New beginnings...

I woke up this morning to a lawn sparkling with the first frost of the season, and the remaining annuals flopping over. Time to start planning for next year.

Inspiration will no doubt come from the Garden Party to Make a Difference held at Prince Charles' London home, Lancaster House, last month. Along one wall, a Future Cities Garden designed by Tom Petherick, Adam Hunt and Lulu Urquhart was packed with ideas for vertical gardening in a restricted space. This old propped-up door had become a cascade of lettuces.

 

A peek behind revealed holes drilled to hold large yoghurt pots which each held a single plant.

There were rows of shiny red peppers in an upright frame, autumn raspberries growing beneath a standard apple tree, and containers ranging from an old dustbin to large olive oil tins and even a kitchensink. Tom Petherick says the 'stacking' system stems from the homestead gardens found all over Asia.All the plants grown in this way have a use - whether for food, fuel, fodder or shade -  and  thrive in proximity to one another.

By now the royal facade has probably reverted to its more formal appearance, but for the two weeks of the garden party, it intrigued and fascinated visitors. I predict an outbreak of lettuce 'walls' next summer.

Spring at last

After such a long, hard winter, it's wonderful to see tiny shoots on branches which seemed to be dead, and the first bumblebee hovering over emerging blossom. In this blog, I hope to look at green and garden-related events and initiatives - both in the UK and abroad - with occasional snippets from fellow plant enthusiasts.

So first, here's news of an exhibition which proves the gardening boom didn't start with Ground Force. The Geffrye Museum in East London is staging "A Garden Within Doors", looking at the appeal and history of houseplants over the past 400 years. The museum's period rooms are decorated with flower arrangements in keeping with that time, while the main show area, downstairs, concentrates on the huge growth of interest in domestic gardening during the 19th century. There you'll find the gardening manuals a green-fingered Victorian housewife might have consulted, displays about trend-setting inventors, writers and publishers and details of the plantsmen, nurseries, and florists to whom she would have gone for seeds, plants and equipment. And of course there are flowers - scores of them - ranging from a typical conservatory display (above) to an eighteenth century ‘auricula theatre’ and a 'pelargonium pyramid' based on a drawing in The Amateur’s Flower Garden (1878). Inspirational.

'A Garden Within Doors' is free at the Geffrye Museum, 136 Kingsland Road, E2 8EA Ph 020 7739 9893, from now until Sunday 25 July. It will be open Tuesday to Saturday from 10am to 5pm, and on Sundays and Bank Holiday Mondays from 12 noon until 5pm.