Propaganda in the garden

Here we are at the beginning of April and the third Peat Free April. And I think it’s fair to say the backlash has begun.

In the last month or so the way propaganda is used internationally to change the narrative of a situation has awoken many to the use of propaganda but can we say we see it in the gardening world, and is it obvious or is it hidden? Or does it do what the propagandist wants it to do, and cause confusion, especially to new gardeners or to people finding the sustainability in gardening conversation difficult to see through? I would argue it’s mainly the last two, and that interestingly the more right wing press seem to have decided to join in too.

And of course this isn’t just key to the peat debate. There are still people suggesting garden chemicals are fine to use, despite the effects we know, through good, peer reviewed science, that these chemicals are having on our biodiversity. We see plastic grass being called sustainable, which we know it’s not, and despite the outcry a few years ago plastic pots are still in every garden centre across the nation, despite not being recyclable by most local authorities. Plastic plants, hedges and topiary are seemingly in most garden centres and the bags of peat based compost are piling up, next to the peat free.

But gardening is green I hear many cry, and that is of course correct at it’s basest level, but there is nothing green about the industry behind it, other than a few nurseries who are really rocking the trend, but it’s fair to say industrial horticulture has a long way to go before it can call itself sustainable in any meaningful way.

And yet we see “natural” pesticides, sustainable fake lawns, sustainable peat extraction all mentioned repeatedly and we believe it. Of course we do-why would people lie?

Let me give you an example. Recently Bristol airport declared it was aiming to be net carbon zero by 2030 and being net zero as an airport by last year. to a round of huge applause, with the Mayor there at an event, they claim to be the first airport to do this, but what they fail to talk about is the little caveat that states they are reliant on future technology to achieve this. It might be a statement of intent but it relies on a lot of other work first and is really no more than that. It can’t be but it does capture headlines and create a buzz around something that they have no real control over. Let’s be clear-carbon neutral planes are definitely not guaranteed, and anyone working in sustainability will tell you cutting down your air miles is the only way we can achieve net zero based on todays technology. But that message creates a small confusion in the heads of those hearing the message. It brings up questions, and makes people think that industry has got all of our best interests at heart. Which they may have, but your and my interests do no make them the profits they need, but making us think that way does.

So let’s go back to peat. There has been an ongoing campaign in the Telegraph stating that horticulture cannot cope without peat. That it will be the end of the industry in the UK, and that we have saved so much peat from being cut through peat free usage by gardeners at home that we can still afford to keep cutting for the industry.

And none of this is true. Let’s be clear. It’s propaganda from an industry that knows it has left it to the last minute to make the changes it needs to make. The industry has known peat was not sustainable for decades and this is part of what I imagine to be a political campaign, lobbying at government level, to stop a ban on peat, rather than making the changes they could have been making over the last decade or more. Westland horticulture, who are very ready at press events to talk about sustainability, birds and biodiversity, are known to have been lobbying parliament and I suspect they will not be the only ones. And that is but one.

But what is really unnerving is the message that we have saved enough and that the industry can carry on being environmentally destructive as long as home gardeners use peat free. We are still using exactly the same amount of peat each year as ever and the notion that we have cut use is simply untrue according to the Horticultural Trades Association so where is this narrative coming from? Indeed yesterday in an article in the Guardian it was suggested that a peat ban might affect food security and accessibility because brassicas, salads and mushrooms would be affected. Having asked a farmer pal who grows brassicas it’s now apparent that what they mean is that brassicas and salads are started in plugs, which are peat based. So rather than creating change and working out how that can be altered, they’re using the threat of food shortages to scare people. More propaganda which inevitably some people will believe.

Of course we don’t really know. That’s the thing with this level of propaganda and it being mixed with marketing-it’s a dangerous collaboration that is focused on selling the idea that buying that brands product will support you to be more sustainable whilst totally missing the point that sustainability doesn’t need to be bought, but quite the opposite.

The other thing that must be mentioned here is that there’s a suggestion in these article that the peat free campaign is simply online noise. Of course that is not true and there are many people working on this, and organisations such as Peat Free April, are just keeping up the pressure and gaining traction throughout being a part of online communities and linking that with real life campaigning. That’s a low blow and also a slur, assuming all social media is just an outlet for anger and not able to make any real change. Persil had to remove an advert a few years ago that claimed hashtags make no real change, but can I just point to the #metoo movement amongst many others that have and are making real societal change.

so next time you go to the garden centre, take note of the messaging, the marketing, and try to see what’s going on. And let’s push for the vital ban on peat that we know we need, and not listen to the people who are focused on profit over anything else.

Peat free brassicas……

January..........

The weather is grey, and wet, with rain coming most nights and drizzling on and off most days. Underfoot it’s soggy and walking on the grass feels treacherous and horribly slippery. The plants are all looking at what can only be described as their worst, some with old tatty leaves hanging on by a thread, but mostly they are the skeleton the a garden that has definitely not had a gardeners touch for several years. In the oddly warm winter what I am learning is the weeds that are obviously at home here, as they appear, even during the darkest days of the year. Goosegrass is making itself known along the edges of the hedges, popping it’s fresh green shoots up through the sodden soil and making me nervous at the sheer amount of it. There are a lot of dandelions, as well as daisies in the front garden, some of which were flowering yesterday, but my main adversary here is going to be bamboo……..

