Go slow – plant slow-growing hedges

Rowan Adams

29th April 2015

57 varieties of climate-friendly gardening deciduous plants evergreen plants hedges shelter and insulation wildlife and biodiversity wind

Springwatch is like Arnie. It’ll be back*. I know the marketing people couldn’t allow anything so uncatchy, but I wish they’d call it EarlySummerWatch because in my calendar spring is almost over, and with it our last chance to do the things that we do in spring, like planting evergreens.

When I hear the first swift (and it’s usually hear, before I look up in joy and see them) then summer has started. The weather is warm, the migrants are back, and the trees are in leaf. Early summer maybe, but summer it is.

So it’s hard to remember that only a few weeks ago gardeners might have been wrapped up in winter clothes and shivering in a cold biting wind.

I know I was. Not in every garden, just the one.

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Be a nutter

Rowan Adams

13th April 2015

57 varieties of climate-friendly gardening food nuts and nut trees

I’m a nutter. My family and friends have known that for years. But I’m not just your average common metaphorical nutter. No, I’m a common and a garden nutter. In my garden I grow nut trees. I eat the nuts. And it’s not just because I like adding walnuts to my stir-fries.

I’m a climate-friendly gardener, and ‘Make an orchard garden‘ is one of the things I keep going on about. When I say the word ‘orchard’ most people think I mean apples. Don’t get me wrong, nothing wrong with apples, or any other fruit. Here in Britain we’ve got the world’s biggest national collection of fruit trees at Brogdale in Kent, and I wish it had more recognition, better funding, and more land. Indeed I wish we had county collections of fruit and nuts in every county in the country.

But I think nuts are even more important than fruit.

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57 varieties start here – time to explore

Rowan Adams

3rd April 2015

57 varieties of climate-friendly gardening gardens open to the public groundcover plants soil trees water

Marketing people are good at snappy messages. I’m not.

I started writing about climate-friendly gardening five years ago. I’m the kind of person who thinks there’s no such thing as too many books, or too long a reading list. When I started, I needed to find out as much as possible. Now, thousands of words later, as many details covered and as many references as I can find, the challenge is turned upside-down: to write about climate-friendly gardening in as few words as possible, so I can share the essentials of what I’ve learned.

I grew up at a time when a certain company still advertised their 57 varieties of processed foods. When I tried to get what I’d learned about climate-friendly gardening down onto a single page of paper, it somehow turned into 57 things for gardeners to do.

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Go slow – plant slow-growing hedges

Be a nutter

57 varieties start here – time to explore

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