I’ve been doing a lot of research about biodiversity on brownfield sites for one of my projects, which led me to this fantastic lecture by landscape designer John Little.
John runs the Green Roof company, which has enabled him to bring wild biodiverse-rich landscapes to schools, public spaces and roofs.
He lives on a four acre plot where he tests out various structures and landscape materials, with different types of planting and how well they work in terms of ecology. He even talks about a shopping trolley found abandoned in a pond – it looks terrible but is brilliant in ecological terms, because it’s actually trapping natural material from the flowing water to create a usable habitat for wildlife.
While we don’t want to deliberately leave litter around, we can take the theory of putting a more complex structure into our landscape designs in order to create habitat, and hibernation and nesting areas.
You can watch the full lecture here:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Z_AzlRC6TBI
Do you compost?
I’ve talked about my love of making rich dark crumbly garden compost before. Every garden – whether you’re a keen gardener or not – should have a compost bin tucked away somewhere. Firstly, turning all your veg peelings and grass cuttings into compost will really reduce the amount of rubbish you fill your bins with, and secondly, it’s a completely free way to create compost in the most environmentally friendly way you can think of – using your own waste materials.
This week is National Composting Week (March 14-20) so check your local council’s social media for offers on composting bins and equipment. If you don’t want a plastic dalek in your garden, then of course there are more aesthetically pleasing ways of creating a compost bin.
This is a really good guide to composting from David Domoney:
https://www.daviddomoney.com/complete-guide-to-compost/
What have I been reading?
What are weeds?
What a beautifully written article by Alys Fowler. What are weeds, indeed?! In decades gone by, we would have attacked anything growing where we haven’t planted it with some vicious chemical. The post-war aesthetic was a clean and tidy square of grass and lots of bare soil and stand-alone shrubs.
Now we all have more awareness of wildlife and pollinators, and a much more natural garden design prevails. Weeds should not be seen as the enemy. Self-spreading and self-seeding plants can have so many benefits to your garden.
Read the full article here:
https://www.theguardian.com/lifeandstyle/2022/mar/16/how-i-learned-to-love-weeds-and-why-you-should-too
