By Mattie O’Callaghan, Horticultural Trainee
When the final leaf cascaded down from the eight London Plane trees which tower over the Garden Museum, it was a big cause for celebration. Myself and several of the volunteers danced in a ring on top of our leaf mound, compressing the leaves, before watering and covering them to break down into nutritious mould to feed new life. Even as the rain poured down and the winds snuck into our jackets we were joyous. For me, the most joy of all was being able to share and create together a public space in the heart of the city.
Volunteers form a huge part of so many gardens and as we recognise the importance of engaging people in public space for them, we also realise that garden making comes from their huge effort. At the Garden Museum we have a very generous community of volunteers and supporters and I find the time spent gardening with them the most valuable. Coming to the garden as a landscape architect I wanted to learn about horticulture in a public space, but what I have learnt most of all is how gardening is a collective, shared process which of course includes plants, but also people and the wider ecological community.
Over the last few months we’ve been spending a huge proportion of our time collecting the piles of leaves which descend into leaf bays to make mulch. As plane leaves take a long time to break down and the garden space is small, we gather them by hand. The volunteers join us with enthusiasm for collecting through the autumn months. From a design perspective, we often forget that so much of our designs will have to be maintained and working under so many plane trees is time-consuming. Yet, design mainly invests in planting and hard landscape rather than the gardeners and volunteers who will look after these spaces. Embedding maintenance into the design as a central part will give people who work in public spaces more opportunity for creative gardening over mundane tasks.
Across the road we can escape the torrent of plane leaves in the Healing Garden, which has given opportunity for members of the local community to be part of the making and care of a garden in Old Paradise Gardens. The garden has emerged slowly with the collective work of many gardeners and volunteers to become a space for families to grow, schools to interact with plants, teenagers to grow and cook food, and a peaceful space for local people to sit and enjoy. Recently we’ve been working with volunteers to put in new edging, create habitat for bugs, and plant out bulbs and plants donated after the Project Giving Back Exhibition, led over the growing season by gardener Selina Ozanne with Matt Collins.
Woven into the Healing Garden is the craftsmanship of many hands which have constructed the hazel fences and beds which hold the garden. Under the guidance of coppice-worker Alistair Hayhurst of Underwood Crafts, we as gardeners, volunteers and local community members have together shaped the space. Alistair, a professional hurdler, built all the fencing and then taught the rest of us how to make some of the raised beds, where we worked in groups for moral support, guidance, for splitting knobsticks and threading them through each other. The writer Ursula Le Guin, who we often studied in landscape architecture, talks about how it matters what containers and carrier bags we hold the world in. This hand-made, collective container holds the garden to be an evolving, communal space which changes with the hands that make it.
In the city it can be difficult to even know where to get your hands dirty. Navigating the urban life of London is hard, but it is through volunteering in community and public gardens that I came to horticulture. Green space is limited and so few have access to it. The Garden Museum’s recent exhibition guest curated by Todd Longstaffe-Gowan The Lost Gardens of London shows the green space that once existed in the city and the urgency of protecting the spaces which are at risk of development. At the museum in the midst of the traffic and construction we can find joy in the first flower of the Dahlia tamaulipana (tree dahlia) and the snowdrops pushing through amongst the towering city.
As the January temperatures have continued to be freezing we’ve been putting the last of the leaves to bed in St Mary’s. This will soon be transformed into Lambeth Green, a new neighbourhood green for horticultural training and the local community. Soon we will see the crumbly mould between our fingertips, the new buds emerge on skeleton trees, and the bulbs we planted erupting in swathes of colour. This can only happen with the collective work of the volunteers helping us clear the leaves, planting with care, and opening the ground to light.
After all the morning’s hard work we sit down with a steaming cup of coffee and tuck into the tin of biscuits and homemade cake; for it is the coffee break which has to be the most important part of gardening. Stories are shared, we learn about each other’s lives, and delight in simply being outside enjoying it all. It is from the volunteers, many have been here for over 20 years as gardeners have come and gone, that I have learnt so much. Making a garden or public green space is about making it with people and halving the last chocolate biscuit.
Many thanks to our garden volunteers Amy, Belinda, Cosima, Daphne, Jane, Katy, Laurie, May, Richard, Tim and Verity.
The Garden Museum Horticultural Traineeship programme is generously funded by the National Gardens Scheme.