I met with Fiona and Louise from The Kitchen Garden project in Shoreditch. We spent an hour chatting in lovely spring sunshine. It was very interesting to see how a similar project is run in a different part of London.
Their web-site is very interesting:
https://sites.google.com/site/thegrassshootscollective/home
and they have made a film which you can see on youtube:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7AKn0YPWEWo
FRIENDS OF ABBEY GARDENS MEETING
SATURDAY THE 6TH OF MARCH AT 2PM
LANDGRABBERS CABIN
ABBEY GARDENS
BAKERS ROW E15 3NF
Our monthly Friends of Abbey Gardens meeting will take place next Saturday the 6th of March 2010 from 2pm at the Cabin (see agenda below). We are also running informal Garden Club sessions every Saturday from 10 am onwards until we have a new Garden Club Leader in place (hopefully towards the end of this month).
AGENDA FOAG MEETING
2pm, Saturday 6th of March 2010
1) Planting and things to be done in the garden
2) Garden Club Leader position general update
3) Events and outreach
– preparation for the 20th of March wildflower event
– dates in diary for this season’s events and FOAG meetings
– public works/Somewhere event in March
4) Infrastructure (progress of works)
5) Honesty Stall (presentation of design)
6) Fund raising
7) Plant database
- Any other business
APPLY NOW TO BECOME THE NEW GARDEN CLUB LEADER FOR THE 2010 SEASON
We are seeking an enthusiastic and self-motivated person with a passion for getting people (of all ages) gardening and enjoying plants. They must also have an interest in and empathy with the innovative vision for the garden. The successful candidate will be a local advocate for the project and must be a self-organiser as they will work largely independently at the site. They should be prepared to work flexibly: They may perhaps structure themed activities for certain days, or otherwise redefine the Club’s sessions to meet the demands of the site users and the ambitions of the project. They must be available throughout the project period at the agreed Club opening times (cover is available for up to 2 weeks absence by prior arrangement). The Leader will be responsible to and employed directly by the Friends of Abbey Gardens who work closely with the artists and London Borough of Newham to realise the project.
Deadline for applications – 5th of March 2010
Announcement of shortlist – 8th of March 2010
interview date – 10th of March 2010
Immediate start preferable
DOWNLOAD THE FULL GARDEN CLUB LEADER JOB SPECIFICATION HERE
AND/OR PASS ON TO ANYONE WHO IS INTERESTED
Karen Guthrie introducing the tree planting session at Abbey Gardens. You can see more pictures of the event on the Abbey Gardens Flickr page
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Sat Feb. 6th, 10.30am – 3.30pm
Friends of Abbey Gardens and artists Karen Guthrie and Nina Pope invite you to join them for their first gardening event of 2010 – the planting of 30 young fruit trees at Abbey Gardens in Bakers Row.
photo:Nina Pope
Abbey Gardens, Bakers Row, London E15 3NF
Volunteers are advised to bring lunch and to wear stout shoes and warm clothes including gloves. Tools are provided. New participants for 2010 are always welcome.
What Will The Harvest Be? is a garden where anyone may learn about, grow and harvest organic vegetables, fruit and flowers. You can give as much or as little time and energy as you can spare or just come and visit. There are plenty of events. Abbey Gardens surround part of the ruins of a 12th
Century Cistercian abbey.
Started by local residents who formed Friends of Abbey Gardens, the project What Will The Harvest Be? was devised by artists Karen Guthrie & Nina Pope of Somewhere.org.uk
Open to visitors every day from dawn to dusk.
See websites for details of gardening sessions.
www.abbeygardens.org
www.whatwilltheharvestbe.com
CLICK HERE TO DOWNLOAD THE PDF FLYER FRUIT TREE PLANTING EVENT
Unfortunatel we had to postpone the fruit tree planting day.
Because of the cold weather the tree nursery which supplies the fruit trees has not been able to pull any trees. They will not be able to deliver next week. We will announce a new date as soon as we have one.
Friends, volunteers, passers by and everyone else is invited to help us plant our fruit wall on Sat Jan. 16th, 10.30am – 3.30pm
The Friends of Abbey Gardens and artists Karen Guthrie and Nina Pope invite you to join the first gardening event of 2010 – the planting of 30 young fruit trees along the northern wall of Abbey Gardens as part of the ‘What Will the Harvest Be?’ project.
The wall-trained trees will be the crowning glory of our open-access ‘harvest garden’ where literally anyone may learn about, grow and harvest fresh vegetables, herbs and flowers.
Join us to kick of the 2010 growing season or contact us if you have any questions
We are featured on the home page of the Capital Growth website with a nice link to the ‘What Will the Harvest be?” site.
I read with interest recently, this news story about the rediscovery of a long lost gardener’s notebook at the historic Ickworth House, which has unlocked countless mysteries for the present gardeners – said one: ”It means that we don’t have to make blind guesses and can now be really true to how Ickworth was created to be in future work. Any gardener would kill for this kind of information, it’s amazing to think it’s just been sitting there all these years.’
