Words fail me

That was my initial anxiety when Victoria Summerly asked me to write a weekly gardening column for The Independent magazine 23 years ago.

While I was chuffed to be asked, I was mindful of what I can only describe as mild dyslexia. At best, it slowed the reading and writing cogs and at worst, especially while giving a talk, made a sort of text-trifle with words quietly wobbling, sticking or vacating the room completely occasionally causing stage fright.

But this wasn’t a stage in the physical sense and the thought of being Anna Pavord’s sidekick writing a sort of post-script column, ‘Urban Gardener’ was too good to resist.

The one day a week I set aside to write 700 words almost always spilled over to two so, from an economic perspective, it didn’t make much sense, but I persisted and somehow, over five years or so, never missed a deadline.

The best part of the arrangement was that I was free to write about anything that grabbed my attention. A potentially dangerous concession on the part of the editor (I’m sure he winced every time I mentioned Brentford Football Club) but I don’t think I took too much advantage and kept the spotlight mostly on plants, gardens and our allotment.

My work as a garden designer has been rooted in a simple belief: that gardens can be places of beauty, calm and abundance. Whether you enjoy a contemporary city space or a more naturalistic landscape, gardens serve as places of connection to the life support system we casually refer to as nature and can help keep us sane in an increasingly bonkers world.

Today, with the threat of biodiversity collapse and multiple ecological crises, I often think how much more useful that column would be now.

Urban Gardener (revived), therefore, is an (old skool) attempt to get back into the habit of musing here on my actual website and not so much on social media where it increasingly feels like an echo-chamber. This blog will cover not only my professional work in design, but also the quieter, deeply rewarding life at our allotment within the walls of Henry VIII’s hunting grounds, Bushy Park.

Here, together with my wife Christine, fruit and vegetables are grown using stock-free methods, a way of growing without using animal-derived inputs.

We’re still amateurs by any growers’ standard but it’s reasonably productive, endlessly fascinating, and it continues to teach us a great deal about the complexity and generosity of nature and its effect on our physical and spiritual well-being.

Alongside this, I will occasionally touch on another subject that matters greatly to me: animal rights. Conversations around food systems, ethics and environmental responsibility can sometimes feel sensitive or divisive but that’s not my intention here. The aim is not to lecture or confront, (I’ll save that for Instagram!) but to share the choices we’ve made, the reasoning behind them, and the lessons we continue to learn.

For us, living a vegan lifestyle is, without doubt, the most fundamental and effective way of lessening our impact on the planet. It sits naturally beside my work as a designer and amateur grower: a desire to tread more lightly, to nurture life, and to create gardens without unnecessary harm. The only regret, like most of the vegans I know, is not coming to this understanding sooner.

Finding the right words for animal rights can be challenging and sometimes they have to be blunt, but it’s becoming increasingly important to address given the scale and speed of the onset of climate change and biodiversity collapse much of which is caused by animal agriculture.

It’s a taboo subject for many and one that you’ll be hard-pressed to find in any of the horticultural media publications (I’ll expand on this in my next post) or garden-related events and conferences. I hope this might change in my lifetime for the sake of all life on Earth and future generations.

These blog entries may be random (and I may pad them out with old Urban Gardener columns when I don’t have time to write) but I hope these thoughts/musings will offer something of interest whether you come here for garden inspiration, practical growing ideas, reflections on sustainability, or simple curiosity.

Above all, I hope they encourage thoughtful, generous conversations about how we might all live a little better with the natural world and the other lifeforms that we rely on so much for our very survival.