Bamboo is beautiful plant but so often misunderstood and so planted in the oddest of places. This is a beauty as a plant and I think has come in from a neighbouring garden that is a few doors down and has a huge stand of it. Likely they have no idea how far it has spread, and I imagine were sold it as a variety that doesn’t spread, as is the phrase. “too badly”, but as with all bamboos once it gets it’s feet in they grow and spread like very little else. And it’s a beauty as I said; five feet tall with large green and glossy leaves. If I had acres I would be more than happy to see it but whilst this is by far the largest garden I have ever stewarded, it’s not the size to cope with bamboo. So over the last few days I have been forced to dig down in beds that I am determined will be as no dig as possible, and remove the shoots as they appear. Delicious bamboo shoots as they appear through the soil, but if they are this voracious in January, I am somewhat dreading June.

The lawns are also sad and sorry. The front garden is without a doubt more moss than grass and I my accidentally have taken up the thatch and sown wild flowers in the areas that were bare, hoping for a riot of colour in early summer. They are “real” wildflowers rather than a pretty mix so I hope that they will work themselves into the foundations of the garden and keep appearing year after year but we will see. Often I struggle to get them to germinate, most likely because I have a tendency to over love them, rather than let them alone to do their thing. They are the independent children of the garden, that get on with it and thrive when left alone.

Storm Arwen rocked us here in Wales and we found our beautiful front hedge damaged by the ravages of the gusts, with a fairly large area of it lost. I was deeply saddened by this as it was full of ripe ivy flowers, so important for pollinators flying in winter, so with that through we are replacing it with more wildlife appropriate planting than the privet that was home to the ivy. Thus far an Ilex Red Dragon has been bought and will be added to in the next months with, I am hoping, a winter flowering honeysuckle and a male holly to make sure the female Red Dragon gets pollinated.

And that is an update from the garden-something I promise every year and rarely manage but this year I will try to do better. Writing about the garden can feel self indulgent and self focused but hears hoping that it supports others as well as offering an insight into building a garden focused on climate and biodiversity crises.

A November Rose

This morning I posted to Instagram the photo I have shared below. The immediate thought of course is what joy to have roses in bloom in November but then we have to ask ourselves, but is it?

And of course our immediate answer is yes, but then I began to think about the gardens in which I grew up. My formative gardens if you like, generally further north than Bristol of course, but by November 1st those gardens were places of decay, where the composting and mulching had begun, and where the onions and garlic were sitting waiting for the shortest day to be planted, and where the autumn sown broad beans were beginning to pop their heads up. The summer was long gone, the tulips were about to go in and the other autumn planting bulbs were already encased underneath the soil, cleared for them and waiting for spring.

Bu now the gardens were preparing for Guys Falkes, for bonfires and frosty mornings, which generally had begun. Our winter clothes were out and to go into the garden you needed to be wrapped up warm.

And yet at the weekend I was gardening in a tee shirt. In Bristol in the last 5 years we have seen no pre Christmas frosts and even in the new year they tend to be fairly uncommon. There are gardens we have never seen with any frost at all, where goji berries and lemongrass and flourish all year and where, today, the dahlias are still in full bloom.

Roses die back in September?October don’t they? Fade into a beautiful decay and lose their leaves to become shadow of their former and future glory. Whilst they sleep they gather the strength they need for the year ahead, their roots quietly communing with the mycelium underground, taking in the nourishment they need, stretching themselves into places where water is easily accessible, thickening their cells so that they can cope with the winter to come. Effectively putting on their winter wardrobe.

So what happens if they aren’t allowed to do this? If they think we are in some never ending summer where only the light changes but where they feel safe to flourish? What happens if they don’t put on that winter wardrobe and instead are caught out by a sharp, cold snap? Of course they’ll cope with one, but what if the weather continues to go from summer to winter and back again? How much confusion can one plant take before it begins to get really confused and is overwhelmed by the seasons, unsure of how to behave and when?

In the UK we may not have truly begun to see the ravages of climate breakdown but this week I have seen farmers fields in Devon overwhelmed by rain and water bubbling through areas next to flooding. We have seen torrential rainfall, dangerous flooding and again people being flooded out of their homes. But still we hear that climate chaos isn’t really affecting us, but here I implore you. Think back to the childhood gardens we all recall, of the season shift we all felt after the autumn half term, and consider how that has changed, Because roses blooming on the 1st of November are just one beautiful sign that climate change is not only affecting us, but also everything we share our earth with…….

And on a practical note, this rose has been given a strong talking to about COP26 and seasonality, and been given a lunch of comfrey leaves so the potash can support the cells to strengthen for that winter, which inevitably will come.

