Tranquil flashpoint: Salvar um Jardim

Threatened with closure following a crisis at the National Trust for Scotland, Arduaine garden has become synonymous with the power of protest groups

In front of me sparkled seven islands of west Scotland in a sunlit sea and behind me shone white-flowered rhododendrons too tender to be grown in the rest of Britain. Beyond these islands with names like Luing, the next coastline is distant Labrador. The wind rustled in an undergrowth of rare Far Eastern flora, and I marvelled that two years ago the guardians of this heavenly garden, the National Trust for Scotland, had intended to give up on it, lock the gate and walk away.

Arduaine has become even more famous since the Trust published its summary decision. Cantankerous southern gardeners have learned how to pronounce its name, Are-doo-nee, the Gaelic word for a green promontory. It has become synonymous with the power of protest groups. Very senior heads have rolled at the National Trust for Scotland after their closure plans in a crisis enraged the 312,000 members and prompted a pugnacious look at the structure and financial woolliness of their institution. Arduaine became the flashpoint for incredulous discontent. Valiant donors maintained the garden’s costs for 12 months while the Trust reconsidered its plans. Activists formed a rival, In Trust For Scotland, and the need began to be specified for an endowment of up to £2m to take the garden out of danger.

Plans for closure had been precipitated by the stock market collapse of 2008-2009, but there are few better “buy” signals than a panic among charity trustees. Since March 2009, more has gone Arduaine’s way. The underlying endowment has gone up with the market by more than 40 per cent. Private donors have already given and pledged £650,000 for Arduaine’s future. The Trust has slimmed down its structure and brought in a new team, headed by the steady hand of Sir Kenneth Calman, previously chief medical officer in Scotland, England and Wales. This weekend the new-look Trust launches its Save The Secret Garden Appeal for Arduaine, with a target of £100,000.

The crucial point behind all the previous fuss is that the Trust is not funded by any public money. It depends on donations, investment income and gate-money and is separate from England’s mighty National Trust. Even before 2009 it had become overstretched by accepting too much in the past with little or no endowment. The new five-year plan makes overdue financial sense. The aim for each vulnerable property is to raise and invest a capital endowment whose income will then meet half of each year’s running costs and the whole of the cost of one year’s new projects. The other revenue will come from entrance money, but the endowment will cushion the risks of bad visiting-weather and economic storms. Arduaine’s visitors have already surged by 11 per cent since the rumpus, reaching 16,000 last year. The garden deserves to get every penny of the remaining balance even before the rhododendrons’ petals have fallen. For only £30, the first 300 donors can have their names carved as an Arduaine Guardian on a special garden gate.

There ought to be a rush of inscriptions. Wherever garden soils are acid in Britain, azaleas and rhododendrons are the country’s greatest living link with the Far East. Wild varieties from China began to enter Britain with the brave plant-hunters of the generation from 1840 to 1880, many of whom had Scottish connections. The link between mild Gulf-Stream Scotland and the forest shrubs of Burma and Sichuan turned out to be the happiest link between landscapes since the great painters of the Italian Renaissance transformed the image of the Holy Land into a dreamy corner of Tuscany.

Arduaine was not early on the scene, but it has some spectacular rarities, including our national collection of Maddenia rhododendrons. They are varieties which are too intolerant of frost for other gardens and yet are mostly white-flowered and exquisitely scented.

I asked the head gardener, Maurice Wilkins, to direct me to the defining quality of Arduaine. “Tranquillity,” he replied, and although the wind was sweeping boisterously off the nearby sea, I understood what he meant. Below the canopy of tall trees, the natural paths wind unobtrusively and there is that calm which is only gained by taking the long view. Arduaine’s boundary is within yards of the beach, but in 1897 its new owner, James Campbell, reckoned that with a shelter belt he could gain from the mild Gulf Stream and make the planting the equal of the big ducal woodlands in Scotland which were developing Oriental “gorges” and Himalayan trails. Soon he was in close contact with Osgood Mackenzie, owner of the most famous Scottish island garden, Inverewe. The woodland garden at Arduaine is now even better than Inverewe’s own.

Campbell’s money came from tea-planting in Sri Lanka. One of his rarest plants for a British collection is a wild Sri Lankan rhododendron of striking outline. It is a menace nowadays on Sri Lankan golf courses, but it only grows outdoors in Britain in west Scotland, 100 yards from the sea. Campbell and his family continued to plant boldly until the 1950s and the oldest of west Scottish garden-owners have recalled for me that Arduaine was at its absolute summit in the late 1940s. It then slumbered until 1970, in danger of the throttling embrace of mother Nature.

In 1971 the site was bought for less than £10,000 by two brothers, Harry and Edmund Wright, with roots in faraway Essex and experience as nurserymen. Their devotion saved the garden, extended the seasonal interest and gave the lower part a more “gardened” feel. It was they who gave the garden to the Trust in 1992 but soon added a blast of controversy. They lived on, as Edmund still does, within 50 yards of the garden’s boundary, and after a series of perceived slights, they put up signs to publicise their view of the Trust’s rudeness and incompetence. They are still visible.

Great woodland gardens depend on a fine balance between an upper canopy of trees and the flowering shrubs beneath. This may prove to be Arduaine’s next big challenge. Campbell planted many Japanese larch trees as a shelter above his rhododendrons and by now they are up to 100ft high, a thousand of them, in Wilkins’s wary opinion. Like other shrub gardens in public ownership, Arduaine is now vetted by scientists for the dreaded Phytophthora ramorum, a sickness which has already required the burning of 90 fine Arduaine specimens in the hope of containing it. Not only has the mature larch canopy begun to block out light from the shrubs beneath it. Larch trees activate the lethal Phytophthora and near Arduaine whole hillsides of larch trees have had to be felled.

On the far side of the garden I looked at a lovely white Rhododendron williamsianum, one of my favourites in a smaller garden, and marvelled at the Rhododendron decorum behind it, one of the first brought to Scotland by the great collectors Euan Cox and Reginald Farrer nearly a century ago. Beside it a tender cream-flowered Michelia was in bud. The garden needs a phased replanting, more magnolias, camellias and more labelling from its database. It also needs £100,000 to assure it a public future. It then will symbolise the power of a bad decision if overturned by independent protest and replaced by thoughtful new brooms. in Financial Times, 13 Maio de 2011 http://www.nts.org.uk/Home/

«LIVE AND LET LIVE»

For those who live in homes where mice nibble through wires, where pigeons make a mess of eaves, where insects reduce woodwork to dust or, at the most extreme, where foxes enter bedrooms and maul babies or drunken baboons ransack the kitchen (instances reported this year in London and Cape Town), the idea of encouraging wildlife to share our living space seems, well, harebrained.

But the idea is being championed by conservationists, who warn that biological diversity is in peril. The United Nations has launched its decade of biodiversity and, in March, the second Integrated Habitats Design Competition will be launched at the Ecobuild exhibition in London.

In Britain, some bat species have declined by 95 per cent and birds such as swifts have fared similarly. The biggest threat to biodiversity worldwide is habitat loss, often as a result of building development. When, for instance, a tumbledown barn is converted into a home it could mean that bats, barn owls, swallows and swifts all lose theirs. Edward Mayer of Swift Conservation says that recent “progress” in Europe has harmed the birds. “Grants for the renovation of the EU countries’ historic towns have led to wholesale removal of swift (and bat) breeding sites as an unforeseen consequence,” he says.

Old buildings can provide homes for all sorts of wildlife, which could be your worst nightmare or an added bonus. In his book Wildwood, the late writer and environmentalist Roger Deakin described how he “welcomed the sparrows and starlings fidgeting in the thatch” of his “ruin” of a home, and how he was torn between wanting to repair the walls and “foster the passepartout menagerie” with which he lived.

However, it is today’s new buildings that offer the latest challenge. In temperate climates, houses are being built to be airtight to prevent heat loss (good for the environment) but this means they lack the nooks and crannies of older buildings, so there are fewer habitats for wildlife (bad for the environment).

That architects are designing houses where birds, bats and insects are made to feel at home with Homo sapiens may give some the shivers. However, instead of throwing brickbats, we should welcome this new thinking and install bat bricks, enthusiasts say.

