My New Allotment

It’s an exciting time in our village, with the development of allotments in a field not far from here. Championed by the parish council, a local landowner was persuaded to donate the space, and we’ve been watching progress with interest. It’s taken a time to get the suitable planning permission, and then toilets and car parking. A water supply had to be installed too; but at last we've been told we can pick up the keys to the gates.

The National Society of Allotment and Leisure Gardeners has a lot of information, from legislation, creating a new allotment site to specific growing tips, such as handy hints for new gardeners or first steps to allotment gardening.

So I’ll be blogging about the allotment in the coming months. I’ve already ordered a little shed. Watch this space to see how things go, and about our successes and (possibly) failures.

Save Those Trees!

I was interested to see that Boris Johnson has pledged to plant 10,000 new trees in London by March 2012. He said that: "Thanks to these trees, streets across London are leafier, more pleasant places to live in." However, according to CABE, the government’s adviser on architecture, urban design and public space from 1999 to 2011, trees in our streets are more important than just looking nice. They offer food and living spaces for birds and other wildlife, and moderate temperatures through the shade from their canopies.

According to the Natural History Museum urban trees help to clean the air and soil, counter noise pollution and absorb carbon. Their website gives details of the urban tree survey, a three-year study of trees in parks and gardens across the country to find out what trees are growing where, and how the tree population is changing.

The Woodland Trust has also been studying the value of urban trees, including the reduction of flooding and asthma rates to the list of benefits. Their report can be seen here.

The London Tree Officers Association is organising a conference called Trees, people and the Built Environment in Birmingham, 13-14 April 2011.

Knobbly Veg

Delicious. Magazine is running a campaign to get supermarkets to sell vegetables in all shapes and sizes, instead of the perfectly uniform, shiny sort which are at present graded as “class 1” by the EU. Class 2 vegetables, while tasting just as good, are consigned to food processing or animal food, which leads to a lot of waste.

The “We Love Knobbly Veg” campaign is being supported by The National Trust, which sources much of the less-than-uniform vegetables for their cafes and restaurants. They have also been encouraging people to grow their own “knobblers” in the “Food, Glorious Food” campaign.

Delicious. Magazine has a knobbly veg gallery on its website, and also a template that can be downloaded to send to MEPs in support of the campaign.

Biodiversity: Making a bug hotel

Around this time last year, I wrote a piece on the benefits (to wildlife) of not doing too much in the way of autumn garden tidying, and earlier this year I wrote about 2010 being the International Year of Biodiversity and how easy it is to contribute in our own gardens – so I thought you might like to see one of my own humble efforts – “The Crawl Inn”.

The Crawl Inn is a “bug hotel” – a place in the garden, loosely constructed from debris, intended to provide habitat for over-wintering of creepie-crawlie and buzzing insects. Most of these are highly beneficial to our gardens – either directly (e.g. pollinating insects and those such as ladybirds & lacewings which are predators for the less-welcome visitors like aphids) or indirectly (through forming part of the food chain for other insects, small mammals & birds).

Making a bug hotel is really easy, and it costs almost nothing, as well as being great fun for the kids! There are excellent instructions on the “buglife” website, and a Google search for “bug hotel” will also provide a multitude of examples and instructions for making shelters with varying degrees of “style” & ornamentation from all sorts of materials.

My own version was made as follows:

1. Gather the materials –
   Some plastic mesh (about 1m x 1m), 3 lengths of timber batten about 1.2m (4’) long and a piece of exterior (marine) plywood about 450mm x 350mm (18” x 14”), plus some twist tie and a staple gun.
   
2. Position one of the battens about 75mm (3”) from the end of the mesh, with the end of the batten flush with the edge of the mesh.
   Use the staple gun to tack the mesh onto the batten.
   
   
3. Repeat this with a second batten at the other end of the mesh, then with the third batten roughly in the middle of the mesh.
   
4. Roll the mesh to form a cylinder with the battens on the outside. Use a few strands of twist tie to join the mesh together between the 2 outer battens.
   
   
5. Take the tube to the spot where you want the bug hotel – ideally where it’s not exposed to cold winds and where it’s partly shady & partly sunny.



