Planted Questions

Rooftop growing goes posh, biggest plant, worst playground, etc

Gavin McEwan — Thu, 18 Mar 2010 12:18:00 GMT

1. Canadian-based upmarket hotel chain Fairmont, owner of the Savoy in London, is perhaps an unlikely pioneer in sustainable local growing. But its Royal York Hotel in Toronto has been growing its own vegetables and herbs on its organic rooftop garden for the past 12 years.

And now in densely packed, import-dependent Singapore, a similar garden is yielding lemons, curry leaves, bell peppers, lemongrass and mint for the hotel's restaurants.
Even in Dallas, not a city often associated with sustainability, the chain's hotel now boasts a 280 sq m herb and vegetable garden.
But this is not as new as it seems. New York's alluringly hideous "residential hotel" The Ansonia had a rooftop garden over 100 years ago, featuring "about 500 chicken, many ducks, about six goats and a small bear".

2. Soon, west London's wistarias will be in bloom - they seem to be practically obligatory on houses along some stretches of the Thames. But they have nothing on this one in Sierra Madre, California, listed in the Guinness Book of Records as the world's largest flowering plant:

Thought to be 116 years old, it covers over an acre (4,000 sq m), has over 1.5 million blooms and is reckoned to weigh around 250 tonnes. It even serves as the focus for an entire annual festival, held most recently last weekend.

3. Speaking of records, my nephews would like to nominate this, encountered on a day trip to Dorset's Jurassic Coast, as Britain's Worst Playground:

4. Film-maker Mirko Faienza manages to find some rather more alluring images in his father's small garden in Bologna, Italy:

5. Finally, a Health & Safety at Work moment - demonstrating with immaculate timing why a good solid safety rope is absolutely essential:

There's a place for artificial turf - that place isn't a public park

Gavin McEwan — Tue, 09 Mar 2010 17:53:00 GMT

Artificial turf, which we look at in next week's HW magazine, is finding its way into many parks and public spaces in the US - but the public response has been less than enthusiastic.

Now I have no problem with synthetic surfaces on public sports pitches, where twin pressures of low maintenance and high use throughout the year mitigate against the natural option.

But how eager would you be to go and sit out in an artificially turfed public park on a hot day? And when New York gets hot, it seems, the artificial turf in its parks gets even hotter.

It's not just the heat effect. the city is currently phasing out the use of rubber crumb infill, after significant amounts of lead were found in many of the sports and play areas where it was used.

(A 2008 study by the Centers for Disease Control appeared to confirm the risk, especially for older, worn pitches.)

Now a controversial New York riverside development proposes further use of artificial turf - with the novel justification that it is "less attractive to geese".

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The Daily Telegraph columnist and blogger George Pitcher can be relied upon to be wrong about most things, and boy is he wrong about Japanese knotweed.

"Its roots are really shallow and lightly spread and can be torn up easily, like varicose veins from a dusty corpse"

he writes, apparently unaware of its fantastically tenacious rhizomes.

But perhaps I’ve been putting spores into the breeze, to propogate on some innocent market-gardener’s rhubarb patch

Well no, you haven't, because (a) flowering plants don't produce "spores" and (b) mercifully the seed of Jk is not (yet) viable in the UK.

All you have spread, George, is misinformation.

Sustainability: pearls from the politicians

Gavin McEwan — Fri, 05 Mar 2010 15:37:00 GMT

This week's Ecobuild show in west London provided clear evidence that "sustainability" is more than just talk, and that consumers and corporate customers are putting their money where their mouths are.

The sustainable building show has grown rapidly year-on-year since its launch five years ago, and now attracts a few political figures, something unheard of at horticulture events (in the UK at least - the Continent is a different matter) - who proved that there is still plenty talk too.