It’s now cheap and easy to provide homes for bats, birds and more without impairing the longevity or beauty of the house. The German company Schwegler Natur manufactures hollow bricks designed as bat roosts and bird-nesting sites. They also make homes for solitary-nesting bees to be built into walls. Interiors are designed for the animals’ comfort – think textured walls and open-plan living areas with hanging space to suit all sizes. The prefab roosts can be built into walls or roofs to encourage bats (there are approximately 1,000 species worldwide of which 17 are in the UK). There is also a range of bird nesting boxes. The company has sold over 5m units in Europe.

“The idea is that from inside your house, you wouldn’t know that you share your home with other animals,” says Dr Carol Williams, author of Biodiversity for Low and Zero Carbon Buildings (Riba Publishing). The book contains detailed architectural plans showing how birds and bats of many species can be accommodated in our homes without impinging on human residents. “These species have evolved to live with humans,” says Williams. “Now, because of the real need to lower the carbon footprint of buildings, we risk endangering biodiversity by concentrating on reducing emissions,” she says. “If we do everything for nature except make a home for wildlife, we’re not helping.”

Encouraging biodiversity in your home can also aid mental health, says Williams. “It’s very enjoyable to sit outside with a glass of wine and watch bats flying out at night or hear swifts screaming in summer,” she says. “And being in the middle of a healthy ecosystem increases a property’s value.” Others may worry about droppings, tales of vampires or the possibility of a bat getting caught in the curtains but such concerns are “folklore”, she says. Well, she would. Her passion for wildlife may seem, ahem, batty. She even asked her builders to make holes in the new fascia and soffits she had fitted to her Cornwall home, in the hope that bats would roost there. They did.

Britain’s most common bat, the pipistrelle, only requires a 15mm by 20mm space through which to enter and roost in a cavity. Once roosting, they, like all British bat species, are protected legally. Professor Brian Edwards, of the Royal Institute of British Architects’ Sustainable Futures Group, says that in Britain the legislation has “considerable teeth”. “The regulations introduce new offences which could inadvertently be committed by architects engaged in restoration projects,” he says. Edwards advises anyone thinking of restoring to seek advice from groups such as the Bat Conservation Trust (http://www.bats.org.uk/).

Protecting our wildlife by maintaining or building structures that encourage animals to live with us is something we have done for centuries. In 15th-century Italy, many households built towers for swifts to nest in. Admittedly, the reason was to provide a harvest of young birds for the dining table. In the UK, many homes had dovecotes that provided the larder with meat and eggs, and “bee boles” in the walls – recesses where woven beehives were protected from the elements. The early 20th-century architect Edwin Lutyens built homes with owl boxes in them and wrote whimsically of “the dear big white fluffy thing” he’d seen nesting.

Owls control rodents while peregrine falcons feed on feral pigeons. Bats, house martins and swifts, meanwhile, all eat thousands of insects a day, many of them pests such as aphids and midges.

Few can deny that “nature” enhances urban spaces. In the 1970s, Malaysian architect Ken Yeang was one of the first to involve greenery in urban building designs, with his “bioclimatic skyscrapers”. Today, walls and roofs composed of living plants that provide habitats for insects – the base of the ecological pyramid – are increasingly popular. The living walls of the Musée du Quai Branly in Paris, designed by Patrick Blanc, and the living roof of native plants on the California Academy of Sciences, by Renzo Piano, are two recent examples.

Blanc’s lush living walls – which adorn buildings worldwide, including London’s Athenaeum Hotel – “bring a smile” to all who see them, says landscape gardener Daniel Bell, responsible for maintaining them. It’s not just our species they please. “The walls are absolutely alive with animals,” he says. “There are countless spiders and insects – stink bugs, flies and bees, snails. Birds feed on them; there are even blackbirds nesting in the walls.”

Living roofs and walls can also insulate buildings and reduce noise. In an era of climate change and fast urban lifestyles, we need more of them, says horticulturalist and broadcaster Professor Chris Baines. “Every extra living green surface will help to moderate the urban heat island effect, slow down the rate of rainwater runoff and help to lift the spirits,” he says.

“It’s unusual for architects, ecologists and engineers to work together to create a built environment that takes biodiversity and ecosystem services into account,” says Blanche Cameron, joint organiser of a new annual competition for such projects. The first Integrated Habitats Design Competition, supported by the government body Natural England, attracted 40 entries from architectural practices, ecologists and engineers in six countries. The winner, with a plan for converting a disused railway depot into student accommodation, including bat roosts, bird nesting, living roofs, solar panels and more, was a first-year architecture student from Liverpool University.

One architect who is building green properties with greater ecological benefits is Justin Bere. His London home has roofs of hawthorn and hazel and a wildflower meadow. There is a beehive and bat roosting and bird nesting built into walls as well as all the low-carbon features that owners of a green home would expect, such as solar panels for hot water and electricity.

“If we put a building over nature we have an obligation to put nature back on top,” says Bere. “It doesn’t cost a lot but we can’t live without nature and we don’t have any right to try and do so.” He has created a space where house sparrows flock to eat aphids on the flowers of common vetch in his rooftop meadow. “I love watching everything – the change of seasons and the wildlife.” It must all be a welcome sensory feast for his human neighbours too. Previously the site, encircled by tall terraced houses, was home to a sausage factory. London’s (unwelcome) feral foxes probably miss that. in Financial Times, 21 de janeiro de 2011

http://www.ecobuild.co.uk/
http://www.schwegler-natur.com/

Foto: pata residente no Jardim Botânico

Casas com Telhados de Algas e Flores

In Denmark, on the island of Læsø, off the east coast of North Jutland, are houses with seaweed roofs, some of which have survived for as long as 300 years.

The seaweed, or eelgrass (Zostera marina), grows up to two metres or more long. It was collected from the seashore by horse and cart and, once dried, bundled and twisted into thick ropes that were then woven through a home’s rafters to form a roof a metre thick.

Over the centuries, the eelgrass roofs became misshapen and formed a habitat for wildflowers, with sedums and grasses sprouting on their surface. Today, only 20 of the houses survive.

A fungal disease wiped out much of the eelgrass in the 1920s and, perhaps due to changing sea currents, the beds have still not recovered around Laesø. The island’s residents have also started thatching their roofs with straw instead; it lasts only a few decades but is less labour intensive.

In its heyday, creating an eelgrass roof involved the labour of at least 40 women, while the men were out at sea. Henning Johansen, who is reviving the art of seaweed thatching, has estimated that it takes 300kg to thatch just 1 sq m of roof. Once complete, the roof’s ridge is covered with squares of turf to weigh it down. As rain permeates the layers of dried seaweed, it causes them to “glue together”, becoming watertight.

Johansen says that not only is a seaweed roof fire-resistant, it is also possible to walk on one without damaging it, which was important to the residents of the island centuries ago. They would regularly stand atop their homes with a telescope, looking out across the flat, then-treeless island for ships caught in storms. The main source of wood for the interiors of the houses came from shipwrecks.

Near the island’s main town of Byrum is Museumsgården, a fine, 350-year-old courtyard farmhouse that has been preserved. It has panelled walls from shipwrecks and recycled heavy oak timber flooring. The foundation is a layer of stones from the seashore, upon which timbers have been placed directly. Interior walls that aren’t made of salvaged wood are clay mixed with seaweed and covered with a lime wash.

Today, the island has been reforested and residents can no longer see the sea from their rooftops. Unfortunately, according to Johansen, reforestation might have been a factor in the demise of the seaweed roofs. In the 17th and 18th centuries, once the small island had been deforested, the air would have been full of sea salt, inhibiting the growth of plants on the roofs. Now, many houses are surrounded by trees, protecting them from salt-laden winds. Grass and other plants take root easily in the seaweed roofs, which eventually rot and have to be removed.

Over time, Johansen hopes to replace some of the existing roofs with new seaweed ones, rather than straw. He imports bales of dried eelgrass from 300km away in the southern Baltic and will soon start to make the first seaweed roof for over a century at a cost of £100,000 to its owner.

One tradition he will change, however, is the inclusion of a cow’s head or a cat inside the roof for good luck. “It was important for the cat to be alive when it was put there,” he says.