Acclaimed garden writer Noel Kingsbury also made a recent heartfelt appeal for information, in the journal of the Hardy Plant Society. It seems scarcely believable to keen gardeners that such information does not exist in the public domain and yet all that Noel seeks to collate (for PHD research towards improving the diversity of planting in public space, I believe) is straightforward feedback from amateur gardeners about which herbaceous plants do well in their gardens and why. It seems so simple doesn’t it? But this kind of word-of-mouth knowledge is rarely if ever written down, and – despite many good garden blogs – as the knowledge generally rests with the older generation, we don’t see it online much either. Gardening books, naturally, are written by experts who delight in nurturing horticultural delicacies and seldom do they feature the kind of adhoc grassroots gardening most of us practice.
Now, the knowledgeable / nerdy (like me) amongst you will know of the extensive field trials done by the Royal Hortcultural Society in their gardens, which often lead to the coveted ‘AGM’ award being given to the best and most ‘gardenworthy’ of tested plants. The thing about these trials though, is that they are carried out in one of only a small handful of geographically diverse locations by – and there’s the rub – professional gardeners, not mere mortals like you and I with other things on their minds and in their lives: Yes, occasionally even RHS gardens suffer drought, pests and disease but on the whole these trials offer optimum conditions whereas what most of us offer plants is just-about-getting-away-with-it care.
Now, many Abbey Garden-ers this year have had to put up with Nina and I’s insistent mantra “Always label your plants!”, and behind the scenes with Chris Cavalier and Dorian Moore we have busied ourselves on an expansive database of all our plants and their cultivation, on this very website. It takes a lot of work, but then it holds a lot of information, much of which can be ‘automatically’ retrieved online in future years of growing. Web site users can wander bed to bed online, looking at what’s growing, when it’s been harvested and what it looks like. This doesn’t sound like rocket science but believe you me, when you spend as much time as I do looking at other garden websites you realise how few ever get round to as much as a plant list – only this year did the National Trust (an organisation relatively rich in resources) even attempt to begin a nationwide plant survey of their properties, which include iconic influential gardens like Sissinghurst.
As a gardener myself, I know from experience how hard it is to force yourself to find a pen and label when you’re out, muddy handed and enjoying the actual physical action of gardening. You always think you’ll remember it later and get round to it. You almost never do. Multiply this minor act of human frailty by the number of us active at Abbey Gardens and then add it to all the other gardens in the world and you have a mass amnesia costing us much hardwon wisdom… At least the Ickworth House story shows us that we are not alone!
(One of my favourite Christopher Lloyd stories involves a garden visitor asking him – on his hands and knees weeding – the name of a rare and treasured plant in his borders. Christopher :”Do you have a pen and paper?”. Her: “No, but I’ll remember it” Him: “You won’t. So I’m not telling”)
But IMHO the point of labelling and taking note of harvesting dates etc is less to do with making sure people know they’re pulling a carrot out and not a parsnip and more to do with the bigger picture:
When I garden anywhere I am blissfully aware of my microcosmic act of communion with a tiny part of the macrocosm of Planet Earth. I love the physical and immediate aspects of soil, roots, tools and seeds, but then I also increasingly realise that the temporal is counterbalanced with a desire to share this experience, contribute to a global ecology, develop networks with like-minded people and organisations, and leave behind a lasting legacy of the trial and error and successes of my lifetime’s gardening.
Opening my garden for the National Garden Scheme, giving talks, blogging and projects such as WWTHB? are all part of this ambition.
Moreover, I have a strong belief that what seems like minor ephemera today changes to gold-dust in a hundred year’s time – again look at the Ickworth notebook, probably considered a casual aide-memoire by the gardener of the day (who almost certainly had his ranks of careful plant labels removed during the neccessary vandalism of the wartime ‘Dig for Victory’ campaign that turned all country gardens into allotments). Little did he know that a century later the information within would be the only record of his travails.
Blogs, websites et al can be the gardener’s notebooks of our times. Yes, they’re harder to update if your hands are muddy and your laptop’s back at home. But their advantage is beyond the imaginings of any Victorian gardener: they can connect effortlessly with anyone else who is interested. Over the years I’ve had some fascinating conversations with Dorian Moore our web programmer, about the future of the WWW, how the increasing fluidity between sites like Flickr and Google Earth has the potential to create accurate biodiversity maps of unprecedented detail, showing and archiving plant distribution through space and time, something scientists and researchers have attempted and failed to do for centuries. The impact of this in the uncertain, climate-changed future will be immense. It’s what the web was made to do and it’s up to us to get on with it so that future generations aren’t left looking for the notebook behind the garden shed.
Sites like WWTHB? already contribute to academic and scientific knowledge about biodiversity and horticultural practices – they are historic documents in the making, without which all of our combined efforts at Abbey Gardens remain part of a local, oral history – fascinating and valuable, but frail and gone when we are.
Karen Guthrie, Dec 2009
The friends group produced a series of very good looking (if we may say so ourselves) postcards
to promote the garden and the What Will the Harvest be? project. Making good use of the
many beautiful images from our first season of growing, digging, and harvesting.
We produced eight different A5 calling cards which have all relevant information about the project printed on the back and four versions of A5 folding cards which are ideal to thank all those who made this year such a success. Designed by Lydia Thornley they are available from the friends group.
The brand new sign alone is worth a trip down to the garden. You can’t miss it!
Installed by Andy with support from Nina, produced by Formet.
If you want to get a taste for next years harvest you can have a look at the planting plan for 2010.
The document is best viewed by downloading it and viewing it in a pdf viewer.
Download the planting plan here -> Planting Plan 2010