London Mayor Boris Johnson's "food champion" (and failed organic farmer) Rosie Boycott bigs up roof gardens in today's Evening Standard - with particular praise for the garden on top of Reading International Solidarity Centre.

Completed six years ago, this was the work of Edulis Nursery & Landscape Design owner Paul Barney (who we profiled a couple of months ago), and shows how much can be achieved with even limited soil depth.

(Rosie should also check out more recent roof gardens at Ropemaker in the City and the Lyric Theatre, Hammersmith if she thinks Kensington Roof Gardens is a "one-off" for London. Indeed there is one London-based firm that specialises in roof gardens - though it reckons London "lags miserably" behind other cities.)

With roof gardens and other green roof formats appearing in the "Life & Style" sections, could they become next season's post-recession must-have? And if so, can we please all get the terminology right? There's no such word as "rooves"!!


I've gone on a bit about webby stuff lately, but can I just point out the joys of RSS feeds to those who have yet to discover them? "Really Simple Syndication" allows you to view all the blogs and other information sources you're interested in in one place.

I use an excellent free website called Bloglines but there are many other ways of doing it. Most blogs, as well as other web sources, have an RSS feed built in (look for the logo, as on the bottom right of this page). This way you need never miss a post from your favourite HW bloggers again!

Some years ago, during a bout of tabloid-fueled hysteria about paedophiles, Private Eye ran a cartoon of a man running from a baying mob, yelling back, "But I'm a paediatrician!" That same week, a real (female) paediatrician had her wall daubed with the word "Paedo".

What has this got to do with horticulture? Well, I've already mentioned the strange symbiosis between horticulture and video gaming. Now, within a day of this cartoon appearing in the current Eye:


...comes the news that Japanese games designer Keita Takahashi is redesigning the children's playground in Nottingham's Woodthorpe Grange Park. I'm intrigued to see what the designer of Noby Noby Boy ("gentle, happy-go-lucky lunacy") and Katamari Damacy ("unapologetically surreal") will come up with in a real-life play area.


More on web design "issues". I got a press release today from a guy who has probably the longest domain name in horticulture - even giving the website of Britain's longest-named town a run for its money. Good luck with typing that in off his business card (assuming it fits on).


Finally, in a week of an international fungi conservation conference in Whitby, how about some time-lapse footage of these intriguing and sometimes icky organisms:

 

It's the modern hack's lot to have to spend a lot of time online, and fortunately the standard of horticulture's websites has improved considerably in recent years. But there are still a few that rankle like a mouse that's on the blink.


¤ Body copy on the HTA's website is always at an eye-straining 11px (equivalent to 8-point), mid-grey against white - despite the site's recent refresh. This has done away with many of the longer pages, but still the "landing page" for the Greening the UK campaign runs to around three screens of text. Try as you might, you can't change that into anything more readable, short of cutting-and-pasting it into your word processor. Why is this necessary?


¤ Lots of even tiddlier text (10px, again grey, again not resizable) on the IOG homepage. Isn't horticulture supposed to have an ageing population? Let's hope the DDA people don't get wind.
(On the other hand, the RHS website, which we've dissed in the past, has both a "text larger/smaller" function and a text-only version - hats off.)
The IOG site also lots of text that, being underlined, looks like it's hyperlinked, but isn't. And does anyone still talk about "Hot Links"?


¤ The Arboricultural Association cannily got in early to bag the snappy "trees.org.uk" URL, but then seem to have left it largely at that - with the result that it looks like a hobbyist's website from about ten years ago, with lots of centred copy, umpteen typefaces, and inconsistent navigation. Their logo looks a bit dated too - maybe it's the Cooper Black typeface.


¤ There seems to be a rule in the landscape architecture and design industry, which no one will break step with (and of which this is only the most egregious example), that Thou Shalt Use Flash, rather than good old HTML - even though
- Flash site content doesn't generally get picked up by search engines
- Flash doesn't allow you to search the site internally
- Site navigation will be guaranteed to be unlike anything else you have ever encountered.

¤ Many continental hort websites also don't want you using your browser in a way that's familiar to you. At Entente Florale Europe, the redundant splash screen takes you to a non-resizable (in IE) pop-up window bereft of your usual browser functionality. Fortunately the window still has the little "x" in the corner - which is the first place I go when I see a pop-up.


¤ Not strictly a hort website, but pretty useful to the trade, is that of the Met Office. What would you say the primary purpose of the Met Office is? To give you the weather forecast for your area? That'll be four clicks from the homepage via the navigation bar please - and even then, the useful stuff is "below the fold".
The site is much keener to tell you which "severe weather warnings" have been issued - usually, none.


I'm sure I'll think of more, and I'm sure you can too - comments welcome.

An article in New York's City Journal by Project for Public Spaces director Andrew M. Manshel claims that getting public spaces right is more about getting the little things right:

People in public spaces respond to thousands of subtle visual and aural cues, and successful places manipulate these cues to provide familiar assurances of comfort and well-being. The cues prompt a person who encounters a new place to predict a positive experience there - above all, that he will be safe.

Grand schemes, on the other hand,

can attract broad opposition and be subject to complex political, logistical, and financial obstacles. Once an elaborate design has been committed to, backing away from it - or even altering it - becomes both politically and mechanically complicated. Further, planners have a limited capacity to predict how people will respond to their designs.

A good example of the former, he says, is the decision to provide movable chairs rather than fixed seating in Manhattan's Bryant Park.

People like to control their own space, and movable chairs allow them to do just that. Movable chairs let people face one another and interact in different ways, not just the ones that landscape designers have in mind when they arrange fixed furniture. Having chairs scattered around sends a message of trust that people won't steal them.

Not just any chairs either but those elegant, lightweight steel and wooden slatted jobs more often found in French bistros and on the terraces of posher country house tea rooms.

And it seems to have worked. The park was a no-go area until redeveloped by the Bryant Park Corporation in the 1980s. Led by Dan Biederman, pioneer of privately-funded public spaces and an early proponent of "Broken Windows" approach to crime prevention, the project incorporated ideas of sociologist William H Whyte, who insisted on the movable seating.

Funding to maintain the park comes from neighbouring businesses and properties - which have risen in value following the park's transformation - and from the many events it hosts. It boasts wi-fi access and even an open-air library, and has been called "the most densely occupied urban park in the world".


Another innovation at Bryant Park that Whyte instigated, and which Biederman continues to support, is the attention paid to gender balance - so much so that regular tallies of males and female park users are kept. As Biederman has explained:

Women pick up on visual cues of disorder better than men do. They're your purest customers. And, if women don't see other women, they tend to leave.

And the presence of women not only encourages more women in - it may have a hand in encouraging men in too...