In Financial Times, 30-8-2008

http://www.museerne.dk/content/dk3

ELEVATED PRINCIPLES

Uma obsoleta linha de caminho de ferro elevada em Nova Iorque foi transformada num "arruamento" arborizado só para peões. A inauguração do primeiro sector foi em Junho passado:

One of the most striking tropes of any sci-fi city of the future has always been the stratification of travel, the elevated railway, the monorail, streets in the sky, the flyover. From Le Corbusier to the World’s Fair Futuramas, the skyscraper skyline has always been interwoven with aerial roads and tracks.

For a while, these visions seemed to be coming true in New York. The Empire State Building was crowned by a Zeppelin mooring mast, the Rockefeller Center introduced a layered city of subterranean plazas and terraces while subway and rail lines cut swathes under and over the city in complex webs of structural steel.

But it didn’t last. The High Line, a freight railway built to service the huge industrial buildings around Chelsea, was begun in 1929 but, by the 1960s, after less than a generation, was already defunct. Wandering around Chelsea today, wending between galleries and lofts, between photo-shoots and audition lines, it is hard to see it was ever there. The High Line’s rusty legs poke hesitantly through the cliffs of masonry but, occasionally, glimpses of the railway flash into view; a delicious art deco detail, a rusty riveted column, a web of steel beams. Now it is being revived in a vision of the new transport for the future, a new vision of the stratified city. It is becoming a place to walk.

The surface of the High Line has been made into an elevated linear park and, in a rare stroke of urbanistic genius, a defunct amenity, long considered a strip of urban blight, has become an engine of regeneration.

Its rebirth has spawned a boom in development along its length and its environs have become the city’s most extraordinary architectural showcase. It is becoming a kind of museum of contemporary design. And at its heart is the Standard Hotel. (...) Its rooms, decked out in a kind of retro-futuristic-nautical, give the most astonishing views over the city. The vista sweeps out over the Hudson and out to the Statue of Liberty while the endless activity around the meat storage units below roots the views in the gritty everyday life of the city, such as workers with blood-stained aprons and wasted clubbers at dawn.

But it also looks out on to its own vista, the long, green expanse of the High Line. The story of these old tracks is an encouraging tale of perseverance and preservation. Joshua David and Robert Hammond set up the Friends of the High Line in 1999, garnering instant celebrity support. Working hard to encourage community activism and commissioning New York architects Diller Scofidio + Renfro, the plan emerged to turn the tracks back into a more refined version of the picturesque wilderness they had become.

An exquisitely sylvan set of photos by Joel Sternfeld showed the lines as they were, an artery of untamed foliage flowing through the city and they helped people understand that this could be a green amenity rather than a toxic eyesore.

It helped also that this had been done before, in Paris’s wonderful Promenade Plantée. The architects of the High Line, who are also responsible for the recently-opened Alice Tully Hall at Lincoln Centre, worked hard to analyse the strange collection of plants that had gathered and thrived along the tracks. The very particular ecosystem was maintained and encouraged, rotten tracks were removed and replaced. The park enables the visitor to walk, uninterrupted by crossings and lights, across 18 blocks of the city centre.

Along with the new arrivals, there’s still plenty of the old Chelsea on view. The glistening skyline spike of the Empire State Building keeps the journey focused as the former tracks wend their way up from Gansevoort Street. The path passes under the brick hulk of the former Nabisco factory, its massive underbelly delicately graffitied in filigree tags, its once-shattered windows transformed into an artwork by Spencer Finch, each new pane derived from a colour study of the endlessly changing waters of the Hudson.

There is the radical new architecture itself spawned by the prospect of the High Line’s urban revitalisation: Neil Denari’s extraordinary HL23 Tower bulges over the tracks, its base squeezed on to an impossibly tight site, the cross-bracing rippling up through its skin in an echo of the High Line’s metal structure; there is the space-age pod of Diane von Furstenberg’s crystalline loft by architects Work; there is Shigeru Ban’s wonderful apartment block, an open crate of terraces with aluminium screens to shutter it up like a storefront; there are the patchwork façades of Jean Nouvel’s 11th Avenue condo tower and beside those the rippling fronts of Frank Gehry’s IAC headquarters by the Chelsea Piers.

As the High Line crosses over 10th Avenue, the structure reveals an unusual view to Midtown and the structure dips down to make a hanging public space suspended above the flowing current of traffic. There is the industrial vernacular that litters the route: metal bridges, an industrial version of Venice’s Rialto, spanning between mountainous brick buildings; there are the spindly hats of the dwindling water towers, so characteristic of the city’s roofscape.

Already the revived landscape of shrubs and reeds, saplings and grasses is obscuring the tracks and railings, the latticework sides and deco details. The High Line has become a wonderfully strange landscape, a park that takes up no space, which drifts through the city like a magic carpet. If Central Park is the most extraordinary monument to nature, a huge slice of Manhattan’s natural landscape in the midst of the world’s first modern city, then the High Line is nature winding its way back through the grid, reasserting itself over the city of industry.

And this is the moment to see it. New York is at its best at the moment it changes, the dark grids of still-exposed structural steel skeletons, the hum of construction, the evocative juxtapositions of fire escapes and scaffolds, decay and renewal, water towers and cranes. For now, the clubs and the warehouses, the meatpackers and the models, the glaziers and the gallerists co-exist in a slice of real urbanity. One day, it’ll all be condos and museums but, for now, this extraordinary linear park offers the most thrilling architectural walk in the world.

in Financial Times, 18 Julho 2009

FOTOS: retiradas do http://www.thehighline.org/

EDIBLE and ELEGANT

Cabbages, chard, peas and pumpkins can bring as much variety to a garden as flowers can, says Hazel Sillver

Functional rows of leeks and lettuces, with soil in between, are not as kind on the eye as the rose tumbling over the pergola or the drift of pink poppies filtering the light. Veg is just veg. Or is it?

Judging by a series of new kitchen gardens – and the French potagers that inspired them – it seems productivity can be beautiful.

In the Chef’s Kitchen garden at The Royal Horticultural Society’s Hampton Court Palace Flower Show in London this month, flowers such as roses, echinops and sedum grew among good-looking vegetables and herbs such as fennel, round-headed leeks (Allium sphaerocephalon), artichokes, cabbages and red orach.

Designed by Karen Rogers, the plot was created to demonstrate that a garden can be both edible and elegant. “You don’t have to have lines of veg,” says Rogers, who planted hers higgledy-piggledy in among the flowers. “A kitchen garden can be beautiful to sit in.” The focal point was a wood-burning stove (for outdoor cooking), around which sat box topiary and raised beds of blue-grey-painted wood that were filled with a stunning mixture of flowers, fruit and vegetables.

The interest in decorative vegetables is widespread. People now want to grow their own food on such a scale that their garden (if it is attached to a small townhouse, for instance) is often dominated by edibles. Why not? The allotment can look as pretty as the rose garden and attractive vegetables can be grown in borders amid the flowers. Once upon a time if vegetables were labelled “ornamental” it meant they were grown for looking at, not eating; nowadays people want them to be ornamental and edible.

"The desire for productive gardens is now immense,” says garden and landscape designer Helen Westendorp. “Last year only a handful of my clients wanted me to incorporate a vegetable garden but this year everybody has asked for one and they all want it to be ornate.”

Westendorp has created a kitchen garden at The Bell, a hotel and gastro-pub at Skenfrith in Gwent, south Wales. To fulfil the owner’s brief of “pretty productivity”, she put beds of ornate edibles such as horned cucumber, lavender and asparagus pea around a gazebo covered in blackberries and apples.

In these eco-friendly and health-conscious times, plucking food from the backyard instead of buying greens that have been flown in from another continent can help our bodies – and the planet. At Hampton Court Palace, the award for Best in Show went to the Winchester Growers’ Growing Tastes Allotment Garden and it is likely this was because of its timely theme.

At the moment, horticultural bodies and politicians cannot do enough to encourage us to harvest our own crops. Boris Johnson, mayor of London, and the Royal Horticultural Society recently paired up to create Capital Growth, a scheme that will oversee the development of 2,012 new food growing spaces in the capital by 2012. In San Francisco, Mayor Gavin Newsom has just ordered an audit of unused land, including rooftops and windowsills, that could be turned into community gardens or farms supplying locals with vegetables.

