Читать книгу The Organic Garden - Allan Shepherd - Страница 14

Whenever you can’t meet your own needs, support your local gardening enterprises. Small organic nurseries are a wellspring of local plant knowledge as well as being part of the glue that binds a community together. Local craftspeople can supply us with garden furniture, bird houses and feeders, fencing materials and other garden paraphernalia. Market gardens and box schemes can deliver much of our food.

My friend Sue Harper has her own cut flower business. It’s called Sweet Loving Flowers. She wants to grow local cut flowers to reduce the need for those flown in from the four corners of the world. Sue’s plants are hand grown and tended organically on a small, oneacre, south-facing field in Wales where, contrary to some of my occasional moans, the sun does shine. Sue was once the gardener for the famed River Café in London but moved back to Wales about five years ago to bring up her child. Her enterprise is tiny compared to some of the multinational companies that import a continuous flow of chemically produced, hot-house-grown, air-miles-laden, environmentally damaging plants from abroad. But she is only one of a handful of people meeting the growing demand for organic, local cut flowers.

Work with materials that are local to your area and learn how to fashion some of the things you need in your garden from natural, sustainable materials. Natural materials grown close to home are a fantastic and beautiful resource. As you will see later, this could include beautiful woodland materials such as willow, hazel and oak, or natural earthen products such as slate, local stone or clay. Very often they are also materials that the average gardener would feel happy to learn to work with. Some of the techniques for using them are very pleasing, almost therapeutic.

Half of garden design is about choosing plants. The other half is about materials and structures. The impact on the environment of buying a few plants is relatively small compared to the impact of some garden materials, furniture and accessories. The atmosphere and ecological footprint of a garden can be spoilt by poor material choice. Make sure you are not creating a paradise at home by destroying one somewhere else.