Here are a few pearls I caught:

- Wilfred Emmanuel-Jones (Conservative parliamentary candidate for Chippenham): "Supermarkets have killed towns like Chippenham. You should have to pay for supermarket car parks. And planning permission should depend on stocking local produce. We need to get tougher on planning."
- David Blunkett: "That horse has already bolted." i.e. Nothing to do with me guv, I was only a cabinet minister at the time.
- Blunkett again: "People like me want to get out of London when we can. But the badly off only have one place to live."
But hey, thanks to the boom in immigration he oversaw while home secretary, at least we can celebrate diversity while we're here. His ideal "sustainable community" for a weekend getaway? The rather less culturally enriched Youlgreave, Derbys.
- London mayor Boris Johnson's "food champion" Rosie Boycott: "In London, so many people have food poverty - you see shops with maybe only a few onions and garlic."
Those vampire-deterring outlets must be a peculiarity of Rosie's neighbourhood, since pretty much everywhere else in London (including my own vibrant neighbourhood) is peppered with corner shops selling a bewildering variety of fresh produce till all hours.

The park's the star, ultra-sensitive plants, beware frying branches

Gavin McEwan — Wed, 03 Mar 2010 16:46:00 GMT

1. The National Trust has been making great play of the fact that Antony (the Cornish seat of the Carew Poles, not the androgynous singer) features in Tim Burton's new take on Alice in Wonderland, which opens in cinemas on Friday.
Altogether more low-key is the exposure that the Royal Parks has given to the role of Brompton Cemetery in the recent Sherlock Holmes film. The famous Victorian cemetery already has a film credits page, though there's no mention of its latest exposure; only this on the gatehouse noticeboard:

My wife actually stumbled on the shooting there last year while out jogging, and wondered whether the outsize crows present might have been ravens - a recurring motif around the evil Lord Blackwood, who in the film rises from his tomb in the cemetery's catacombs.
It turns out you can actually train ravens and even keep them as pets - but remember: "The first step in training is to have a true interest and love for your bird".

2. Horticulturists will know the sensitive plant, Mimosa pudica, whose leaves contract when touched. But it has nothing on this marine plant - or is it really a plant?

3. Now one for utility arboriculture enthusiasts - a demonstration of how branches and power lines don't mix. Keep the sound on!

4. To the well-attended open day of specimen plant importer Classiflora, where the advantages of having Italian nurserymen on hand were in evidence:

5. Back in the office, I just took an odd call.
mystery caller: Is Jim there?
me: Jim who?
mc: Jim Dean.
me: Jim Dean hasn't worked here for about a decade.*
mc: Ah - sounds like I just missed him. Thanks anyway!

(*Jim does of course still contribute occasionally to HW. Hi Jim, if you're reading.)

6. A garden products supplier has sent me an email promoting a new range of barbecues in which the word "barbecue" is mis-spelt throughout. You know who you are!

geothermal - the next big thing in glasshouse heating?

Gavin McEwan — Wed, 24 Feb 2010 14:51:00 GMT

This map shows where licences have been granted in the Netherlands for exploration and extraction of geothermal energy:

It includes most of Westland, the area behind the Hoek van Holland ferry port and bound by the river Maas (Meuse) and North Sea, which has been called "the world's largest greenhouse area".

(The view from space illustrates this clearly - though the glasshouses have the unfortunate effect of looking like a powdery blue-green mould!)

Indeed I notice that among the licencees in the area is Bloemenveiling FloraHolland, which runs the world's largest flower and plant auction in Naaldwijk.

According to the body which coordinates alternative glasshouse energy projects in the Netherlands:

Many greenhouses are located in areas where geothermal heat can be extracted. A feasibility study (2007) shows that the use of geothermal energy could reduce greenhouse gas consumption by around 10%.

So far in the UK, few have followed Southampton's lead in community geothermal power - though on a smaller scale we reported the new Blue Diamond garden centre on Guernsey is heated by geothermal aquifer.

Last October the Government launched a £6million grant scheme to promote geothermal more widely. And I see from this map that areas suitable for geothermal extraction (in red) coincide with areas such as Lincolnshire and the south coast, where a lot of glasshouse production is concentrated:

Could it happen here?

"the largest park in Europe for 150 years" isn't

Gavin McEwan — Tue, 09 Feb 2010 17:21:00 GMT

The Government and Olympic authorities have frequently claimed that the Olympic Park in east London will be "largest park in Europe for 150 years". (Mayor Boris Johnson reiterated the claim a couple of months ago). Most people (HortWeek included!) have happily gone along with this claim. But blogger Julian Cheyne was doubtful and submitted a Freedom of Information request to the ODA, including the question:

I understand the ODA considers this park will be the largest in Europe for 150 years. Can you please state how this description has been arrived at? Which parks has this park been compared with?