At the White House, Michelle Obama, first lady, has had an ornamental vegetable garden installed while Queen Elizabeth’s acres at Buckingham Palace now have their first edible garden since the second world war. There are rare crops, such as the climbing bean Blue Queen, strawberries growing out of a large stone vase and a round bed of eye-catching vegetables, such as rainbow chard, planted in concentric circles.

Of course the most famous vegetable patch in history was created for a monarch – the 22-acre Potager du Roi at Versailles, designed for Louis XIV in the late 17th century to “delight the eyes”. The ornamental pattern of rectangular beds surrounding a fountain was such a spectacle it spawned a series of pretty kitchen gardens for which France is now famed. The term potager, which simply means “kitchen garden” in French, now means beautiful kitchen garden in English.

There are still many incredible potager designs in France, including colourful lines of vegetables and flowers at Château de Bosmelet in Normandy and, of course, the vast chequerboard of beds at Château de Villandry in the Loire Valley.

France is an exception in history. In most countries, the ornate kitchen gardens of the past gave way to unattractive rows of vegetables. In recent decades designers have begun to think differently. In the UK the late garden designer Rosemary Verey created various potagers; at The Old Rectory in Sudborough, Northamptonshire, for example, she mixed box-edged beds of vegetables with rose-drenched arches, lavender, delphiniums and pink willow.

Now others are following her lead. The new kitchen garden at RHS Harlow Carr in the north of England is designed to demonstrate that an organic edible garden can be decorative. A walkway of living willow walls and sweet peas curves through raised beds of attractive foodstuffs such as kale. At fashion designer Linda Allard’s huge potager in Connecticut, US, there are roses among the vegetables and a tomato walkway.

There is no reason why vegetables cannot be attractive. Either we mix them with non-edible beautiful plants or we use attractive edibles, of which there are many: the exotic-looking Turk’s Turban, the small pink sweetcorn Strawberry Popcorn, regular sweetcorn for its structural foliage, the purple-grey cabbage Red Drumhead, the burgundy artichoke Violetto di Chioggia and the dark purple bean Blauhilde, to name but a few.

The organic seed and plant company Victoriana Nursery reports an increase in people buying attractive vegetables, such as cucumber Crystal Apple and pumpkin Jack Be Little to train up a trellis or over an archway.

Vegetables can be grown in more formats than we might imagine and it is an exciting design prospect to want them as the backbone of the main garden. in Finnacial Times, 25/26 de Julho de 2009

FOTO: alfaces e outros legumes no jardim do Château de Villandry no Vale do Loire

«Meanwhile, back in the city»

The Meanwhile Gardens, a little urban green space not far from where I live, are not Kensington Gardens (though they lie just within the Royal Borough), let alone the hanging gardens of Babylon or the gardens of the Summer Palace in Beijing, thoughtlessly destroyed by British troops during the Opium Wars. Nor are they the gardens of Kubla Khan’s pleasure dome in Xanadu. They are decidedly modest in scale, just a four-acre ribbon of trees, walks, borders, ponds and beds hugging the south side of the Grand Union Canal as it meanders from Paddington towards Kensal Green.

All the same, they do what city gardens should do – they provide breathing space and greenery and surprising beauty in what was once a desperately poor zone and is still classified as a deprived ward. Children appreciate them; at one end there is a playhut and a skateboard park. For those requiring a quiet space for contemplation, there is a scented courtyard. The charity Mind in Kensington and Chelsea runs horticultural training schemes out of the gardens for people who have experienced mental health problems. The Meanwhile Gardens are rich in wild flowers and wildlife: the other day I heard blackcaps and chiffchaffs and willow warblers singing together in early summer concert.

I like their somehow provisional and self-deprecatory name. These are not the gardens of some glorious future, of Le Corbusier’s ville radieuse, in which all the problems of urban living have been miraculously solved, once and for all. They’ve had to eke out a place, between a council estate and one of London’s most notorious tower blocks, between the canal and the railway line. The Meanwhile Gardens do not promise salvation; salvation has not yet arrived and maybe never will, but in the meantime, life is still there to be lived.

What does it mean, the meantime or the meanwhile? It could sound like a poor time, an impoverished time. It tends to mean an interim time, the time while we are waiting (for what? for something better?). But the meantime, the meanwhile, is also where we live. Mean can also mean average, middle of the road. So the Meanwhile Gardens could be a place for dwelling as well as waiting, in between one thing and another, between the beginning and the ending, nel mezzo del cammin di nostra vita, or in the middle of the road of our lives, which are always between a beginning and an ending.

This may sound unambitious, but in their small way the Meanwhile Gardens point to something important. Our imperfect, provisional urban lives can be touched by beauty, can be open to flourishing and conviviality as well as mere survival. This was what the Roman poet Martial meant by rus in urbe (the countryside in the city), one of those phrases which has sounded through the centuries while its context has been forgotten.

In fact when Martial uses the phrase, he does so with a good deal of irony. He is writing from clamorously noisy Rome to his friend Sparsus, explaining why he has to take frequent country breaks to be able to think and be quiet. Rome gives him no rest at all. There are schoolteachers bawling in the morning and corn-grinders by night, not to mention hammering and metal-beating (it was a bit like that where I used to live in leafy St John’s Wood). Of course, Sparsus wouldn’t know about any of this; he lives in luxury and peace in his magnificent villa on the Janiculum hill complete with vineyard.

In other words, Martial’s rus in urbe is more of an aspiration than a reality, something in his day enjoyed only by the very rich and yearned for with envy by the hoi polloi. But it is a powerful aspiration, one which has caught the imagination of city-dwellers and planners for 2,000 years. For Martial, rus in urbe seems to be a private preserve in the midst of teeming public urban “noise and smog”. But what if rus in urbe could enter the public realm?

The great parks of cities such as London and Paris mostly started as royal or aristocratic playgrounds before being handed over to the public. The Meanwhile Gardens, on the other hand, were never an aristocratic preserve. Thirty-three years ago a local sculptor called Jamie McCullough had the idea that a derelict industrial area could be turned into a community garden. The council (then Westminster) gave temporary permission; a nickname was coined and it became, paradoxically, permanent.

This modest and provisional achievement, for me, may be a better guide for the cities of the present and the future than either aristocratic largesse or utopian planning. We cannot expect another Hyde Park or Bois de Boulogne; but in cities all over the world there are crannies which, with a bit of imagination and will, can be greened.

This is regeneration in its most basic form; another poet nearer our time, Gerard Manley Hopkins, saw a world already “seared with trade; bleared, smeared with toil”, but he also recognised something else: “There lives the dearest freshness deep down things.”

in Financial Times, 20 de Junho de 2009

Nota: Para saber mais, visite o site oficial do projecto www.mgca.f2s.com/index.html

«A BOTANICAL SLEEPING BEAUTY»

The many wonderful things about Jamaica – its extraordinary music-making, its physical beauty, its athletic prowess (six sprinting gold medals at the Beijing Olympics) – contrast harshly with the crime, violence and political corruption. Tourists rarely see anything of the twisted side of island life. Yet almost every Jamaican knows someone who has been threatened with a gun or knife – or murdered.

The island’s reputation for violence, however, is only part of the picture. Rural Jamaica especially has an alluring atmosphere that cannot be guessed at behind the walls of the tourist beach resorts. Hardly visited these days is Cinchona, a botanical garden due east of Kingston, the capital. To older Jamaica hands, Cinchona is a place of remarkable charm, and one of the best-kept secrets in the West Indies.

Cinchona Gardens began life in the 1860s as an experimental quinine station. The cinchona plants had provided quinine as an antidote to malaria. Competition from cinchona grown in imperial India, however, soon undermined the project and, a decade later in 1874, the quinine station was transformed into a pleasure garden and haven for orchid-fanciers. William Nock of the Royal Botanic Gardens, Kew, was summoned from London to oversee the transformation. Before long he was inviting fellow botanists to see the night-flowering shrubs and magical efflorescence of sub-tropical flora.

Situated 5,000ft up in the Blue Mountains, Cinchona is determinedly off the tourist track. I was advised to visit with Andreas Oberli, a Swiss-born botanist living in Kingston, who was keen to see how the gardens had fared after the assaults of a recent hurricane. Before setting off, we weighted Oberli’s pick-up with cement blocks for balance: the road to the gardens was not good, he said, and the ballast would help reduce the risk of skidding. By midday the nose of the concrete-heavy Mitsubishi was pointing permanently skywards, as the road edged along vaporous ravines with swirls of thin mist. Occasionally the rolling greenness was broken by the crimson flare of an African tulip; the same shrubbery, said Oberli, typified the Italian regions of Switzerland.

