Urban Gardening: Tips From Walworth Garden, London | Country Living UK

What we've learned here is that being an urban garden is no barrier to attracting the most amazing wildlife and in fact increasingly I think ecologists are growing in their understanding of the value of urban space for wildlife as well as the countryside, which in many parts of the UK as we know is in fact almost desert-like in terms of wildlife and habitats. Hi I'm Danny, the Education Manager here at Wellworth Garden and it's my pleasure to be able to show you around today. So we have a huge range of people come through this garden, it's wonderful to work here because of that. As well as the staff, the students form a really big and important part of our community here, we have over 90 students using our garden every week. It becomes somewhere that they cherish and look after throughout the time that they're learning with us. Many members of the local community are coming in and out, some of them every day to have a cup of tea or coffee, enjoy the garden, watching it change throughout the year and it's a teaching space, an experimental space and one that we continue to grapple with, be critical of and learn from. We're going to have a look at some of the plants that our students are propagating for our garden centre. We've got a really big range of things in here, some of those huge towering echiums that you'll see around the garden we have pricked out from the ground where they've seeded, beautiful different shapes and colours, lots of cuttings that we've potted on here, different things like persicarias, salvias, verbenas, just wonderful, wonderful plants. What we've learned here is that being an urban garden is no barrier to attracting the most amazing wildlife and in fact increasingly I think ecologists growing in their understanding of the value of urban space for wildlife as well as the countryside, which in many parts of the UK as we know is in fact almost desert-like in terms of wildlife and habitats. The space that we have, we have seen a den of three fox cubs behind our potting sheds which is very sweet, we are currently feeding them jam sandwiches to keep them happy. We've seen some incredible beetles, rose caper beetles of course, the big green shiny ones, oil beetles, stag beetles, we've seen lots of different bees, I in fact saw a large carpenter bee you know that could sit in the palm of your hand, incredible black iridescent body landed on one of my students arms quite surprisingly, but very rare endangered bee. If you provide the space nature will move in, it's miraculous, it's really encouraging because it means whatever you do in the city is worthwhile. I think different areas have the different benefits, I'll take you through a few examples, the most astounding example I think is water. So this is one of our I think seven or eight ponds that we've got in the garden now and most people think that this pond looking at it mossy edges and it's significant classic plant growth that has been here for years but it's only about three years old. The structure of our ponds is very different to most people might think of a garden pond as being, for starters we have put a number of large rocks and stones into the pond in order to provide I guess disruption to the the level water surface, that means that insects and birds are more likely to be able to get down in order to drink water but what it also enables is amphibians to get out of the water whenever they want to. In that way we're thinking about access in and out of the water so the actual structure of the pond is very important. I would encourage people to build wildlife ponds as one of the most radical changes you can make in a garden, very quickly nature will come in and enjoy that space. What we teach here is that the most important thing about flowers is to provide a range of shapes for different mouth parts because all insects feed in very different ways, they're different sizes and their mouths are different shapes so it's not just important to have flowers but to have a range of flowers. Think of a butterfly it's got a proboscis as long as its body in some cases, how could it possibly eat from the same plant or drink rather from the same plant that something like a beetle is going to? I suppose the other thing to think about in accordance with that is planting that you select should be future proof. Do anticipate that our gardens are going to get drier, they're going to get warmer and the extremes of temperature are going to get larger. Select plants that are going to last and create lasting habitat, lasting forage, nectar, pollen, fruit, whatever it is that it's providing. It can only do that if it's a plant that will grow in the place that it is and increasingly that's changing. So you will hear a focus about prioritising native species, we don't really buy into that ideology here. Whilst there are a range of native species which are incredibly important in the UK, that's not necessarily the future of planting in our gardens and we need to look beyond that. There are things that should be prioritised perhaps instead in certain cases including the length of the flowering season and providing the right shapes of flowers and year-round food for the various species. We have really planted here to embrace the full year of flowering as well as enjoying the dying process of, or rather the dying back process of all of these mostly perennial species. We have had a number of arrivals in here that have self-seeded as annuals. We've got evening primroses out already, you can see the yellow, we've got some wonderful poppies that have self-seeded. We've also had burdock which has self-seeded throughout the garden. So some nice surprises and the surprises is what I love about this border, incredible colour combinations that just really hit you, the kind of bright rusty red of lichenous chalcedonica and this mediterranean just clashing beautifully. As well as having some more intentional structures in here such as the cardoons which you can see are the silvery leafed plants going backwards and also some of the euphorbias that we've put in here for a sort of background. Like I say come September, October or maybe even earlier than that given the summers that we've had we do get a huge range of very kind of dry seed pods forming up here and they actually form a rather nice, in fact here's an example already, this red hot poker leaving its spire standing. We get to enjoy these plants twice because we've enjoyed them flowering and then we enjoy them dying back throughout the autumn and the winter and it's only then after the winter when things have started waking up from hibernation in here that we then would cut back and allow things to start again, mulch all the border and then the whole process starts again. The trees that you can see behind me initially grown for about three years or so until they were a couple of inches across and about 10 feet tall and then last autumn we bent the trees over to the side and split them from about a foot down to the ground and we've lent them all over and pegged them into place. That is in essence hedge laying. What you can see now is only six to eight months on we've got the biggest flowers I've ever seen on our elder flower, we've had the most vigorous comeback, loads of new shoots coming and that's because if you lay a hedge over like this you encourage new shooting coming up from the base, you slow the sap flow down through the tree and you get an abundance of flowers and fruits. So this is a really wonderful method of managing a hedge. We can now cut it with a hedge trimmer as usual but we'll keep thick growth at the bottom that provides lots of low down food forage and shelter which is really important. The hedge won't get leggy like a lot of our hedges do over time if you just trim the top and the sides.