The City Is My Garden.....

Bloom Fringe is an amazing event that I visited in the first weekend in June. it is the fringe event to Dublin's Bloom Festival, Ireland's premier garden show, and I was invited by the awesome ladies who run the event to spend three days in Dublin, talking visiting awesome community gardens, and generally just to get involved in the event.
On my first day in Dublin, somewhat tired from the journey, I found this piece of street art and it made me really think.........

What does that mean?
Well for me in particular the city is my garden. Supporting gardens and gardening is my thing and is what I do as a volunteer, giving my horticultural knowledge to folk who can use it to improve those lost and unloved spaces that most areas of cities have. Whilst what I do is, of course around creating those community spaces around food and growing, it is also more than that. For me it's a horticultural call to arms. A demand, if that is not too bold a word, for horticulture to be at the centre of the way we care for our cities. A request for good horticultural practices from all the stakeholders and contractors who work within the city. Why on earth shouldn't good planting, tree maintenance and planting, care for our parks and wilder spaces, be at the centre of what we see as a healthy city.
Now I am more than aware that most people think I am somewhat crazy in my thinking but let me explain.
81% of the UK population live in urban areas and that is an ever rising figure. Our cities are becoming full to the brim and it's a frightening scenario, as mental health issues rise and the NHS and others struggle to deal with the rising numbers of people needing support. We are constantly told that we need to get people into nature, but what on earth does that means? As discussed in a previous post, we can hardly bus people out to the countryside every weekend for their dose of nature, so what do we do?
Surely it's obvious? Surely we bring nature into the city? Surely we open the door and allow not just nature, but good horticultural practices into the city and allow people to feel that they have a voice in hat their city looks like?
But what do you mean Sara? Well........
So here in Bristol there are a few things that really get my goat. Over the years pollinator projects have meant that there are a lot of areas planted for pollinators, using a seed mix that was especially formulated for that. Now that project is over, sadly the beds are very poorly, if at all managed, and we see huge swathes of Welsh and Californian poppies that have taken over from the other species sown, peppered with willow herb and other weeds that have come in. They look sad and tatty. Like nobody owns them my grandmother would have said.
We also have some junctions that have been planted as herbaceous borders,. Now this is a wonderful idea and I salute it wholeheartedly, but these borders were planted without any thought for how they might be managed in uncertain times, and now we are in a city that needs to make 101 million pounds worth of savings this year, you can probably imagine the state of these spaces. They are trimmed once a year and wood chip is used as a mulch, which by this point in the year is failing and weeds are appearing through them. Whoever designed the spaces also didn't allow for failures or for some plants being more vivacious shall we say. Phlomis fruiticosa waves in enormous drifts across the city whilst other plants struggle. In some places Peonies have been used and their beautiful blooms fall all over the mulch as they are missing any form of staking and other plants surrounding them have died away.
Bindweed is also a massive issue in all these spaces as they are trimmed yearly, or cut with a brush cutter, that cuts back the bindweed and just makes it's roots stronger so that it very quickly takes over and strangles the rest of the plants in the space.

Wolfe Tone Square in Dublin

Now I realise here I am painting a picture of doom and gloom but of course there is another way. We all know that in days gone by councils parks departments were the way so many now esteemed horticulturalists began in the industry. Today we see, in most towns and cities, the parks teams hugely diminished, if they have survived at all, and hence this entry point is closed, or severely cut. Here in Bristol parks are set to become "budget neutral" and so the parks department has to be 100% self sustaining and so our incredible council nurseries, which we are lucky to still have, have to concentrate on growing plants for other areas in order to make themselves financially viable.
But surely we can change this? With Incredible Edible Bristol we have made gardens in the most unlikely of spaces, concentrating on growing food for sure, but also, and sometimes more importantly, focusing on the change a beautiful garden makes to those most unlikely spaces.
Whilst I was at Bloom Fringe, those fierce organisers of the event took two spaces and changed them with plants, effectively making gardens, all be they temporary spaces, in a car park and in a square in Dublin city centre.
Wolfe Tone Square is, I think, Dublin's equivalent of our Bearpit here in Bristol. A lost, unloved and underused space populated by a community that is in trauma. A space used for drinking, for anti social behaviour and a space avoided by many through fear. The aim of our Bearpit garden, is to support the creation of a more safe and inclusive space, with the addition of food being more of a side line although the vast majority of the plants used are edibles. By turning the space in Wolf Tone Square into a temporary garden, the atmosphere changed dramatically. children played in the mud kitchen, climbed on the copper cow and played chess with a chess master who was one of the spaces usual community. People stood in the space chatting, talking about plants, about gardens and about life. The seating available in the square is set in place and in a line so placing chairs around the space, making it beautiful with plants and grass, albeit fake, made people stop, slow down, take a seat and begin a conversation.
Now for me this is the power of good outdoor design. We cannot change the way our towns and cities have been designed. We certainly cannot change these lost or poorly used spaces but what we can do is put nature and good horticulture into our policies of managing these spaces, turning them from lost and unloved to beautiful, productive and healthy spaces. Investment now into this along with requests to other stakeholders who manage land in our towns and cities, and a change in how we design spaces into the future, will ensure healthier city as we head into the future, and can address not just physical and mental health of people, but also the health of the city itself, using SuDs, green roof and wall technologies, and bringing nature into the city for the health of the city.
So how do we do this?
Well in my experience, we just do it. Organise your community around that space and get on and make that change. Often it can be done for the price of a few seeds and the use of some old furniture that otherwise might end up in landfill. Clear those spaces, add some seats, spread some seeds and see what happens. Bur along with that, lobby your local councillors and ask them to begin to see the areas they support as a garden. Speak to your children schools and clubs. Find those people in your community who can help with gardening, carpentry, crafting skills.
And if you need proof that this works to make more coherent communities, use the examples across the country that are really supporting nature within cities to support the health and well being of both people and place.