Not for the first time, Jamaica struck me as a place of voluptuous, overripe beauty. Waxy-leaved frangipani and outbursts of orange-white blossom enhanced the Blue Mountain road we were now on, a scene that cannot have changed since the 1680s when Sir Hans Sloane botanised his way across it (and subsequently gave his name to London’s Sloane Square).

However, as we approached Yallahs Valley, the landscape was not so lush. A couple of bridges were down, and landslip had washed out parts of the road. Twice our pick-up got stuck in rough ground. “Thank God it hasn’t rained,” Oberli said, “otherwise all would be mud.” In these devastated surroundings, sweat-soaked and covered in roadside dust, I caught my first glimpse of Cinchona Gardens. By the entrance was the melancholy spectacle of a tulip tree and a eucalyptus uprooted by the hurricane. Yet beyond the iron gates, Cinchona’s beauty, with its lilac hydrangeas and rivers of blue azaleas, was overwhelming. The place appeared almost theatrical – the creation of some rhapsodising set-designer. Once inside I was aware of a hushed, almost private atmosphere that felt remote from the world.

Oberli, camera slung round his neck, took photographs of a clump of Assam tea bushes planted by William Nock more than a century ago. He stumbled on a lone lily with an odd, crinkly bloom. “Oh, you are a beauty!” he exclaimed and, crouching low, photographed it too. Strange gold ferns – green on the outside, gold underneath – glinted exotically in the afternoon light. Oberli has been associated with Cinchona since 1982, when he was appointed the gardens’ project manager. His brief was to restore the botanical “Sleeping Beauty” to its Victorian state; it took him four years to accomplish the task.

The observatory house had been vandalised and the glass palm-houses imported from Kew had collapsed. In the mid-1980s, Jamaica’s then prime minister, Edward Seaga, wanted to develop Cinchona as his own private country club, complete with tennis courts and a helicopter-landing pad. Oberli, to his credit, helped to block the project.

As dusk fell, a bamboo scent reached into our lungs and the mountain mists began to clear. Half a dozen Rastas were lying among the rose beds outside the observatory house smoking ganja. The plantsmen seemed to be enjoying the beauty of the mountains in the fading light. “The more you smoke,” one of them eventually announced to me, “the more Babylon fall.” (Babylon, in Rasta-speak, means oppressive colonial society; more loosely, the police.) He took a long drag at his carrot-shaped cigarette and introduced himself as Lloyd Stamp, keeper of Cinchona Gardens since 1978. He was a big man whose belly hung off him like a dead weight. With a sigh he began to complain to Oberli of his employers, the ministry of agriculture, who for the past 30 years had failed to provide him with adequate security.

“Thieves creep up here at night, Mr Oberli, and steal the Bermuda Ladies and orchids,” Stamp said. “Man, I need some guard dogs.”

“Yah, dogs are good,” Oberli agreed. “Dogs keep you alert – and they alert you.” There seemed little likelihood that Stamp would get them. People mostly avoided Cinchona. Even the mountainside farmers, who were no strangers to solitude, kept away from the godforsaken loneliness of this outpost.

Nothing, though, could tempt Stamp or his staff to work elsewhere, especially not Kingston. The city was a “creation of the devil”, he said. What used to be considered a crime in Kingston is now judged a non-crime. “Is Satan take over now,” Stamp judged. It was almost dark and the air, not yet cool, had a tired end-of-the-day smell of damp earth.

I looked out across the valley to the Blue Mountain Peak in all its ethereal majesty and sapphire tinge. I felt lucky to be up here, enjoying the dimming view. “If life is fair,” Stamp looked at me, “you will have to come and see us again.” in Financial Times, 2/3 de Maio de 2009

«Evocative neglect» no JB de Odessa

Gardens do not have to be perfect to be rewarding. They are so often evocative, in ways which depend on their viewer, not on their level of care. No two people see quite the same when they look beyond the surface. Often it is easiest to see more in gardens abroad, not only because they lie beyond the flora that we buy and sow at home.

I have just been looking at Ukrainian gardening and found an interest that goes deeper than appearances. In the Black Sea city of Odessa, my first impressions are curiously familiar. The weather might be humid but horse chestnut trees line many of the central streets. Like their English brothers, they are already turning brown in a premature announcement of autumn. And the cause is shared with the UK. The chestnutinfesting insect that reached us recently was traced to the Skopje area in the Balkans. In the past 10 years it has spread as fast as the internet and its presence in southern Ukraine suits the view that its ultimate home lies further east, probably in China, where its natural predators have yet to pack their bags and fly in pursuit.

Under their browning chestnuts, Odessa's city-gardeners surprise me by planting lines of narrow-leaved hostas. They are plants that English gardeners reserve for richer soil and never plant right round tree trunks. In Odessa, they ignore our rules. I watched as an array of the plants was planted out and saw how their gardeners remove a spade's depth of the surface soil and replace it with rich compost, more in our style. In prominent places they also add leaking hosepipe below the surface to irrigate the new arrivals.

In the elegant main city square they must also, surely, irrigate their splendid cannas. From parks in the former Soviet countries, readers have often sent me postcards of truly hideous beds of cannas, sometimes with an exclamation mark on the back of the card. The sight of them made me glad to be living in the free west. Christopher Lloyd then began to champion the charms of cannas in his garden at Great Dixter in East Sussex, south-east England, but somehow I always pictured a bust of Lenin glowering over them when he took up their cause as if it was new.

In Odessa, gardeners have not, I think, been reading Lloyd's books. They simply and sensibly exclude the forms with purple leaves and rose-purple flowers. In the city's main square only clear scarlets and yellows are used in masses, and only in forms with clear green leaves.

What happens, I wondered, in the botanical garden marked as Botanchevsky Sad on my city map? In the Ukraine it is a worthwhile question. Up in Kiev the botanical garden is remembered for its fine display of the little-known flora of the Ukraine. In the Crimea, just outside Yalta, the huge Nikitsky Sad includes a yew tree that is more than 500 years old. The horticultural enclave became the vast experimental centre of Soviet era agriculture, extending over 600 acres with another 1,500 acres of outstations. It has remained almost wholly unknown to western lovers of plants.

Odessa's botanical garden has a very different air. Superb specimens of our beloved English oak tower above a garden of evocative neglect. In the zoo of Kabul in the 1960s, the prime exhibit used to be English foxes. In Odessa, a port, the pride of the botanical garden is the tree that made the English navy great. Under a few of the oaks were yet more hostas, freshly watered, as if somebody, somewhere was still trying to do their best. I recalled how the garden historian Edward Hyams had written of this very garden in 1969: "It consoled us for its neglect by producing hoopoes for our delight."

Instead of hoopoe birds among the acacias, it consoled me with its personnel. In the heart of the garden, I watched the only gardener, an elderly lady who was hosing the last of the hibiscus and the rose-pink gladioli. She was wearing a smock that had surely not changed in the last 100 years. An aged magnolia sagged in the background. Panes were missing in the nearby greenhouse, whose heating chimney had corroded. Inside, cacti and tender plants were jumbled in big clay pots. Outside, pear and plum trees overlooked the Black Sea and, with a shock of recognition, I realised I had been in such a garden before. It evoked for me the garden of the Bolkonsky family outside Moscow, to which Prince Andrei returns before battle in the matchless pages of Tolstoy's War and Peace.

Andrei, too, found panes gone from the greenhouse and plants lying on their sides in tubs. In his garden, too, there was a magnolia with broken branches and only one worker was visible: not a woman watering but an old man weaving a shoe from raffia-twine. He, too, was undistracted, as if life must simply go on. Above all, there were fruit trees in the Bolkonsky garden too. A group of young girls was pillaging them in their owners' absence. They ran unawares into their former master while carrying stolen fruit in the folds of their dresses.

