The Organic Garden. Allan Shepherd
His wife loved it.
I’m altogether comfortable with my feminine side. A garden requires a long-term commitment to care and nurture. You can get all macho about gardening, but I think it’s a mistake. If your only relationship with a garden is to do with strength and posturing, you might as well abandon subtlety, suggestion and the idea that a garden can cater for more than one mood.
Nine: go local
Whenever you can’t meet your own needs, support your local gardening enterprises. Small organic nurseries are a wellspring of local plant knowledge as well as being part of the glue that binds a community together. Local craftspeople can supply us with garden furniture, bird houses and feeders, fencing materials and other garden paraphernalia. Market gardens and box schemes can deliver much of our food.
My friend Sue Harper has her own cut flower business. It’s called Sweet Loving Flowers. She wants to grow local cut flowers to reduce the need for those flown in from the four corners of the world. Sue’s plants are hand grown and tended organically on a small, oneacre, south-facing field in Wales where, contrary to some of my occasional moans, the sun does shine. Sue was once the gardener for the famed River Café in London but moved back to Wales about five years ago to bring up her child. Her enterprise is tiny compared to some of the multinational companies that import a continuous flow of chemically produced, hot-house-grown, air-miles-laden, environmentally damaging plants from abroad. But she is only one of a handful of people meeting the growing demand for organic, local cut flowers.
Work with materials that are local to your area and learn how to fashion some of the things you need in your garden from natural, sustainable materials. Natural materials grown close to home are a fantastic and beautiful resource. As you will see later, this could include beautiful woodland materials such as willow, hazel and oak, or natural earthen products such as slate, local stone or clay. Very often they are also materials that the average gardener would feel happy to learn to work with. Some of the techniques for using them are very pleasing, almost therapeutic.
Half of garden design is about choosing plants. The other half is about materials and structures. The impact on the environment of buying a few plants is relatively small compared to the impact of some garden materials, furniture and accessories. The atmosphere and ecological footprint of a garden can be spoilt by poor material choice. Make sure you are not creating a paradise at home by destroying one somewhere else.
Ten: what we do in our gardens matters
It matters to somebody somewhere, even when we think it doesn’t.
Many people have changed the direction of my life. Some of them I’ve never met. Top of this list is Chico Mendes. Chico Mendes worked in a small area of rainforest in a remote region of Brazil. His job was to extract a harvest of natural rubber from trees – a job he could do without harming the trees. Chico supplemented his income by collecting other things from the forest too – Brazil nuts, herbs and fruits. He believed in harvesting from the forest in a way that would keep the forest intact for ever. Being totally reliant on it he was horrified to hear that his area of rainforest was to be cut down. Faced with the loss of his own livelihood, he organised a peaceful campaign of protest and resistance. He was sitting on the steps of his home when two gunmen hired by loggers shot him dead.
Can there be anything more ugly than the jagged edges of felled tree stumps poking up from empty soil?
What could be so important to take the life of a man like Chico Mendes? The sad reality is that the wood Chico died to protect was turned into charcoal, garden furniture and plywood fences. It appeared in chain stores around Britain and we bought it.
How extraordinary it must have been to garden a rainforest. To walk amongst giants every day. To be no bigger than an ant nor older than a child in comparison to the living things around you. How brave to go into your garden every morning wondering whether you will return to sit on the steps of your home each night. As gardeners we can imagine how it must have been for Chico Mendes as he heard the bulldozers move onwards through the forest. Wondering when his garden would be next.
I can picture the landscape after the bulldozers moved on. It doesn’t take much imagination. We’ve all seen the photographs. Can there be anything more ugly than the jagged edges of felled tree stumps poking up from empty soils?
But however vivid these pictures are, they still don’t tell the whole story. We might think that within a few years farmers are happily ploughing and harvesting crops on this new landscape but the truth is that once a rainforest has been removed from a piece of land nothing on that land is ever quite the same again.
Rainforest soil relies on rainforests. Once they are removed the soil loses its fertility. It is a story that 300 million slash-and-burn farmers know all over the tropical world. Each one cuts, farms and moves on, chasing ever-decreasing circles of fertility until they are forced off the land altogether, into city slums. This is competition at its most brutal. Competition amongst men for land, and with nature for fertility.
Making ethical decisions
You’re going to need to be equipped to start living organically, so I thought it would be helpful to list the thought processes that go through my mind when I’m making an ethical decision. I don’t want to give the impression that I’m a puritan and never buy anything brand new. It’s just that I like to think carefully before I buy anything.
Before you buy…DIY
Do I need it? This is a classic example of an obvious question often overlooked. How many times do you buy something on impulse and then realise that you could have done very well without it? This may seem a bit puritan to people who like shopping without boundaries, but the first step to ethical living is think before you engage credit card.
Can I make it at home? In Chapter one I rattle on about a garden bench I made. It’s not a particularly amazing bench but, because I made it, it’s the best thing since unsliced bread. Making stuff yourself is the best ecological option. You can choose the materials yourself and put it together in the least energy wasteful way.
If I can’t make it myself, can one of my friends or swap buddies make it or offer me another solution? Check out www.freecycle.org for a national network of swapcrazed freeloaders.
If I have to buy something, can I buy recycled, secondhand or reused?
If I have to buy new, can I buy products that are sustainable, local, natural and carry an approved symbol? (Be it a Soil Association, Forest Stewardship Council or other ethical standard.)
If I can’t buy local or natural, can I buy sustainable from the UK or Europe and from an ethically minded national company?
If I can’t buy from Europe, can I buy fair trade, organic and sustainable from developing countries?
If I can’t buy within these criteria, should I bite the bullet and buy it or is there another solution I hadn’t thought of?
This sounds like a laborious process but actually after a while you can make these decisions quite quickly. It’s just another skill to learn.
Buying new products
If you’re buying new stuff how do you know what you’re getting is really green, organic or ethical? There’s a whole host of different symbols and standard-setting organisations out there but which are the ones that ensure the highest standards? I’ve tried to pull together the best symbols and organisations here, give you an idea of what each of them stands for, and a contact point to make further enquiries.
Understanding ethical symbols
