ARTICLES - January 2012 News Letter

NEWS LETTER FOR JANUARY 2012.
A TIME FOR REFLECTION

Dear Fellow Garden Lover,

January already, how quickly the months creep up on us before we know it, it will be Easter again! The garden at the moment is slumbering, it’s looking decidedly shaggy and needs a clear up but I tell myself that I should not cut anything back until spring time. So occasionally when it is a milder day and the wind has abated I dash out to do small jobs here and there then scuttle back indoors again for a cup of tea. I know I should be washing out my pots, sorting out the compost heap that is becoming volcanic and deciding what to grow during the next season. The high winds over the new year damaged one of the fences, in fact a number of friends have reported damage from the storms. All this will have to wait for the spring, as I have a very small courtyard garden I can afford to adopt a kind of laisse faire attitude to gardening, all those of you with huge gardens, I expect every hours of daylight is spent toiling in your potting shed, I salute you.

Changing the subject slightly I seem to be doing book reviews in these letters and this month is much the same. I have just finished a very inspiring book called ‘On Guerrilla Gardening’ by Richard Reynolds. Subtitled A handbook for gardening without boundaries’ he lists the pros and cons of gardening on some else’s land, the history and the fact that this kind of gardening has grown over the years into an international movement with serious political implications. Dreary and derelict sites have been improved, landless people have acquired space to grow their crops, boring traffic islands have suddenly been enlivened with crops of flowers. This was a very inspirational and humbling book, read it if you can.

Happy Gardening
D.Langdon-Smith 8th January 2012