Andrei had come to say farewell "from a characteristic desire", Tolstoy tells us, "to aggravate his own suffering". I had come to say hello, out of a gardener's curiosity. Amazingly there were sounds of a scuffle and fiction seemed to become fact before me. Three young girls appeared by a hovel, two of whom were carrying plums, just like the girls in Tolstoy's novel. The old lady went on with her work, watering not weaving, but equally unconcerned by a spectator's existence. The huge plane trees above the five of us were old enough to have existed in Odessa's garden when Tolstoy was writing his chapter.

Andrei returned to his men to prepare for battle. The girls in his garden ran away through the meadow, with their fruit and their bare, sunburned legs. My girls pushed the eldest to the front so that she could ask if I needed a guide to the garden. She was riding a western-made bicycle but I needed no guide because I could leave by following the English oak trees. One day, an oligarch might restore this garden's splendour but he will also destroy what its present neglect can evoke. in Financial Times, 6 de Setembro de 2008

FOTO: Jardim Botânico de Lisboa. Abandono evocativo? Ou desleixo?

Hortas Comunitárias: «Refuge from a painful past»

John is proud of the chard, beans and fennel he has nurtured in a corner of a north London community garden. For him, the plot is more than a pretty oasis: "It gives me a sense of belonging that I don't get anywhere else. . . . it helps me forget about the past." The 21-year-old, whose woolly hat slips back to reveal the two-inch scar on his forehead from the pistol-whipping he received in 2001, is an asylum seeker. He shares this patch of ground with nine men from Kenya, the Congo, Iran, Iraq and Russia, who are also seeking refugee status.

The Ugandan fled his home five years ago after his father was killed by a gang, who also attacked John and shot him in the leg. After arriving at Heathrow airport, John, then only 16, was abandoned by the guardian who was supposed to arrange a school and home for him. He had no family in the UK (his mother died 10 years earlier) and was mistrustful of people. Eventually he made contact with social services, who found him temporary accommodation. But he suffers from depression, aggravated by the uncertainty over his status, unable to work or claim the same benefits as refugees or British citizens. "It was hard being here; I thought of all these things I'd lost and I found it hard to cope."

But he says meeting fellow asylum seekers through the Room2Heal organisation, part of the Helen Bamber Foundation, which advises and supports refugees and victims of torture, has helped him: "It gives you a family feeling. There are things I can discuss with them that I couldn't with other people." Every Friday without fail John travels across London by bus from Crystal Palace to Islington's Culpeper community garden to tend the plot of land and, especially, to look after the small fir tree he planted in memory of his father.

Psychotherapist Mark Fish set up Room2Heal 18 months ago after working in northern Uganda, where he established a retreat for religious leaders. Alongside the gardening group, Fish also runs a group counselling session that allows the members, who are aged between 20 and 50, to share their problems. Fish says the idea for a plot of land in the garden was originally to provide a space for contemplation and relaxation but its significance has grown: "These people don't have homes. This bit of land is their own. One member told me proudly 'I'm a landlord'; when he said that, he looked radiant."

Culpeper, founded in 1982, has grown from a rubbish tip into an attractive site with ponds, rose pergolas and herb gardens. It is a serene sanctuary from the surrounding traffic and busy shopping area. Dependent on charitable grants for its funding, Culpeper is home to 50 plots tended by community groups such as Room2Heal, as well as children from a local primary school and nearby residents who do not have gardens. Looking after the patch is a communal effort carried out by two garden workers, a number of plot holders and the volunteers.

Community gardens have, in some form or other, existed since cities , although the movement gathered pace in Britain and the US at the end of the 19th century. Then areas were cultivated by local workers with the aim of providing free food and exercise. After the second world war, many gardens were built on, or became derelict sites.

Jeremy Iles, director of the Federation of City Farms and Community Gardens, to which Culpeper belongs, says such gardens are a good way of developing community cohesion: "They have an impact that is different to the services provided by local authorities . . . There's a social value far beyond just gardening."

Culpeper holds a number of activities for locals, including a pensioners' tea party, arts projects for children and Hallowe'en parties as well as plant sales. Fish observes that the plot helps members make connections with the community and shows locals that "asylum seekers are not the dark figures they're made out to be in the press".

Last year Room2Heal members built a path on their patch of garden to symbolise the journey they had been on. At first it was straight. But, after much discussion, they reset the paving stones in a wiggly line because it better represented their struggle. At the end of the path they plan to build a small bench and hope that people from neighbouring plots as well as visiting locals will sit in their patch.

Kate Bowen, a worker at Culpeper, believes Room2Heal is an asset to the garden: "They're friendly. . . they make an effort to be part of the community, especially with their offers of barbecued chicken and tea." John says he regularly gets horticultural tips from holders of neighbouring plots.

The number of community gardens has grown recently - membership of the federation has grown from 120 groups seven years ago to 360 now - which Iles attributes in part to the recognition of their social value. But it is also due to the growing interest in food miles, organic produce and healthier lifestyles.

Health is one of the reasons James, a 46-year-old Room2Heal member, who uses a walking stick after being injured in police detention in Kenya, likes to come to the garden. Working on the plot helps to keep him mobile - he does the planting jobs so he can kneel down. But the benefits are beyond physical: "I felt dead until I came into this group. If I feel down, it transforms me to come to the garden." in Financial Times, 26 de Abril de 2008

http://www.culpeper.org.uk/

Jardins Lusos: «Ideal antidote to winter»

Novo livro sobre Jardins de Portugal publicado no Reino Unido:

During the recent week of a real English winter, my only digging has been round the wheels of the car, embedded in snow at various points up the drive to the house. On the coldest mornings, I have given up and returned to a mental travel among little-known gardens that are havens of camellias and spring flowers in mid-February. How many of you know much about the historic gardens of Portugal? Perhaps you have seen a few at Sintra in its unusually favourable climate for trees and hedging. My mental image of them amounted to a few painted tiles behind stone benches and dazzling bougainvilleas between the gardens and hideous, encroaching modernity.

I have been completely wrong but it has taken an excellent new book to open my eyes. As its author, Helena Attlee, aptly observes: "Thousands of visitors are drawn to Portugal each year but few of them visit its gardens. Their loss is your gain." It could even be a gain at this very moment. Some of the best are magnificently equipped with camellias, many of which are now out in flower.

Her Gardens of Portugal is the essential companion, not least because she gives the addresses of the many good gardens open only by appointment. I hope their owners do not live to regret her generous research.

In the south of the country, the once-royal garden at Queluz is relatively well known abroad. It has become the beneficiary of funding from the World Monuments Fund and I have written in the Financial Times about its appeal to restore the garden's great series of statues, made and exported by John Cheere near London's Hyde Park.

Queluz was a royal botanical paradise in the 18th century but it turns out to be only one of a score of architecturally planned gardens worth hunting down. Decay and neglect are flourishing in many of them but there is still plenty for sensitive visitors to take to heart. Attlee writes of a "quirky soul which survives vibrant and intact" or of "absurdity in a captivatingly light-hearted garden". I trust her entirely and her book's photographs are excellent.

Gardening in Portugal has been a historical roller-coaster. The first great flowering was in the early 16th century when Portuguese ships were navigating the Cape of Good Hope and bringing spices and irresist-ible luxuries back from Asia. The great -survivor from this era is Quinta da Bacalhoa, every aspect of which deserves a superlative, writes Attlee. It has the painted tiling, or azulejos , which is such a feature of walls, seats and even pillars in Portuguese garden design. The gardens of this era owed a debt, like so many, to the designs in Renaissance Italy. The best painted tiling I have seen on pergolas outside Attlee's book is in the cloister garden of San Domenico, the Italian headquarters of the Dominican monastic order in Bologna. It measures up to Portuguese standards, although Portugal has finer scenes of family members on prancing horses and more busty classical heroines. I have often thought that wittily painted tiling of this sort would be a fine addition to cramped London gardens in places such as London's Fulham. The da Bacalhoa garden owes its restored state to an American buyer in 1936, Orlena Scoville.

