Gardening – The new urban wild

At a time when many people were concerned about food security, I ran a series of Survival Gardening workshops between 2020 and 2023, and some incredible survival gardens have taken root as a result.

John Claudius Loudon (1782-1843) is remembered as the best-selling garden writer in the world. His An Encyclopaedia of Gardening (1822) aimed to diffuse knowledge about gardening to men and women of all sections of society presenting gardening as a lifestyle choice. He believed that nature should be the hallmark of modern cities and cities should be landscaped like a garden, a retreat brimming with vegetation.

By 1938, 65,000 people had entered the competition run by the London Garden Society for the year’s best-kept garden!

Urban gardens can be an extremely complex environment creating a mosaic of different habitats, and key microhabitats while yielding a diversity of food. And this month I had the pleasure of visiting a local productive suburban survival garden. It was a feast not only for the eyes but also for the table.

The gardener, John showed me the tricks he learned from the workshop. He had built metre high raised beds to terrace some of the sloping section, installed a semicircular frame for pumpkins to climb over, getting them off the ground. A variety of zucchini, tomatoes and eggplants were spread around, making sure if one area failed there would be others to harvest. 

A number of bean teepees sprouted out of the ground covered in vibrant purple beans and the violet flowers. While the tomatoes were staked and covered with netting barriers to keep the birds and green shield beetles at bay. No pesticides, no chemical fertilisers, just a mosaic of ever-changing ecosystems and different microhabitats!

Paths wound through the raised beds, and one area had been given over to a stunning variety of herbs.

Last year’s compost pile had been transformed into a potato bed and would be dug up by the grandchildren as an early gardening lesson.

A small well-tended orchard allowed free movement around the lower garden which ended with a fence hidden by bananas in fruit.

Loudon, who envisioned suburbs blending the best of city and countryside, creating a new type of nature, would have been pleased to see that here was a man who had counterbalanced the frenetic intensive housing assault on urban life by a retreat into nature brimming with vegetation.