On Bank Holiday Monday, we had a celebration in the garden. Some fried vegetables from the raised beds were shared around, we had a plant sale, drawing for children and cyanotype printing. The latter was organised by Max, the garden co-ordinator, and was very popular, mostly with adults but some older children had a go too. Cyanotype printing is a …

Forest Gate Community Garden Saturday, 26 August 2023 We have two cherry trees at the front of the garden. The larger of the two may be 50 years or more old.  It is certainly in peak condition with no rot or decay. In late April or early May, it is a glorious froth of pink blossom, enhanced by the lack …

100s of sycamore seeds are dangling from our two sycamore trees. They have mostly lost any green colour, now light brown, and are in pairs connected at the ‘heads’ with the wings at right angles. We call them helicopters because when picked up in the wind they twirl and fly some distance from the mother tree. There are so many …

There are many honey bees about the garden. In the hollyhocks, around the globe thistles and deep in the penstemons. Though, you often see a bee head into a flower and immediately back out and go to another. They have smelt an earlier bee in the first flower, and know that there will be little nectar left, and so don’t …

We had eight hours of rain on Friday. Most of it gentle, but heavy in patches. It was very welcome, after a dry week. The pond hardly looks any higher but our IBCs (big tanks) are fuller. And the rain was everywhere, all over the garden, which sounds a little obvious, but if you are dependent on watering cans, then …

It is cooler but mainly dry. Any rain we have had hardly soaks into the soil. The wildflower bed is sad, the flowers gasping, the stems languid. Drought rushes plants through their cycle as they are stressed, and must set seed before lack of water kills them. Our plants in pots dry out quickly, one of our apple trees, in …

Hot, dry weather and no sign of Thames Water. Will we see them this summer? They have to get borough permission to dig up the road. Is that in train? Well, expect no rush from them or the Council. How these things play out is always dispiriting, delay the watchword. Our standpipe, hardly comparable to the Elizabeth Line, which was …

Sauvages de ma rue, wild things in my road, or in our case: plants just outside the fence. They are in the little soil that slips out of the garden into the gap between the paving stones and the fence. We have sow thistle, hedge mustard, various grasses, white campion, purple toadflax, nettle and chickweed. The Sauvages de ma Rue …

The wildflower bed is a sea of red poppies; most have come out today as yesterday the scentless mayweed, that largish white daisy-like flower, held sway. Poppy flowers only last a few days, the petals easily detached in the wind. But they will keep coming for the next month of so, leaving behind their pepper pots of seeds. There are …