Wars with Morocco and then with Spain clipped Portugal's prosperity but news of gold and diamonds in Brazil restored it in the early 18th century. Garden-making flourished again with the Italian inspiration of Niccoló Nasoni, an imported genius who brought in the baroque style. He coincided with the ascent of the trade in port wine. It did not add only to 18th century gout, it also boosted the profits available for garden building and entrenched its English growers in style around Porto. Even in 1900, they struck a visitor as behaving as if they "owned the city, so Britanically, so unconsciously arrogantly" with their cricket pitches and rowing regattas and "jolly, self-contained British life". They were the ultimate British expats and their gardens showed it. Nasoni's most famous building evokes vin rosé , not port. He designed the Casa de Mateus so familiar on the labels of Mateus rosé, although the grapes for this wine were not grown around this magnificent house.

An age of exuberant gardening was shaken by the devastating earthquake round Lisbon in 1755. It was further shaken by a remarkable moderniser, the Marquis of Pombal, who attacked the country's education, Jesuits and aristocracy with particular energy. Other noble gardens suffered but his own continued to prosper and its tiled terracing, classical statues of authors and remarkable Poets Cascade can still be visited with pleasure. His fervour was followed by Napoleon's invasion and its ruinous wars. Noble gardening was hit yet again. It was not extinguished, however. Attlee has a fascinating account of yet another Italian import, the set designer Luigi Manini, who arrived from a career at La Scala opera house in Milan. He applied his skill to the magnificently sited garden of Quinta da Regaleira, where enough survives to be a tribute to interior designers when let loose outdoors.

He is not, however, the high point of her story. I am intrigued to be reminded of a superb Portuguese garden in the mid-1930s, honoured for its white peacocks, orange trees and elegance by the famous landscape gardener Russell Page. It turns out to be the Casa dos Biscainhos, one of several worthwhile gardens in the damp, garden-friendly north. Apparently many of the local townsmen emigrated in the 1960s and the public gardens were left to the women, a tradition that persists.

Biscainhos has been owned by the town council since the mid-1960s. In 1805, a visitor wrote: "When I entered the house's drawing room all the dames of honour were seated - guess, reader, where? On the floor!" By the 1960s it sounds as if they were out in the flower beds instead.

At Biscainhos, Page saw amazing camellias, clipped into the shapes of huge houses. I now see what he meant. Camellias took off in Portugal in the early 19th century and in gardens such as the stunning Casa do Campo the results are wonderfully visible. Camellias are pruned into tightly circular shapes, up to 30ft high. As I write they are flowering all over their glistening evergreen leaves, an almost incredible sight.

In England the recent frosts have ruined camellia buds outdoors. In Portugal they are at their best, with roses to follow in March and rivers of blue agapanthus while we are still shivering among our daffodils. Portuguese staircases of stone, tanks of water and façades of exuberant houses are the ideal antidote to late winter. in Financial Times, 14/15 de Fevereiro de 2009

The Gardens of Portugal, Helena Attlee (Frances Lincoln, London).

FOTO: Jardim do Palácio dos Condes da Calheta em Belém, Lisboa

«Solar cooker wins climate contest»

«A solar-powered cardboard cooker will on Thursday be announced the winner of a $75,000 competition to tackle climate change.

The Kyoto Box uses the sun’s rays to cook food and boil water. It is targeted at the 3bn people who currently use firewood. The box costs just $5 (£3.40) to make and will be given away free.

Jon Bøhmer, the cooker’s inventor, said: “It’s a great feeling. The prize is just what’s needed to get this project off the ground. There’s only so much I can do on my own.” The FT Climate Change Challenge sought to find and publicise the most innovative and scalable solution to the effects of climate change.

Sponsored by Hewlett Packard, the technology company, the competition was organised by Forum for the Future, a sustainable development charity, and the Financial Times. Sir Richard Branson and Dr Rajendra Pachauri, a Nobel prize winner, were among the judges, who chose the winner in conjunction with a public vote.

That public support helped the Kyoto Box beat nearly 300 entries to win the competition. The cooker consists of two cardboard boxes, one inside the other, with a clear acrylic cover on top that lets in and traps heat from the sun, and acts as a hob. Black paint, foil and insulation work together to raise the temperature high enough to boil water. The box is appealing because of its sheer simplicity. “There are too few people looking at simple research,” said Mr Bøhmer. “We need the basic stuff too.” The box is so easy to make that it can be produced in existing cardboard factories. A more robust version has been developed in corrugated plastic, which costs the same and is ready for testing across 10 countries.

By replacing firewood, the cooker could save up to two tonnes of carbon emissions per family per year. Mr Bøhmer hopes the box will be eligible for carbon credits, hence the name Kyoto box, making a yearly profit of €20-€30 (£18-£27) per stove, which would enable further expansion and easily cover the cost of replacing the cooker after five years.

The stove also aims to save lives: it can boil 10 litres of water in two hours, destroying the germs that kill millions of children each year.» in Financial Times, 8-4-2009

«STRAIGHT AND NARROW»: os micro jardins de Amesterdão

I didn’t exactly expect to find swaying fields of cannabis in the canal-house gardens of Amsterdam but I was surprised by their formality in this famously laid-back city. Then again, their enduring classical designs – so unalloyed in some cases I would have been only mildly surprised to find William III, 17th-century ruler of the Netherlands, later king of England and gardener extraordinaire, strolling about the parterres – made sense given how well adapted they are to Dutch geography and culture.

The Netherlands is a terribly populous country and Amsterdam especially so. Even wealthy residences, such as the waterside houses built for successful merchants and other solid burghers in the capital in the 1600s, tend to be constricted. That paucity of space explains why so many of the 7,000 often beautiful, protected buildings in the capital appear, weirdly, to be tipping towards the middle of the street. In fact, their inclination allowed a pulley – still commonly used today – to be suspended from the gables to transport furniture too bulky for winding, narrow stairwells to the upper storeys. Their gardens, likewise, are typically long and lean and also use contrivances to beat their dimensions – intricate box hedging, water features and statuary that are meant both to make the most of the pinched space and to distract from it.

“Most of the canal-house gardens are only about 7 metres wide by 30-40 metres deep; gardeners have constantly sought solutions to make them not look so narrow,” explains Tonko Grever, curator of the Museum Van Loon, which, with its faded lush furnishings, constipated portraits and formal rose garden after a 1680 design is one of the most convincingly restored of the city’s historic residences. Complex, elegant parterres, designed to be appreciated from the bel étage – the upper reception floor – were meant not only to draw attention from the lack of space in the garden. Such decorations were also favoured for their steely winter looks by well-off families who spent the warmer seasons out of town. Arising first on the sweeping canvas of royal gardens, they were, finally, a visual treat to contrast with the flatness of the Dutch landscape.

I do not want these gardens to sound dour; even when severely clipped they contained quirks. The concentric circular rose beds in the Van Loon garden form, you soon realise, a map of Amsterdam’s canals. The swirling arabesque parterres in a garden on Herengracht look quite antique but they have been there only 15 years, Maarten van den Grinten, a jazz guitarist and one of the four owners of apartments in the house behind who share upkeep of the garden, says: “Ten children have grown up here and in the garden next door; it used to look like a football field. We chose parterres for the low maintenance,” he said with a shrug. “Next door” was reached through a gap in the hedge; many of the gardens I saw were shared in this easy way. Its style was a rare casual contrast like an exemplar of the natural planting subdued for a century or two when the Dutch William, metaphorical clippers in hand, ascended to the English throne.

“How much work do you do on it?” I asked Dorine de Gruyter, the artist owner, wondering if the apparent anarchy was a laborious artifice. “Oh, hardly any,” she said, leading me down a foliage-cramped path to where her knobbly sculptures, inspired by stilt-walking musicians she had met on a recent trip to Cuba, were displayed.

Art leavened the formality of many of the gardens. The classical statuary might have flirted with kitsch but was saved by a Dionysian quality that would have pleased the ancients: a cherub strangling a serpent, a fawn dancing in ecstasy. The modern works set up a dialogue with the venerable formality and symmetry of the planting.

Through the narrow portal of the artist Heather Jeltes’s house, you come first upon a tiny room in which she has installed a draped, candlelit dining scene. You could imagine Vermeer supping in its tenebrous confines. Further back, an even more minuscule courtyard was almost filled by a broad swing set against a trompe l’oeil painting – the illusion barely perceptible – of a trellis and creeping plants.

