The Organic Garden. Allan Shepherd
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Wildlife is at the heart of your organic garden, so enlist the support of your garden allies. A true organic gardener assesses how to work with nature to get the most from their garden without having to be its constant guardian. The garden is more important to those species that occupy it full-time, so make a garden for those who always use it. If you do it right the pollinating insects will bring you flowers. The composting creatures will improve your soil. The predators will eat the pests. Garden for other species and they will garden for you.
Five: grow for ornament
Vegetable plots are only part of the story. Ornamental gardens can be organic, and edible and non-edible plants can be grown together in beautiful spaces. And beautiful spaces change lives. We are only beginning to understand how bad spaces ruin lives, but with each passing year there are fresh studies that reinforce the commonsense view that people with access to beautiful spaces are happier. Just as we see studies showing that young people perform better at school if they have access to healthy food, so we are beginning to see how people of all ages perform better in beautiful environments. In Chicago, crime rates have fallen dramatically in areas where new parks have been created. It seems that people have more respect for each other and their local area when they are under less stress. And access to beautiful spaces reduces stress.
When I was twenty-six I met my friend and long-time collaborator Chloë Ward. Chloë is a true gardener, by which I mean it is her main occupation. Much of what I know about gardening I owe to her. Chloë is one of those rare people who can see beyond that which exists today to think about what might be possible in the future. Like Elzéard Bouffier, she plants for her own enjoyment but with an eye on what might be in the years to come. Many of the pictures you’ll see in this book are taken at the Garden Organic (HDRA) gardens in Yalding, where she formerly worked as deputy head gardener. Chloë’s particular mission is to grow edible plants in spaces that are designed not as vegetable gardens but as ornamental landscapes, mixing the ornamental and the edible. A fact borne out by her writing on food gardens in this book, including the section on the up-and-coming and relatively new technique known as forest gardening, a subject about which she is one of only a handful of people qualified to write on.
Six: value lies in the land
July 2006 saw two of the hottest days ever recorded in Britain. The beautiful damp, lush green Wales I know and love started to look like the Mediterranean. First, CAT gardener Roger MacLennan recorded the highest temperature in his garden in twenty years. Then the next day the record was broken. In 2006 the Welsh rain failed us. A temporary blip or a sign of things to come?
The question that concerns me most is how can we garden and live in an era of climate change without losing the peace, security and good living we enjoy today? As the government’s chief advisor on the issue has already suggested, climate change is now a matter of national emergency. Perhaps we need to conjure up the spirit of that other great national gardening effort, the Dig for Victory campaign of the Second World War, to look forward to our better world. To rekindle a love of gardening in a time of global crisis would be a wonderful thing.
But what kind of gardening should we aspire to? In the future, will each of us need to garden for self-sufficiency and put our leisure pursuits to one side, just as millions of people did during the Second World War? Or is this a different kind of crisis, where it is more important to use our gardens as little centres for well-being and low-carbon lifestyles?
When I’m in my garden I buy less music, I rent fewer DVDs, I don’t go out so much. I stay in, I dig, mend, make, plant, plan. I travel less. Use less electricity. Need no space heating. I invite people round and we party. It’s all a way of cutting my carbon use.
I figure if I can build a good life for myself here, one that is continually refreshed by new experiences of my garden, landscape and home town, I don’t need to travel or pursue carbon-costly activities. I’m trying to kick carbon addiction by creating a low-carbon lifestyle and my life is all the richer for it. I’m not saying I’m perfect, but my garden helps me keep within what the carbon experts say is a global fair share of carbon emissions – 2.6 tonnes of CO2 per year, compared to a UK average of 10 tonnes – the amount of carbon every person in the world could produce each year without causing global climate change. I’ve long since given up on the idea of total self-sufficiency. CAT’s Peter Harper once calculated the productivity of his garden. He weighed everything that came out of it – vegetables, fruit, garden waste, wood, the lot – for a year. He wanted to see in percentage terms how self-sufficient an average garden could be. He calculated that his garden could generate around 0.5 per cent of his annual space-heating demand in wood cuttings and about £140 worth of fruit and vegetables (at 1997 prices). After removing the cost of seeds and plants from this total, the economic value of his garden amounted to 0.9 per cent of total household expenditure. The true value of a garden lay not in its economic output, however, but ‘in terms of entertainment, therapy, exercise, education, contribution to environmental quality, nutrition, convenience, gourmet delights and sheer connectedness with the Earth’. In other words, all things that are priceless.
Self-sufficiency is a grand ideal but it may not be what is needed during this period of global climate change. My friends Tom and Lisa Brown (pictured above left) have a smallholding and grow almost all their own foods, make endless amounts of honey, jams and chutneys, and generally lead what you might describe in the old cliché as ‘The Good Life’. But they have a lifetime of learning under their belts and several acres of land in which to make their dream possible. The good life is a good life but it is also a full-time occupation. When I walk around Tom and Lisa’s place I am struck by their absolute commitment to the value of land, and their place in the history of the land they now have stewardship over.
In this period of climatic instability we will need to care for our own little patches with equal passion. Bad weather erodes soil and weakens our plants. But if we know our land well we can help to do our bit to keep it strong and healthy. If we can guide our own gardens through the traumas that climate change may bring, we will have played our part.
Seven: plant for biodiversity
To keep a check on the villains in your garden, fill it up with lots of different species of plants. Gardens are healthier if they have a large variety of different species and plants are less likely to suffer from disease.
In the flatlands of Lincolnshire I lived amongst space that was more or less dead for nature. Field upon field of agricultural crops stretched out around my village. Every summer millions of black flies blew across the open hedgeless country into our gardens. Here they would rest upon our clothes on the line, so much so that we would have to wash them all over again. They fell between gaps in our window frames and filled up the aluminium corners like ground black pepper. They got into the roots of our hair and into the corners of our eyes. The worst job I could imagine in my childhood was mowing the lawn on a hot day, one hand on the sticky vibrating plastic handle of the hover mower, the other brushing away the sweat and the flies from my face.
And all beyond me I could see the flat, open, soulless fields filled with their single crops stretching out for miles and tractors showering chemicals over them. If you were a black fly where would you go? Beneficial insects like biodiversity and pests hate it.
Eight: make a social space
Make gardens for people as well as for plants and animals. Gardens are not just for wildlife or food production. They are social spaces too and need to be designed for humans.
As a gardener I’m most interested in atmosphere, purpose and technique – what a garden feels like to be in, what it will be used for and how I can make it work horticulturally. We need a garden to do different things for us. A garden space does not just cater for one emotion or for one person or activity. It must mean different things for us at different times. For me a garden is a foil to my ever-changing moods. It’s a social space when I want it to be. A quiet space whenever I need it. A place to be active. A place to be still. A sanctuary. An invigorator. One male reviewer of my last book called it too feminine