Bristol's Bearpit Garden

Living in a food desert......

There's so much talk about food deserts but mainly we hear it from large, deprived areas of cities in the US and there's often some debate about whether they exist here in the UK. Inevitably the situation is not as dire here as our cities are smaller, and it would be rare to have to drive for half an hour to buy an apple in a city, although in areas in the countryside not so rare. However I'm going to talk cities as that's my experience and where I'm working.

Any city, as Bristol does, that has 16 working food banks, obviously has people living in crisis and food poverty. However, food poverty isn't just related to food deserts and, sadly, with access to food banks being quite difficult to attain, it's also questionable as to whether everyone in food poverty can even get to that food when needed. Far from it for me to criticise the food banks as they do amazing work, but the system to get to that food is long and complicated, usually including doctors and/or social services, which often is uncomfortable or even impossible for people due to personal circumstances. 

People are often very surprised to hear of food banks in Bristol. With its reputation as a foodie city, and its status in 2015 as European Green Capital, its reputation is somewhat different to its reality. For sure Bristol is full of amazing restaurants and has an abundance of community supported agriculture projects, city farms and community gardens, but it also has areas where people struggle to access fresh and most importantly affordable food for themselves and their families. Little did I know when I moved out of the city centre, that this would be something I would find out about first hand.

Where I live, in South Bristol, unless you have a car, which I don't as I don't drive, the closest supermarket other than the convenience store at the garage or the corner shop that sells sugary snacks and noodles in pots but not a pint of milk, is over 2 miles away. For sure there are buses, but buses no longer have the place to put your shopping at the front, as it's been utilised for free newspapers, so it's really important only to carry onto the bus the amount you can hold within your seat area. The buses in our area are really well used and are often packed so more than 3/4 bags is impossible, and in reality 2 bags for life is your limit. I've seen drivers refuse people entry to the bus with more. 

For me this is hard. I want a diet full of fresh, locally grown where possible, food that's good for me. The reality of the supermarkets that are accessible by bus most easily is that they are fairly small stores and their range is limited. A lot of the food isn't ingredients, but ready meals, pizzas, and their vegetarian options are limited to say the very least! 

Fizzy pop, crisps, biscuits, pastries and cakes are given far, far more space than fruit, veg or fresh meat and fish, with all the offers on snacks rather than good food. But of course I have options and choice, and although it means being more organised, I am lucky that I can fairly easily access the Bristol food scene that we all know of, and that with an allotment and garden I can grow a lot of our food myself.

But what about those people with limited choices, or no choice at all? What about parents juggling jobs, often with unsociable hours, and often more than 2 in order to pay the bills? What about families with no car? Or even with a car, but with several jobs that car always being out with the working parent? What about single parents struggling on one income? All these people are time poor as well as living somewhere that has been designed as a dormer suburb, with little thought to the logistics of life. Over and again I attend community consultations about food where I hear the clear message that what the community wants is a supermarket. And over and over I see middle class choice not understanding need. For sure community shops, box schemes and deliveries from local suppliers are wonderful but for many they are just not affordable, or what they want. Many of us take for granted the ease of a supermarket, or the expectation of having weekends and evenings free, but for many families this just isn't the case.

I have an understanding of this, as my husband is a prison officer who specialises in mental health and suicide prevention in a hectic women's prison. He works long hours, and does a job where he can't just leave when it's his allotted time. He also works every other weekend. Due to his work, for obvious reasons, we don't live too close to his workplace, so he has to take the car as public transport simply doesn't exist. Family life for us has always meant juggling his work commitments around everything else that has to be done. Easy when you live in a small town with two supermarkets and nigh on impossible when you don't.

So what is the answer? Well the answer is design. The answer is to stop building housing estates without thinking about food provision and stopping the expectation that everyone has  use of a car to visit out of town supermarkets. 

But what's also  important is finding communities that are struggling and empowering them to help themselves by creating positivity around the issues and looking at exciting, engaging ways to get people to look at how they connect with food.

But, and here's the crux of the point, whilst our government is happy to give control of our food provision to the supermarkets, effectively giving them a green light to behave in any way they want, it is going to be people power that changes things. Generally food deserts in the UK appear because the big guns know that people will have to visit them, however hard it is to do so, because there is no option and once in through the doors, their clever marketing has you in its hold. We need to demand that this changes, through both urban planning, local and national government but most importantly through people power.....

And with that ladies and gentlemen, I say...... 

'Watch this space'

Guerilla gardening or good use of a lost poiece of land?