To which the ODA responded (pdf):

CABE Space and the London Parks and Green Spaces Forum have assisted the ODA in preparing benchmark studies on parks around the world and in London including previous Olympic Parks. Our understanding is that the Olympic Park will be the largest urban park of its type in Europe.

The "of its type" is a bit of a get-out, but actually there are several larger urban parks even in Britain. Edinburgh's Holyrood Park is 260ha, while Richmond Park, well within the Greater London boundary, is a whopping 955ha.

Even confining the question to new parks, there are several larger on the Continent. Cheyne points out that Germany's Duisburg-Nord Landscape Park, created on a post-industrial site similar to the Olympics' in the 1990s, comes in at 200ha, while a comment on the same post points out that Poland's Silesian Culture and Recreation Park, opened in the 1960s, covers 620ha.

I notice also that Madrid's Juan Carlos I Park, opened in 1992, comes in at 220ha. The current design for the Olympic Park, on the other hand, is for an altogether more modest 100ha.

weird wide world of hort rides again

Gavin McEwan — Wed, 27 Jan 2010 16:40:00 GMT

1. French architect Vincent Callebaut has come up with a design for an "amphibious garden" which could roam the waterways of the world. Plants on the roof filter the river water, while power comes from photo-voltaic cells.

He describes Physalia as

an architectural prototype that aims at meeting the need of the mutualisation of the knowledge in terms of sustainable management of the water resource. It is a half aquatic and half earthly amphibious vessel, a floating agora which has not only the objective on a geopolitical scale to deal with ecology ad water saving, but also on a European scale, to elaborate strategic solutions to animate the fluvial network

...and so on over three screens - but when one combines "French" and "architect" one expects nothing less.

On a more modest scale, already on the Thames beyond Richmond I noticed that one houseboat appeared to have a floating garden anchored a little way down-river - fenced in presumably to keep the geese off:

With London's allotments way over-subscribed, and not much land available for more, Will fluvial horticulture be big in 2010?

3. What makes a plant a plant? You might think the ability to photosynthesise via chlorophyll was a defining characteristic. But it turns out a kind of sea slug can also manufacture chlorophyll, using genes nicked from algae - so sparing it the bother of having to eat. It even looks quite leaf-like:

4. My wife and I were struck by this strange stuff on several branches in a frosty woodland in the west Highlands of Scotland.

Turns out it's hair ice - so called because the ice strands grow out of pores in dead wood, much like hair from follicles. It's not on English Wikipedia, while the German page says only that "the formation of the rarely-seen hair ice has so far been little researched scientifically".

5. Still on things German, how would you feel if the grave of your nearest and dearest was under the control of Hades? But such is the name of Germany's leading (only?) graveyard management software package.

"Hades", though associated with Greek mythology, also appears in the Bible - in some versions at least. According to one commentator:

Hades is generally associated with death and the grave while hell is generally associated with burning and punishment. For all practical purposes... there is no real major distinction between the two. They are both characterized as places we don't want to go.

6. We reported a couple of weeks ago that turquoise will be this year's hot colour, according to those Masters of the Colour Universe Pantone. It sounds like an improvement on 2009's hot tip, mimosa yellow, anyway.

I wonder if we're getting more colour-literate. The Crayola crayons of our childhood originally numbered just eight when they were launched over a century ago. Now they're up to 120 and counting. Blogger Stephen Von Worley has created this handy infographic to show this evolution:

7. Bird care products have been one beneficiary of the cold snap - Haskins Garden Centres have been selling "vast amounts" - but so far no one has thought of harnessing visiting birds for musical purposes:

Artist Céleste Boursier-Mougenot brings his installation "The Curve" to London's Barbican Centre next month.

8. On exotic birds, I remember as a child seeing a documentary about what were probably sparrow weavers - builders of huge multi-occupancy nests on the African savannah. In the doc, one such nest, the product of years of avian diligence, goes up in flames due to a fire supposedly started by the sun's rays being focused onto the dry straw by a single drop of dew.

I remember thinking the film crew were stretching credibility (as well as ethics) a bit there. Now according to one research group: "Claims of fires induced by sunlit water drops on vegetation should...be treated with a grain of salt."

