The Living Garden
A Place that Works with Nature

The Living Garden is the book for all gardeners (whether new or experienced) who want to work in tune with nature to create a beautiful space. Jane Powers shows that if we cut out harmful chemicals and use the right plants for our climate and conditions, we can make a garden that has a life of its own, in which flora and fauna are intricately interwoven. She describes how to plan and plant for birds, bees and other creatures (including humans) and how to grow our own food, look after our soil, make compost and plant potions, sow and save seeds, propagate plants and carry out many other essential operations.

CONTENTS



INTRODUCTION: THE BIG IDEA

1 GARDENS FOR THE PLANET

2 CIRCLES AND CYCLES

3 SOIL

4 PLANNING YOUR GARDEN

5 PLANTS

6 CREATURES: THE GARDEN POPULATION

7 FOOD

8 HELPING NATURE GARDEN

9 GARDENERS' GOLD: HOME-MADE COMPOST

10 THE GARDEN YEAR

RESOURCES

Index

Acknowledgements

Circles and Cycles



I find it hard to describe succinctly the way I garden. It’s ‘organic’, in that I don’t use artificial pesticides or fertilizers, and it’s ‘wildlife friendly’, because I do a lot to make birds, bees and other creatures feel at home. It’s somewhat ‘sustainable’ and ‘green’ too, because I reuse whatever I can, buy as locally as possible and generally try to be a good citizen of this planet. But all of those descriptions are imprecise, overused and a bit too goody-goody to be offered up as ‘This is how I do it, and so must you’. In fact, certified organic growers and champions of sustainability would find many holes in my practice. The limitations of my sixth-of-an-acre town garden, and never-adequate supplies of time and energy, mean that unblemished green sainthood will never be mine. Indeed, it will never be any of ours – at least those of us living in the developed world.

Circular thoughts

Instead, I find it easier to say that a great deal of my gardening is about paying attention to circles. The most obvious one is the circle or cycle of life (after all, a cycle is just a circle in the fourth dimension – time). The neatest cycle is that which I mentioned earlier: where you grow a plant, compost it when it’s tired out and return the compost to the soil to nourish the next generation of plants that you grow. And so on and so on. Round and round. Simple and perfect.

There are other cycles too: for instance, where you reuse grass clippings as a weed-suppressing and moisture-retaining mulch, or turn your fallen leaves into leafmould for growing woodland species, or give twiggy brushwood another life as supports for herbaceous plants. Water – both rainwater and cleanish water from the house – can be used again. Many indoor items can live anew outdoors in an entirely different role. Clear plastic drinks bottles make cloches for vulnerable seedlings; corks can be used as buffers on top of bamboo canes to stop the unwary eye being poked out. Some people plant up their old toilet bowls and rubber boots with jolly annuals (not me, I have to admit, but each to his own).



Then there are the circles of place, rather than time. I’m really keen on these, and they govern a lot of what I do in the garden. The idea is that you draw an invisible circle (or rectangle, or amoeba shape – whichever is appropriate for your space) around the perimeter of your garden. The point of this imaginary boundary is to help you think of all the space inside it as a self-contained entity, and to try to make it self-sustaining. If you need something for your gardening activities, such as plant food or material to edge your paths, you see if you can supply it from within your domain. For example, garden compost, nettles or comfrey may all be used as feeds, while logs from felled trees or stones from rocky ground make admirable edgings.

A bitofbiodynamics

This concept of the self-supporting plot is not my own but one that I have borrowed from biodynamics, an advanced method of organic farming pioneered by Rudolf Steiner in 1924, and now refined and monitored by Demeter, an international governing body.

On a biodynamic farm, little or nothing is brought in from beyond the periphery. The acreage is managed as a balanced and self-maintaining organism. Soil, plants and livestock are all seen as elements in an integrated and holistic structure, with each part being interlinked and supportive. All the fertilizers, foliar sprays and other preparations for the food-growing side of the operation are made on the farm, from compost, plants and animal manure. Food for the livestock (which provide manure for the crops) is also grown. Such a farm is full of diversity, but beautifully self-reliant and contained. The result is that it has little negative impact on the earth.

Now, I’m not suggesting that you should bring a cow into your garden, or indeed that a domestic patch has much in common with a farm. But I’d like to commend to you the idea of a circle that can be breached only with good reason. Or rather, the idea of a series of concentric circles, with the house and garden in the innermost one, and then further circles radiating outwards: neighbourhood, town, county, country, continent and further afield. It’s not unlike the way that many of us wrote our addresses when we were little girls and boys, and first in awe of our position in the universe: in my case, it was Ardmore, Church Road, Greystones, County Wicklow, Ireland, Europe, Earth (and of course, ‘Solar System, Galaxy, the Universe’ – but we don’t need those outer rings for the purposes of this example).

So, not to belabour the concentric circles idea too much: the closer to home you can find the stuff that you need for your garden, the better. And if you can reuse the waste that your garden produces locally, so much the better too. By way of illustration, let me tell you about the birch tree in our garden that was recently brought down by a winter gale. It provided us with logs and kindling for the fire, it supplied my neighbour and me with twiggy material for our Christmas wreaths, and the brushwood became pea sticks for my garden and for the allotment of the friend who came with his chainsaw to slice up the trunks and limbs. I was sad to see the birch dramatically keel over on that windy November day, but its cycle of life is far from complete. Even after the logs – now drying in the shed – are burned, the ash will have a dozen uses around the house and garden. It will provide potassium for the fruit bushes, an anti-slip dressing for frosty or algae-slicked paving and a slug deterrent around my lettuces – to mention just three.

Keeping some kind of imaginary circle around your house and garden is kind to the environment. It limits the amount of material travelling around, which means less fossil fuel consumption and less traffic. But it also influences the way that the garden looks. If you choose materials for your garden structures and hard landscaping that come from your own plot, or near by, you naturally create a spot that has a strong, indigenous identity. An exceptional example of this is the garden of June Blake in Co. Wicklow, where all the walls, paths and other structures – the bones of the garden – are made from materials salvaged from the site (a Victorian farm) or found locally. The stone from tumbled granite outbuildings and from the surrounding fields has been reused in paving and low walls, while granite chippings for path surfaces come from a quarry down the road. Even the steel girders that once held up a barn have been laid flat to form the edging of a border. The garden sits so comfortably in the surrounding terrain that it looks almost as if it was hatched from the stony Wicklow ground.