6. Hammer the long ends of the batten into the ground to make the cylinder self-supporting. It doesn’t matter if there’s a gap at the bottom between the mesh & the ground – that will give room for small mammals to use it too!



7. Start to fill the tube with materials to make the hotel’s accommodation –
   dry dead leaves;
   broken bricks & paving;
   dead stems & twigs from plants;
   short lengths of hollow bamboo cane (use an offcut of plastic pipe or part of a drinks bottle to hold them together as a tight bundle);
   pieces of wood with various-sized holes drilled in them;
   short lengths of tree trunks or branches – especially with rough or flaking bark, large stones, etc.
   


8. Almost anything will do – the objective is to create cracks & crevices and hollow spaces of different sizes to suit a whole range of creatures.
   
   
   


9. Once the tube is full, use the sheet of plywood to add a “roof” to keep the hotel rooms dry. This could be just placed on top of the tube, with bricks or large stones to weight it down, but I simply drilled a couple of holes at diagonally opposite corners then threaded some twist tie through these and secured it to the plastic mesh.



10. If you’re going to position your hotel on solid ground (e.g. paving), you’ll need to cut the battens the same length as the width of your mesh – hammering timber through the patio just won’t work!
    


11. My finishing touches were to print off the name of my hotel “The Crawl Inn” and a “Vacancies” notice, together with the “helipad” landing sign, make them waterproof by laminating them in plastic, then using the staple gun to fix them to the battens & roof.

To quote from the buglife website “A bug-friendly garden is a wildlife-friendly garden so if you want a garden filled with life, you need to look after your bugs.” – so, what are you waiting for ... get cracking on your own “B&B for Bugs” before winter sets in!

The Japanese Garden, Van Nuys, LA

Another garden from my US trip was one we just “happened” on while staying overnight in Van Nuys, en route to Santa Barbara. The Rand MacNally map mentioned “Japanese Garden”, so we just had to investigate. It turned out to be a revelation, not only because of its integrity as a garden, but also for its conception as an engineering project.

Designed by Dr. Koichi Kawana, it is a 6.5 acre authentic Japanese garden. Dr. Kawana created more than a dozen Japanese gardens in the USA. What is surprising is that this one is part of the Tillman Water Reclamation Plant (yes, a sewage works!) which provides reclaimed water to much of the San Fernando Valley. Donald C. Tillman, City Engineer, had the idea for the garden, and continually pressed for its funding, until it was granted in 1979.

The garden includes a dry Zen meditation garden (karensansui), a wet strolling garden (chisen) and a tea house.

It was peaceful and tranquil on the beautiful day that we were there, and well worth a visit if you’re anywhere in LA. Please check the opening hours carefully, however, before you make a long journey.

The Getty Centre Garden

The Getty Centre is a modern art museum, opened in Brentwood, Los Angeles, in 1997.
















It has a spectacular setting – perched on the Santa Monica Mountains foothills, overlooking Bel Air, Beverley Hills, Westwood, Century City and the San Diego freeway climbing through the mountains.

Although the campus is striking modern architecture, and the museum holds impressive collections of Western art from the middle ages to the present day, it was the garden which enthused me most.

The central garden was designed by American abstract-expressionist and installation artist Robert Irwin in 1992-97, working with the Getty foundation and with architect Richard Meier and landscape architects Spurlock-Poirier. Irwin, who was part of California’s “light & space” (minimalist) movement of the 1960s, described the garden as

"a sculpture in the form of a garden aspiring to be art"

aiming to provide the visitor with an experience of sights, sounds and scents, with design components selected to emphasize the interplay of light, colour & reflection.

It certainly struck me as a garden fully intended to work with the Getty Centre’s architecture.

Views of the white travertine buildings act as abstract sculptures backing the varied textures and organic forms of the landscaping & planting.

The garden occupies a natural ravine between the Museum and Research Institute buildings, covering an area of about 3 acres (1.25 hectares) which forms a small part of the overall 110-acre landscaped site. The garden entrance is a tree-lined walkway of angled herringbone stone paving which criss-crosses a stream as it cascades down through the ravine.

