I grew up in a windy rural upland, in a house surrounded by gardens, gently decaying fruit trees, and fields. The nearest main roads were miles away, the air clean, and the night sky comfortingly dark, untainted by light pollution. Grass was far more familiar than concrete, and the passage between one month and the next was marked in the environment as things grew, and bloomed, and died, and regrew in a cycle that even the most bored and frustrated would-be urbanite could come to love. Since moving to the South-East, however, I've got sucked into the lifestyle that many, if not most, Londoners are used to: a succession of grim magnolia-painted boxes with something green in a tub, if you're lucky. There are a few of us with bijou rooftop gardens and the like, but these are generally those people who did non-Humanities degrees and are therefore in properly gainful employment. Everyone else gets to see little foliage beyond that found in parks, or side salads, and the passing of the seasons means little more than a change in the likelihood of getting uncomfortably hot on the Underground, or unpleasantly wet leaving it. The weather's essentially something you experience on holiday, unless it happens to delay your train or is freakish enough to make the front page of the Standard.
It was a pleasant surprise, therefore, when on moving into a new house at the beginning of last year, I looked out the back and saw...green. Well, weeds and grass, mostly, but a real garden nonetheless. This, in turn, got me thinking: perhaps I could make something of this. Do my own bit to reinvigorate the city's green lungs. After all, anything even vaguely environmental is currently a newsworthy topic; so why not attempt to reconnect myself with the earth that my forefathers once tilled? (Actually, they seem to have mostly worked in offices, but the point still stands.) 2006, I decided, was to be a year of gardening. I would engage myself with an existence beyond that serviced by Waitrose and Transport for London, and bring a little more of the rural into the urban, recording my progress monthly for the education of others. No gazebos or Titchmarsh, though: this was to be cutting-edge, seat-of-the-gardening-pants stuff.
January.
The garden sits there, taunting me. It is a tangle of dead bindweed, brambles, and other things I have no desire to >>
It was a pleasant surprise, therefore, when on moving into a new house at the beginning of last year, I looked out the back and saw...green. Well, weeds and grass, mostly, but a real garden nonetheless. This, in turn, got me thinking: perhaps I could make something of this. Do my own bit to reinvigorate the city's green lungs. After all, anything even vaguely environmental is currently a newsworthy topic; so why not attempt to reconnect myself with the earth that my forefathers once tilled? (Actually, they seem to have mostly worked in offices, but the point still stands.) 2006, I decided, was to be a year of gardening. I would engage myself with an existence beyond that serviced by Waitrose and Transport for London, and bring a little more of the rural into the urban, recording my progress monthly for the education of others. No gazebos or Titchmarsh, though: this was to be cutting-edge, seat-of-the-gardening-pants stuff.
January.
The garden sits there, taunting me. It is a tangle of dead bindweed, brambles, and other things I have no desire to >>
