Tag Archives: Horniman Museum and gardens

You’re really telling us it’s the August bank holiday weekend?

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God knows what’s happening weatherwise, it’s freezing here in SE23 at the moment and there wasn’t much of an appearance of that yellow thing they call the sun over the weekend despite the promise of it.

Yesterday we spent an hour or two weeding the “rewilding” area at the bottom of garden where we put the “wild flower seed mix” and the odd bee bomb or two. As most of the flowers are “wild” so to speak, it’s hard knowing what are the actual weeds. The area does get a lack of significant sunlight so it’s a big gamble whatever you put down there. The cardoons do well though despite something that’s been eating their leaves for most of the summer (above).

Like we said before, it’s an art to get a part of a garden to look “wild, wild” instead of “wild” as in neglected if you see what we mean. We think we need to give our untame area a bit of time to develop before it looks as nice as the great insect garden of the great Horniman’s Gardens below. That’s “wild” but nice wild.There are successes though, towards the top of the garden we have a couple of sunflowers growing against the garage wall and it’s the smaller one (7ft) that is flowering first. This gardening hobby is all about patience isn’t it? Shame we haven’t got any.

Wild Style

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It’s been an action packed week out in the back with a good bit of watering in the morning and sometimes the evening. The late great Joe Maiden used to say the later hours weren’t the best time to water as it attracted slugs and snails but what can you do when the ground is parched and we do enjoy a stroll up and down the garden path with a watering can. It’s a bit of moving meditation innit?

The wild part of the garden (above top) where we put in some seed bombs plus additional borage, poppies (above) and nasturtiums is now looking a bit wild but not in the organised wildness of the great Horniman’s Gardens locally (pic below). As some gardening mates have told us, it takes time and a lot of care to make a wild garden look good. That’s a paradox is there ever was one.

That reminds us, years ago we stayed in an Airbnb in Ireland where the owners were very much into nature (not the stripping off in your back garden type nature but the bird watching type nature) and since they moved in (they’d been there 25 years) they just left their garden to its own devices to attract as much nature as possible (again not the stripping off in your back garden type nature but the bird watching type nature).

The space looked mad and a little unkempt to say the least but each to their own. What was funny though they did say “We do try and make a point of taking care of the lawn though. We have a farmer’s horse come in for a feed once every few months”. Oh that’s alright then!

Can you wake up now, please?

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London Gardens A-z

The London Garden Book A-Z – Abigail Willis – Metro

I popped into Charing Cross library last week and between playing “spot the sleeping person” and the “where’s the spare chair?”, I came across this great book in the gardening section.

It’s an interesting read about gardens around the capital circa 2012. It’s been well researched and features everything from Kew, The Barbican Conservatory, beekeeping on top of The Royal Festival Hall to lesser known gardens like Roots and Shoots (where I did an introduction to beekeeping course with the LBKA a few years ago), The Food From The Sky growing project on top of a supermarket in Crouch End (sadly no more), Mark from Vertical Veg (who’s also well into his music), the Horniman Museum and Gardens (up the road from us who have a great annual plant sale) and even a traffic island in E9 that went to pot but now been planted out in a guerrilla gardening style, a great Zen garden in Acton and a whole lot more. Even Shannon’s our local garden centre is mentioned in it. What more do you want?

A great book documenting gardens in the capital from the big to the small!

And talking of the capital…