A LITTLE SHED TIME READING

by Graham Burnett

(This article originally appeared in 'The Idler' issue 41)

Perhaps one of the most overlooked of garden tools is the book, a perfect companion to the deck chair and a case of fine local ale. By taking time out from the practical tasks of sowing, planting, pruning and mulching we can sit back, contemplate and absorb the wisdom of those who have gone before us and gain not only practical skills but philosophical insights as well. The definitive list of 'The Greatest Gardening Books' will always be highly subjective and ultimately pointless, but for what it's worth, here's my contenders for a few 20th century gardening classics...

Visions by Clifford Harper

OK, so my first pick isn't actually a book, but so what? It was 1978, a few months after I'd left school, when I discovered Anarchist artist Clifford Harper's utopian 'Visions' series of graphics in a little alternative bookshop tucked away in a Brighton back street. The basement walls were decorated with six A3 posters consisting of lovingly detailed line illustrations of what a post-revolutionary society might look like. Depicting community run printing and industrial workshops, solar and wind powered housing estates and publicly controlled radio and TV stations, they were yellowing and dog eared, belonging to an optimistic age of counter-culture that was unfashionable at the pre-dawn of the Thatcher era. But for me they were an epiphany, especially the image of the Collectivised Terrace – an ordinary street in any town or city where the fences dividing previously private and isolated back yards have been torn down, with the resulting open spaces turned into productive plots of vegetables, fruit bushes, chicken houses, cold -frames and bee hives managed by urban farmers and libertarian communards. Thatcher's hardline 'there is no such thing as society' agenda was just around the corner and already looming large in the public conciousness. But this was a positive glimpse of how things could be, revealing both the enormous potential of the power of community, and the urban food growing space available by applying just a little common sense, co-operation and imagination to what surrounds us. All it takes is a small shift in our perceptions to see that we all have the power to create better times for ourselves and each other. Maybe this is subversive talk, but who needs supermarkets and agro-chemicals when London alone has some 1.4 million households with gardens, 1388 ha of derelict land, 53,600 ha of protected open space, 14,411 ha of agricultural land plus school playgrounds, rooftops and parks?¹

'Radical Technology', the book from which these posters were originally culled, is long out of print, but you can still check out Harper's 'Visions' in 'Why Work? Arguments For The Leisure Society' published by Freedom Press.

The Allotment – its Landscape and Culture by David Crouch and Colin Ward

It wasn't until some five years later that I actually got around to some real growing, when the Southend Libertarian and Anarchist Group decided to rent a collective allotment. Debate around the politics of food production - together with a challenge from Ron to stop pontificating and actually DO something - led to about ten of us regularly turning up on the plot in our home-made CRASS teeshirts, mohicans and dreadlocks, empowering ourselves by getting our hands dirty and relearning some of the horticultural skills that earlier generations took for granted. The 'old boys', with their cloth caps, sleeveless jerseys and straight lines of leeks and cabbages, called us the 'coloured haired lot', and our initial contacts with them felt like a culture clash until we realised that we were part of a continuum. These seasoned allotmenteers had for years been putting into practice our anarcho-punk ideals of self-reliance, DIY and mutual aid. Ward and Crouch celebrate this heritage of autonomy and creativity in this classic work first published in 1988. An in-depth survey of the informal relationships between culture, plots and people, it is full of anecdotes and evidence recounting examples that give a sense of that gift economy, community spirit and improvised asthetic shared by gardeners and growers throughout the ages, right back to Winstanley and the Diggers who in 1649 took the land as a common treasury for all.

The Permaculture Garden by Graham Bell

I first came across the word 'Permaculture' in an article in 'Peace News' way back in 1981. The word intrigued me, and I filed it away in some back cupboard of my brain for the next few years. In the meantime I'd acquired an allotment and become a reasonably competent vegetable grower, able to supply my family with plentiful supplies of potatoes, onions, cabbages and beans. I'd also learned much from the books of organic pioneers such as HDRA founder Lawrence D Hills and the late, great Geoff Hamilton. I'd even borrowed David Holmgren and Bill Mollison's 'Permaculture One' from the library a couple of times, but found it rather dense and difficult to get my head around. I did however grasp that permaculture had something to do with herb spirals, and decided I'd like one of these in the garden of the house we bought in 1994, after 7 years of being cooped up in a tiny first floor flat. So as I liked the pictures in Graham's book I picked it up in the hope of gaining a few tips. It had nothing about herb spirals, but instead was one of the most eye-opening books I've ever read, changing my whole attitude to gardening, growing and ultimately, life. Giving insights into topics such as soil ecology, water management, composting and energy conservation, Graham gently explains that permaculture is a design system, based around ethics of caring for the earth and each other, and principles of using minimum effort for maximum results, seeing solutions instead of problems and above all, working with nature rather than against, as has been the pattern of most agricultural systems for the last few hundred years. More over, these ethics and principles can be applied to almost any other field of human activity beyond simply growing food; architecture and building to economic systems, forestry management to healthcare, energy production to community building. Somebody once described permaculture as 'revolution disguised as organic gardening', but I think its more important than that. Climate change and peak oil are the earth's way of telling us that we need to alter our behaviours. With permaculture we can not only make those changes but learn to thrive as well.

Forest Gardening by Robert Hart

Situated at Wenlock Edge on the Welsh borders, Robert began his forest garden project some 40 years ago after observing that a small bed of perennial vegetables and herbs that he had planted up in a corner of his more conventional smallholding was looking after itself with little or no intervention, unlike his annual crops that needed constant attention such as sewing, planting, weeding and so on. Furthermore, these plants provided interesting and unusual additions to the diet, as well as seeming to promote health and vigour in both body and mind.
Noting the maxim of Hippocrates to “make food your medicine and medicine your food”, Robert adopted a vegan, 90% raw food diet. He also began to examine the interactions and relationships that take place between plants in natural systems, particularly in woodland. Based on the observation that the natural forest can be divided into distinct layers or ‘storeys’, he developed an existing small orchard into an edible landscape consisting of canopy tall trees, dwarfing fruit trees, shrubs, herbs and climbers, yielding apples, pears, cherries, plums, grapes, gooseberries and currants as well as fresh green salad leaves and herbs as ground cover plants.

His vision was that such low input green and productive landscapes would replace the grey concrete jungles and factory farmed 'countrysides' in which so many of us exist;

“Obviously, few of us are in a position to restore the forests. But tens of millions of us have gardens, or access to open spaces such as industrial wastelands, where trees can be planted. and if full advantage can be taken of the potentialities that are available even in heavily built up areas, new ‘city forests’ can arise...”

To me Robert was a true 20th Century hero, whose contribution to our sense of possiblity far, far outstripped the sad, small values my generation have been encouraged to see as aspirational. Robert died in 2000, after which the future of his land fell into doubt. But nonetheless his vision continues to inspire countless numbers who have implemented his ideas in private and community gardens, school grounds, allotments and council estates...

Graham Burnett