Worcester City Council senior arborist John Hancock and his team regularly have extra company in their van, and now they’ve captured him (her?) on video:



Full story in the Worcester News.

Last Saturday morning our "Green Group" dutifully planted up three dozen trees in the hedge of our little wildlife garden as part of the BBC's Tree O'Clock world record bid. It needed doing anyway, and the trees were mostly free (courtesy of a local garden centre, who were only supposed to give out one tree per family, but found themselves with dozens unclaimed come the morning).

I have the photographic evidence and even a witness statement confirming what we did. The trouble is, I can't submit them because the email address at the BBC crashed some time yesterday and is not yet back up - and the deadline is noon today.

Whoever would have foreseen that hundreds of people submitting multi-megabyte emails all at once might create a few technical challenges?

Whatever his contributions to the House, outgoing Tory MP Sir Peter Viggers will go down in history as "the duck island guy". But according to the latest MPs' expenses claims published today, he's not the only Member doing his bit for the garden industry at public expense - or at least, trying to.

Here are our top 10:

10. David Heathcoat-Amory (Con, Wells) - £2.99 for slug pellets

 9. Douglas Hogg (Con, Sleaford & North Hykeham) - £4.99 for weedkiller. A modest claim from the MP who famously asked for £2,200 back for moat cleaning.

 8. David Miliband (Lab, South Shields; Foreign Secretary) - £132.96, made up of £115 labour (£11.50/hour) and £17.96 for five bags of bark chippings

 7. Sir Alan Haselhurst (Con, Uttlesford; Deputy Speaker of the House of Commons) - £135.13 for tree surgery

 6. James Arbuthnot (Con, Hampshire North East) - £138 for "chainsaw for logs"

 5. Barbara Follett (Lab, Stevenage) - £209 for "automatic plant watering system"

 4. Sir Michael Lord (Con, Central Suffolk and North Ipswich) - £220 for "garden maintenance - grass cutting, rough cutting, strimming"

 3. Gordon Brown (Lab, Kirkcaldy & Cowdenbeath; Prime Minister) - £870, including £500 for repainting summer house in the garden of his constituency home, £175 for grass cutting and £195 general gardening (at £10/hour)

 2. Chris Huhne (LibDem, Eastleigh) - £1,975.80 on gardening, including a £70 lawn weed treatment and a £21 Kilmarnock willow, as well as regular maintenance at £14/hour+VAT. Since the retrospective change in the rules, capping gardening expenses at £1,000, has paid back excess.

 1. Still well out in front, Sir Peter Viggers (Con, Gosport) - £8,278, made up of general gardening at £554 a month (£16.25/hour); grass cutting a further £1410; irrigation £220 ("2 services @£110"). Rejected as "not appropriate" by Whitehall staff.

1. It's an unusual brief for a landscape architect, but Apple executive Jeff Dauber said of the design for his minimalist San Francisco back garden: "I wanted someone to barf when they look at it."

Though completely flat, the surface appears warped towards the lone maple tree - particularly when seen from Dauber's own height.

2. I've long thought that cycling provides one of the best ways to appreciate a city - yes, even London - and I'm glad to see that all-round creative type David Byrne agrees. The practical and health aspects of cycling are increasingly being factored in to urban and park designs, but Byrne shows there are other aspects to consider too.

3. Back in Dubai, the recent crash means several out-there projects will now never happen - and the world will never get to see a seawater vertical farm in action.


4. As they're too un-green to be used for lighting any more, why not turn old-style lightbulbs into mini-gardens?


5. And while I'm all for preserving endangered plant species, I think having them tattooed on your body is going a bit far.


6. Finally, can you name that leaf?

Artist Christoph Niemann has this and a few more new to plant science.


More horti-weirdness here and here.

At last week's Oatridge Conference, University of Edinburgh expert Dr David Reay's talk on the consequences of climate change for Scottish horticulture would have left anyone thinking the industry has a cast-iron case to take to government on the vital role horticulture has to play in mitigating climate change and adapting to its effects.

Certainly no one who works in the plant world can fail to have noticed that odd things are already happening to our climate and our seasons. But should public policy towards horticulture be dictated by the climate change agenda?

I say this not as a "denier" of Anthropogenic Global Warming (AGW), though I'd call myself an agnostic. I certainly think that pumping millions of tonnes of CO2 into the atmosphere is a pretty risky thing to do given what we know of the wild fluctuations in our earth's climate and their causes throughout geological time.

But I sense that the public may be tiring of the AGW message.

The upcoming Copenhagen Conference is likely to call for major restrictions on a range of economic activity, which will be unwelcome to many in a world still struggling out of recession.

Already the Australian parliament has thrown out a carbon-trading Bill which was the centrepiece of PM Kevin Rudd's climate change policy.

Closer to home, the recent leaks from the University of East Anglia's Climatic Research Unit showing inconvenient climate data being tweaked or ignored, have dented confidence this internationally respected institution.

Skepticism is even slipping into the BBC's coverage of the subject, such as in this story which pointed out that 1998 was hotter than any year since.

At this rate we could be approaching a tipping point of a different sort, where the credibility of the AGW case, and therefore of measures to minimise it, will be increasingly called into question.

The unfortunate thing is, most of the proposed moves to mitigate and adapt to climate change would be positive things to do anyway. Our health would be much improved, and our towns and cities made more liveable, if we relied on cars less. A wider reduction in fossil fuel use would make the West less reliant on foreign powers whose values and aims in the world are often at odds with our own.

And in horticulture, promoting local food production boosts sustainable jobs in rural areas and helps people appreciate the source, seasonality and quality of their food. Public parks will still offer huge health and social benefits. And trees improve the liveability of towns and cities, by reducing noise and pollution, and providing havens for wildlife - whether or not we need more shading in 50 years' time.