Regeneration and our gardens

We hear the word regenerative a lot around food and farming, and how vital it is for tackling climate and biodiversity crises, but if we learnt nothing else throughout 2020, it’s that we have a third crisis which we need to find solutions to if we are going to create equitable societies that put social justice at the core of all we do. 2020 brought systemic inequalities to the fore as we watched a man murdered on our screens and learnt more and more about the brutality being sent towards black, brown and indigenous people of colour across the USA, and at home, and came to terms with what we now see as being a society that’s very core is wrapped in colonialism and systemic racism. At the same time there has been an understanding that land access for new entrant farmers, for communities both rural and urban, and for small scale food production, is totally inequitable and whilst a few wealthy families made up mainly of our aristocracy but also of new corporate wealth and oligarchy, hold onto and buy up areas of land and then rarely do anything with them to support regeneration of anything, let alone of society. 

Repeatedly the social media gardening channels tell us that gardening isn’t political and often refuse to engage in political gardening debate or conversation. But how can gardening, which relies on land ownership for so many of us not be political? If we expect farmers to change the way they work to work alongside the regeneration of our natural worlds, why do we not expect the same from ourselves as gardeners or allotment holders? Why are we so against, in many quarters, acknowledging the privilege of having that space and being able to create both beauty and productivity, in the full knowledge that more than 3.3 million households in the UK do not have that access to land that it is easy to take for granted. For certain we must begin to take responsibility, as gardeners and growers, for the planet around us, understanding that we have a huge area of land across the UK which could make an enormous change in our biodiversity crisis.

Listening to Rob Hopkins From What Is To What If podcast today and hearing  Josina Calliste of Land In Our Names talking about how we have a generation that no longer assumes home ownership, let alone land ownership, really made me think about how we make gardening and food growing not just equitable but at all accessible. If we have generations that accept they may never have a garden in which they can experiment and learn, or access to allotment space knowing that the allotment waiting lists around the country are long and slow, and certainly not supporting everyone who would like to learn more about land, gardening and food growing, makes questioning the future of UK gardening and home food growing really questionable. If there is an uncomfortable truth here surely it’s that we are at risk of gardening becoming a middle class pursuit that relies on affording mortgages and home ownership, and continues to perpetuate itself as a middle class hobby. 

And yet as a society we acknowledge the power of a garden for health and wellbeing. Never has it been more apparent that our collective well being relies on nature and green spaces, and that in our cities, whilst so many might be without their own spaces, that parks have never been more important. But there is then the added complication that for many people nature, parks and the wider countryside are not comfortable spaces for people who already may feel marginalised. When Countryfile featured a man of colour expressing his experiences of racism out in rural England social media was full of people who were denying that this is a problem, but their overall messaging simply acknowledged the issues being spoken of, and made it apparent that whilst people don’t believe themselves to be racist, in fact unless we create an anti racist society, decolonise the education system and talk honestly about how our history of colonialism has created the world society in which we live today there will be no social justice.

So how does this equate to gardening I hear you ask? Well surely as a society we need to make gardening and food growing equitable? Surely we need to celebrate the different gardening and food growing cultures that are alive across our towns and cities and yet mostly unseen in the media that represents gardening and small scale food production?  We need to acknowledge the skills and history of landbased cultures and celebrate the fact that our growing knowledge, as well as many plants that we consider common in gardens today are actually seated within these cultures. 

But we also need to find a way to make gardening and growing a part of future generations living experience. We know gardening is good for mental health, physical health and general wellbeing, and we also acknowledge that the mental health fall out from Covid for all generations will be huge and take decades to recover from, so now is the time to put land aside for allotment plots, reimagine new build developments so that community space works for new communities and isn’t just an afterthought, and that those spaces are well designed with those new communities. We need to reimagine our towns and cities and empower communities to make the changes they want to see in our urban and peri-urban landscapes. And we need to do these things because we are at risk of losing the skills of growing and gardening unless our future generations have spaces they feel they can use and where they are empowered to learn, to fail and to succeed. To be outside, the see nature and the turning seasons and to understand that we are part of that nature and without it as humans we suffer.

And just to make this clear. This is not a call for a campaign, or a set of meetings where those with control make decisions for those without. The time has come to step aside, to use platforms and influence to give those who think they have no voice, not just a voice but amplification of that voice. To listen and to act. We have known for decades that allotment provision was not meeting demand, despite the fact that it was acknowleged post WW1 that land based therapy was vital for soldiers returning from war,  that people living in high rise blocks are nature deficient and nothing has been done other than an occasional consultation and research project. Again and again I meet with communities who are regularly used for research projects and then no action follows. In 2021, as we look to an uncertain future, grassroots action needs to be understood and encouraged. Communities need resources and to be allowed to regenerate themselves, in their own way, before we can even begin to expect society to fully engage in the climate and biodiversity crises. 

Gardening, growing, land and nature are key to bringing people together, to creating safe spaces for conversations and to share and celebrate the land and all the cultures we share across it. It’s time to recreate and take back that land in order to mend our broken society.