At the top end, the stream is contained within granite tile sides, creating a V-shaped wide rill, with large, irregular-shaped granite boulders in the stream bed where the water swirls over and around them. As the stream descends, and the path winds back & forth over herringbone timber bridges, its texture changes to granite sets and then to granite “tile on edge” with wide stone steps forming the banks between bridges. The stream eventually crosses a large terrace before falling as a short stair-cascade into a circular reflecting pool which holds a labyrinthine round-topped Azalea hedge growing about 75cm above the water surface.

Surrounding this pool are terraces of mixed planting, flanked by low Corten steel retaining walls and compacted gravel paths which ramp back & forth in long arcs between levels, following the style of the stream path and the lines of the pool and water parterre.

The central terrace, between the stream path and the pool, features Bougainvillea-clothed rusted steel “mushrooms” that create shady tree-like shapes with seating beneath their cover. Corten steel is again used to form organic, curvy retaining walls between the planted beds and the gently mounding grass lawns that stretch beyond to the campus buildings. Carved into the terrace is designer Irwin’s motto “always changing, never twice the same” – a key feature of the planting design which includes over 500 species (no, I didn't count them all!) to ensure variety & succession.

Clearly, there was no shortage of funding in the development of this garden (which took almost 2 years to construct in 1997-97), nor for its subsequent upkeep, with quality materials & craftsmanship evident in both the hard and soft landscaping. I did find it inspirational and could see how some of its features could be emulated on a smaller scale – with the water maze reminding me of my own design ”AQUA ZY Garden” from my college days!

Linked to the central garden is a small sculpture park – but I was disappointed with this.

Not so much in the artworks themselves, but with their setting – they seemed, to me, to occupy a piece of “left over” ground, with no thought to the background or direction of (natural) lighting.

Perhaps some additional softscape design could improve this!

The Getty Centre is at 1200 Getty Centre Drive, Los Angeles, and is free admission (though it does cost a few dollars to park) all year, except for Mondays & holidays. For more information visit www.getty.edu/visit/ and www.getty.edu/visit/see_do/gardens.html

Hello again - I'm back!

If you're one of the thousands of people who depend upon my weekly posts for your entertainment (!!!), my apologies for the gap - I've been on holiday.

You may recall my quip earlier this year that "I shouldn't be here" when my holiday plans were scuppered by the Icelandic volcano ash cloud which closed down UK air space a few minutes before our flight was due to leave - we were actually on-board, had heard the safety talk, and were planning our in-flight movies, etc. Well, this time we made it. We had almost 4 weeks doing a fly-drive trip out of Los Angeles, through the Mojave desert to the Grand Canyon and Las Vegas before heading back to the Californian coast at Santa Barbara and back to LA. I guess the 2100 miles we drove, and the flight itself, puts me in something of a carbon debt, so I need to get planting even more trees!

I must praise the ALK "CoPilot Live - North America" sat-nav app on my iPhone which only cost me £12 and faultlessly guided us around for free - the maps are loaded onto the iPhone, so it doesn't need a data connection after the initial WiFi connection (free at MacDonalds or Starbucks!) to let it get its initial bearings. "Park'n Find" was also useful for helping us back to our hire car in the huge parking structures at theme parks (we did "Universal Studios") and the large hotels in Las Vegas & Hollywood.

As well as the varied natural terrain, including US National Parks, between cities, we did get to see a few gardens along the way, so over my next few posts I'll cover some that I hope will be of interest.

Meanwhile, those clever guys at Google Blogger have been busy releasing a bunch of new features, so I've given my blog a "makeover" including a new layout/style, shifted some of the gadgets around on the right-hand side, added a bit more about me to the profile description (sorry it looks a bit messsy, can't find how to "justify" it) and moved the Facebook/Twitter "share" buttons to the new share facility beneath each post - so it's much easier for you to share individual articles you like via email, Facebook, Twitter, Google Buzz, etc. I've also added the "instant feedback" buttons (funny/interesting/cool) so you can just click these if the fancy takes you.

Hope you like!