. Mine, which sits on a 10th-floor Manhattan terrace, a stone’s throw from where the World Trade Center stood, first spoke to me on a crisp September morning 20 years ago. I had jury duty that day and decided to walk the two miles south from my home in Greenwich Village down to the courthouse in the financial district.
But when I turned south on to 6th Avenue, I looked up to see see an orange hole flaming at the centre of the tower ahead of me. A woman nearby fell to the pavement, screaming something about a plane. It didn’t seem like a good day to go downtown; yet something compelled me to continue south. When I arrived at a gas station on Canal Street, a boom sounded and a puff of smoke issued from just behind the tower. “What was that?” I asked a taxi driver, filling his tank nearby. “Well, see those two buildings are connected with pipes,” he said with the unquestionable authority endemic to New York cabbies. “When you get a fire in one it spreads and you get a fire in the other.” Makes sense, I thought, and pushed southwards.
Continue reading...Copper, coffee and beer come together in a cumulative effort to keep pests out of your patch
Anyone who has ever had a tree get in the way of a breathtaking view or pending development approval will know the consequence of a copper coin – come on, we’re all aware of this nasty poisoning tactic! But did you know that copper can be used to kill other stuff too, like pesky snails and slugs?
Continue reading...The Royal Horticultural Society has just awarded a gold medal to a garden full of ragwort and other weeds – and there are some clear benefits to letting nature take its course
Name: Weed gardens.
Age: Possibly older than actual gardens.
Continue reading...Tory councillors are accused of censorship over installation on atom bomb tests in Australia in a Southend park
An Australian artist has accused a group of Conservative councillors of using “bullying strategies” to silence and censor her work after an installation she created to highlight Britain’s “identity as a colonial nuclear state” was removed from a park in Essex.
The councillors threatened to “take action against the work” if it was not removed, according to Metal, the arts organisation that commissioned and then removed the installation from Gunners Park in Southend.
Continue reading...Many people yearn to grow their own food and live a simpler life – but, when coronavirus hit, some decided it was now or never. Have their dreams of burgeoning veg patches and frolicking livestock come true?
On their one-acre plot of Hertfordshire countryside, Sarah Apps and Liam Armstrong live with three chickens, 59 tomato plants and – until this morning – three pigs. “It’s been an emotional day,” says Apps. They plan to get more pigs later in the summer, and next week more chickens are arriving; then ducks and a goat, a couple of turkeys for Christmas and, maybe next year, bees. Living on their own land, and becoming more self-sufficient, had been a bit of a dream for the couple, but it took the Covid pandemic to make it happen. “You just didn’t know what was going to happen,” says Apps. “Young people were dying, older people were dying … I think you really need to live for the days that you’ve got.”
When they spotted a run-down bungalow that came with an acre of land, they went for it. They had been living in Romford, East London. “We could hear the roar of the M25 and I could barely be bothered to mow the small patch of lawn we had,” says Apps. They moved in November and spent the winter creating raised vegetable beds, putting in fencing and making animal enclosures. It has been gruelling physical work – they have done it mostly by hand – moving around 30 tonnes of soil. “It was our fitness thing through lockdown,” says Apps. But now they have growing just about every type of vegetable you’d find in a well-stocked supermarket, eggs every day, and in a few days the pigs will return for the freezer. She breaks off to check on a chicken who is in their kitchen. “She’s just had a bath. She’s not very well.”
Continue reading...‘Plantrepeneuers’ are springing up on social media to dig out space for black people in the natural world
More than 1.4 million people watch Alexis Nikole Nelson, the ‘Black Forager’, eat weeds on TikTok.
Related: Champ, Joe Biden’s German shepherd and ‘sweet, good boy’, dies aged 13
Continue reading...From an allotment shelter built out of old doors to a storage shack turned into a chapel, here are some of the best of our readers’ creations
This is my pandemic project: a garden pub shed, called the Doghouse. It is custom-built from timber with a Firestone rubber roof. Lockdown finally gave me the time to build it and I tried to reuse or recycle materials where I could. The doors and windows were from a friend’s old conservatory. The timber herringbone and boards, plus the back bar shelving, are pallet wood, which I burnished with a chainmail pad, and oiled to give it a nice worn look. I built the bar and canopy from scratch using leftover framing timber. The bench was built from a recycled bed headboard and I used a mattress for the seat. The table and chairs were a local Gumtree find, and the bar memorabilia and pumps were from eBay. I’m probably proudest of the bar. It has the feel and character of a little local pub – we often eat dinner there for a change of scenery. Our two children love it. But we will, of course, still support our local pub whenever we can. Gavin Thomasson, 42, design manager, Ipswich
Continue reading...From a fuchsia that can withstand all temperatures to a Christmas cactus nicknamed the Survivor, readers tell us about the brilliant, beautiful plants they just can’t kill
Continue reading...While enjoying an idyllic lockdown in France, the 83-year-old artist has created perhaps his most important exhibition ever – offering hope to an injured world
‘I think it looks terrific,” says David Hockney. “It’s all on one theme, isn’t it? And there’s not many exhibitions like that, really, a show all about the spring.” The 83-year-old artist is taking a look around his new exhibition at the Royal Academy in London for the first time. He seems happy with it – and rightly so, for it is hypnotic and ravishing. But while I am getting a sneak preview in person, Hockney is here only virtually, his face appearing on two screens, one a giant TV, the other a small laptop.
He is at home, at what he calls his “seven dwarves house” in Normandy, wearing a red, black and white check jacket, a checkerboard tie, a blue-green pullover and round, gold-framed glasses. His kaleidoscopic choice of clothing, challenging the very limits of the video call’s bandwidth, is as vibrant and beguiling as the canvases hanging around us. Hockney has not just painted spring; he has come dressed as it.
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