Gardening tips: plant the hardy fuchsia ‘Hawkshead’

Feed your lilies and visit Greys Court garden in Oxfordshire for peace and quiet

Plant this Fuchsia ‘Hawkshead’, may look delicate, but happily this is one of the more hardy of the fuchsia clan. It’s compact (1m tall) and will cope with most soils, given full sun or dappled shade. It loses its leaves in winter but bounces back in spring: in northerly climes it will benefit from a deep mulch and sheltered spot.

Feed this Lilies do well in pots, not least because they seem less susceptible to the scarlet lily beetle. But these are hungry plants: any feed that’s high in potash, such as tomato feed, applied every two weeks as they get ready to flower, will work wonders. Mulching the top of pots with bark will delay them drying out, too.

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‘Is there such a thing as vegan loo roll?’: how to have a cruelty-free home

From plant-based paint to ethical furniture, creating a vegan home is less complicated, and costly, than you may think

With vegan food, fashion and makeup firmly established in the mainstream, more and more people are looking for ways to have an ethical, cruelty-free home, too. You may not have given much thought to what animal-based products crop up in your house, but there are many: fabrics, from silk to wool to sheepskin, are an obvious example – but is your mattress vegan? What goes into your cleaning products, or your energy provider? And is there such a thing as vegan loo roll?

The fact is, you can take a vegan approach to choosing almost anything for your home – and it needn’t be complicated or expensive. Next time you have to replace an item or redecorate a room, shop around for vegan options – you’ll be surprised at what’s available.

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How to weed in a wildlife-friendly way | Alys Fowler

A perfect weed-free plot offers little to our embattled insects. There is a gentler approach than pulling every unwanted plant

I have watched and silently wept this spring as trees ready for nesting, forget-me-nots in full bloom, and buttercups about to burst forth have all been clipped and ripped, torn and shredded. And in their place? Nothing. Under the rules of good husbandry, this sort of pruning and weeding makes your plot look perfect and well-ordered, the soil pleasingly flat and tickled. But I am going to take my feminist rage at this word, husbandry, and rip it up like it has done to the wild things. Enough of this obsession with control and order.

Our world is in grave danger; the smallest beings that crawl and fly around this globe are disappearing. Yet there is a yawning gap between knowledge and practice, and it sits around one of the fundamental tenets of gardening: weeding. Between the nothing of bare earth and the next set of weeds is a hungry caterpillar, weary bee, or a sawfly larva with nothing to eat. There are no pointless insects; they all matter, as they are intricately interwoven into the food web.

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How to weed in a wildlife-friendly way | Alys Fowler

A perfect weed-free plot offers little to our embattled insects. There is a gentler approach than pulling every unwanted plant

I have watched and silently wept this spring as trees ready for nesting, forget-me-nots in full bloom, and buttercups about to burst forth have all been clipped and ripped, torn and shredded. And in their place? Nothing. Under the rules of good husbandry, this sort of pruning and weeding makes your plot look perfect and well-ordered, the soil pleasingly flat and tickled. But I am going to take my feminist rage at this word, husbandry, and rip it up like it has done to the wild things. Enough of this obsession with control and order.

Our world is in grave danger; the smallest beings that crawl and fly around this globe are disappearing. Yet there is a yawning gap between knowledge and practice, and it sits around one of the fundamental tenets of gardening: weeding. Between the nothing of bare earth and the next set of weeds is a hungry caterpillar, weary bee, or a sawfly larva with nothing to eat. There are no pointless insects; they all matter, as they are intricately interwoven into the food web.

Continue reading...

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Five of the finest roof terraces from across the UK

The perfect places to spend summer...

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Let’s move to Brighton, East Sussex: green, green home of Saint Caroline

The locals may have painted the town Green, but there’s an affluence to the eco currency. And who sent for the Bez-alikes?

What’s going for it? Aside from the fact that it is on a coastline at the end of the country, threatened by sea level rise and postglacial rebound, Brighton is possibly the best place in the UK from which to fight the climate crisis. Calm down, Bristol, European Green Capital 2015: yes, you are incredibly woke, too. Only, you are not home to the UK’s first (and still only) Green party MP, Saint Caroline Lucas, or the UK’s highest number of Green councillors – 19, as of May’s elections. The Greens also topped the polls in last month’s European elections, with 35.7% of the vote. However, you may struggle slightly to square the property prices – of London proportions – with your belief that a truly green philosophy entails a fundamental restructuring, if not overthrow, of capitalist economics. But at least you will seldom spot a Daily Mail in your neighbour’s recycling.

The case against Embrace the grime, love the seediness. Ditto with stag/hen parties, Bez-alikes partying like it’s 1999, and sundry eccentrics. Don’t mention S******* Railway.

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Let’s move to Brighton, East Sussex: green, green home of Saint Caroline

The locals may have painted the town Green, but there’s an affluence to the eco currency. And who sent for the Bez-alikes?

What’s going for it? Aside from the fact that it is on a coastline at the end of the country, threatened by sea level rise and postglacial rebound, Brighton is possibly the best place in the UK from which to fight the climate crisis. Calm down, Bristol, European Green Capital 2015: yes, you are incredibly woke, too. Only, you are not home to the UK’s first (and still only) Green party MP, Saint Caroline Lucas, or the UK’s highest number of Green councillors – 19, as of May’s elections. The Greens also topped the polls in last month’s European elections, with 35.7% of the vote. However, you may struggle slightly to square the property prices – of London proportions – with your belief that a truly green philosophy entails a fundamental restructuring, if not overthrow, of capitalist economics. But at least you will seldom spot a Daily Mail in your neighbour’s recycling.

The case against Embrace the grime, love the seediness. Ditto with stag/hen parties, Bez-alikes partying like it’s 1999, and sundry eccentrics. Don’t mention S******* Railway.

Continue reading...

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