More of this sort of thing here, here and here.

a flurry of snow stories

Gavin McEwan — Tue, 12 Jan 2010 10:18:00 GMT

1. With news of salt reserves running low, crews in Minnesota, who are used to dealing with snow on the roads, have found they can cut salt use by 60 per cent by "pre-wetting it with brine".

2 "Environmental artist and a landscape architecture professor" Stevie Famulari, of Fargo, North Dakota, has found a way to get creative with the snow in her front yard:

3. If things are looking bleak outside right now, take comfort from this video from Norwegian blogger Eirik Solhiem, which shows the changing view of woodland from his house over the course of a year.

4. And if you must build a snowman, why not get creative here too?

arborists capture a seasonal sight

Gavin McEwan — Thu, 17 Dec 2009 11:32:00 GMT

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.

Tree O'Clock: your telly tax at work

Gavin McEwan — Fri, 11 Dec 2009 10:24:00 GMT

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?

top 10 MPs' gardening expenses claims

Gavin McEwan — Thu, 10 Dec 2009 16:38:00 GMT

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.

More weird wide world of hort

Gavin McEwan — Fri, 04 Dec 2009 14:13:00 GMT

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.

Should we be placing all our chips on climate change?

Gavin McEwan — Thu, 03 Dec 2009 17:15:00 GMT

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.

Weird wide world of hort

Gavin McEwan — Thu, 19 Nov 2009 12:47:00 GMT

Well the first one's pretty normal, but then it gets sillier.

1. I had a bit of time before a flight to look around Stuttgart Airport and its neighbouring exhibition hall earlier this week, and took a few snaps - click though for larger versions.
Green roofs were much evidence, but not on the huge 4,200-place car park which straddles the adjacent Autobahn. The artist's impression shows a lush green swath:

...but right now they are busy installing a huge expanse of solar panels instead:

A case of one green virtue topping another?

Also a couple of interesting smaller-scale landscaping touches caught my eye - a bank carpeted in Pinus mugo (I think!):

...and some perennial planting that appears designed to have visual interest even in winter:

2. I wrote a few months ago about the perils of ride-on mowers. I imagine the Elf-n-Safety bods would have something to say about this firm of garden contractors in New Zealand:

3. Meanwhile contractors in Massachusetts have found a more environmentally friendly means of vegetation control - by providing "goat and sheep mowing services".

Those involved stress that managing the animals is a specialist business, as they have a tendency to wander:

4. I mentioned last week the landscaping around the world's tallest building, the Burj Dubai, which will open shortly. Here is a better view of the building itself. I wonder if those lower rooftop platforms will be landscaped too? Interesting micro-climates, anyway:

In fact I see one of my fellow countrymen has already made it to the top. This one isn't for those with an aversion to heights:

5. The BBC, looking for a subject that would benefit from more graphic detail, has a video report of the National Trust peeing story.

6. I wonder if the Scottish Wildlife Trust's latest appeal to Adopt a Beaver for Christmas will find many takers at Hertfordshire Golf and Country Club, which has just lost a prominent tree to the critters?

7. Lastly, in light of recent discussions of the content of horticultural websites, I enjoyed this recent Dilbert:

landscaping in Dubai: an end to thinking big?

Gavin McEwan — Tue, 10 Nov 2009 15:38:00 GMT

What sort of landscaping goes with the world's tallest building? Well, how about the world's largest fountains:

The Burj Dubai and its 150m-high fountains are due to open early next year.

The Gulf area is still throwing up other landscaping marvels, thanks partly to UK expertise. The two Zen Gardens at Dubai Airport's Terminal 3 which opened late last year, was designed by British landscape architects Phillip Cave Associates, while the 425ha Oman Botanic Garden, one of the world's largest and due to open next year, is being assisted by the Royal Botanic Garden Edinburgh.

And in the sports world, several high-profile golf courses and a racecourse will follow on from the Yas Marina Circuit which debuted on the Formula 1 tour this year.

However Building reckons that the development splurge in the area is over for now. And while the second of the Palm Trilogy of artificial island developments is sort of complete, the third and most ginormous of all, Palm Deira, is described as "stalled", as is the similarly ambitious World Archipelago.

Speaking of exotic golf courses, check out this list of some of the world's wackiest.