Leaving the private gardens for the public space of the street, I found evidence of Amsterdammers’ gardening compulsion. Verversstraat, a working-class lane off the tourist trail, is one of the greenest streets in the city. Even a dope-smoking salon had a glorious green archway. Every second houseboat bobbing up and down on secluded Dijksgracht had a higgledy-piggledy plantation. No spare inch is left unplanted – ­literally; you find roses poking up from plots of that size in the pavement.

With the help of the municipality, such kerbside gardens abound. Most are no more than a paving stone wide and I found Welmoed Koekebakker, an artist (yes, another; how does the city’s economy function?) tending one that had grown halfway up her house. My first question was a Londoner’s: “Don’t people steal the plants?” “In 15 years, I’ve had only one or two stolen,” she said. “People donate plants; sometimes I don’t like them. This has become a real gathering place for the neighbourhood.” in Financial Times, 10-1-2009

FOTOS: em Amesterdão os cidadãos podem criar micro jardins em frente aos seus prédios bastando para isso abrir buracos nos pavimentos; esta iniciativa é realizada com o apoio do município.

KEW GARDENS: «A NATURAL HISTORY»

Kew Gardens is famous round the world. Its magnificent palm house is an unsurpassed marvel of glass and cast iron architecture, home to tender trees from un-British climates such as Brazil and Madagascar. Its pagoda is more than 130ft high, the tallest and arguably the earliest tribute to Chinese gardens in Europe. Its herbarium of dried and pressed plants is an international wonder, spanning centuries of collected material, which has now jumped into unexpected life, thanks to our new understanding of genetics where DNA can be recovered from dried leaves and flowers even when the original plant has become extinct in nature.

When did Kew’s own past begin? 2009 is being billed as the 250th anniversary and will be celebrated in February by an enhanced version of the Tropical Extravaganza, Kew’s tropical flower and orchid festival, and in August through a photography competition for all comers, who can submit their pictures of any botanical garden in the world. Kew will also be delivering a Darwin Treasure Chest to every primary school in the UK as part of an even bigger project called the Great Plant Hunt, which wants “to help children explore the natural world around them”. Tobacco and poppy-juice are not included.

The date of the 250th anniversary is not calculated from the first surge of gardening on Kew’s site, however. Earlier in the 18th century, the area to the west of London had begun to be landscaped by royalty, especially by the eager Frederick, then Prince of Wales under King George II. Kew was one of a cluster of fine sites along the nearby Thames, which individual royals were laying out as green retreats from the smell and bustle of their residences in the capital. Prince Frederick died from the chill that he caught during a soaking day’s work in his Kew garden but his widow, the energetic Princess Augusta, continued their joint venture on the site and by 1759 had appointed the first specialised head gardener. One of his jobs was to look after her plantings of medicinal plants and herbs and as a result the garden at Kew was first called “botanical”. It is this part of the initiative that modern Kew treats as a foundation date.

Like many keen gardeners, I have admired Kew’s commitment to science but wondered if it has had much of a commitment to the gardening that I love. One of its great projects is its Millennium Seed Bank, which aims to host and save a high proportion of the seeds to be found in partner-countries around the world. Very few of them are much use to gardeners because the majority derive from tropical dry-lands and cannot be grown outdoors.

Kew is committed to “sustainability” but the only “sustainable” garden in Britain would be one full of nettles and ground elder. I admire hybrid plants whereas Kew concentrates on wild forms. I have had a nasty feeling that deep down the scientists have thought that flower gardeners are extravagant and not central to Kew’s botanical purpose.

I have also not envied modern Kew its challenges. It has had to confront crises that could easily have crippled it. They have ranged from the thunder of aircraft using Heathrow airport to Thatcherism at its least forgiving. Even Kew’s famous past began to turn against it: under the famous Hooker family in the Victorian era, the garden was a leader in overseas plant-collecting when botanical display was linked with the power of the British Empire: the empire then fell and the removal of plants by foreigners was attacked as “colonialist”. Above all, the climate has started to warm but heating is still essential in the huge tropical glasshouses. How does such a consumption of fuel relate to modern Kew’s declared scientific mission of encouraging sustainability in plantings around the world?

On a garden bench beside spurge plants in mid-winter, I put these doubts to Nigel Taylor, longtime servant of Kew’s best interests and now the director of horticulture, with responsibilities for a garden staff of 150. We had just walked through the big rock garden, object of my critical eye after many years’ experience. I shared my doubts and memories with Taylor. My views were not unfounded because I really know how to put the gardening back into the phrase “botanical gardening”. Most modern directors of such gardens are scientists or even bureaucrats and have little idea about the potential of the outdoor, public side of their enterprise. Kew’s two recent directors have been scientists of exceptional distinction and freely admitted that gardening was really not their expertise. Sir Ghillean Prance is a revered expert on worldwide conservation, particularly famous for his championing of rainforests, and Peter Crane is a scientist of equal distinction who once even proposed that I tell him what to do with the garden as it was not his field. It was after dinner but he was not entirely joking.

My first job was as an outdoor worker in the vast alpine garden of the botanical garden in Munich under the legendary direction of Wilhelm Schacht, a super-hero who had even laid out an alpine garden for the last king of Bulgaria. The Munich garden’s only European equal was and is Edinburgh’s, now back on top form after a wobble from envious bureaucrats in the early 1990s. When I returned to England after a transforming period in German public service I naturally went straight to Kew to compare ideas.

It was autumn 1965 and with youthful eagerness I hunted down a senior employee among the boulders of Kew’s own rock garden. A botanic garden, the expert Allen Paterson remarks in his good new book The Gardens at Kew, may be defined “as a place where a wide range of plants are collected and grown and where they are all labelled, mostly correctly”. In 1965, there were many more labels than alpines on the Kew rock garden. It looked like a graveyard for former cushion plants. The most conspicuous residents were non-alpine cotoneasters hugging the rocks. I asked my senior what hours he worked, explaining that I had worked a 44-hour week for 82 Deutschmarks, beginning with a departmental check-in at 6.45am. “Christ,” he replied, “the Germans had the better of you. Here we take out the wheelbarrow at 8.30am but by the time we get to the rock garden we somehow find a tyre is flat. We go back to find the man who signs out the tyre-pump and by the time we have found him and it, it is time to have our mid-morning break.” The rest of the day went by in such calculated footling and I remember wondering if he was being played by Peter Sellers in a horticultural sequel to the British comedy film I’m All Right, Jack.

Taylor listened to my memories as echoes from a legendary past. In 1984, Mrs Thatcher ruled that Kew could no longer expect full public funding and must learn to stand on its own economic feet. The entrance fee went up from a traditional sixpence to nearer £10. I felt sorry, except for dodgers in the rockery department, and reckoned Kew would sell up. With hindsight, Taylor thinks it was a blessing. Kew could no longer simply “tolerate” its public visitors. The central scientific mission is mostly conducted away from the garden visitors’ gaze but nowadays it needs the entry fees from the garden to meet its costs. The results include realistic workers and unions, scores of volunteers, hundreds of thousands of newly planted bulbs and an excellent display of sculptures by Henry Moore last spring. Visitor figures have shot up and private and corporate sponsors have financed a new multiplication of displays. The garden’s biggest natural threats are no longer bolshy workers. They are the hordes of newly resident ring-necked parakeets, birds that were idolised when they first escaped into wild and warm south Britain but which now strip the buds off too many of Kew’s distinguished trees.

To prove the point, Taylor showed me the new glass-covered alpine house, a gift of businessman Edwin Davies, who made his fortune through an improved design for switches for electric kettles. He should be so proud of the displays of rare alpines when they are in flower without any need for electric heating. As for Kew’s heat-intensive greenhouses, Taylor countered me by observing that people cannot become keen to save the world’s endangered tropical plants unless they can also see them growing locally in cultivation. I am not a gardener who idealises “sustainability” because in Britain, I do not want a garden with nothing but weeds from the hedgerow. So long as Kew does not attack my garden’s range, I will go along with Taylor’s defence of his sweaty palm house.

I will certainly pay to support his new-style workforce. On a corner of the rock garden we found eight workers in shirt sleeves in mid-winter keenly shovelling new soil with spades shaped like the ones I used in Germany. If a big boulder needed shifting they set about it without a thought for the tyres on their barrows. Most of them were eager, muscular females. Happy anniversary, ladies. There is indeed a new source of energy at Kew and we should all pile in to support it. in Financial Times, 9-1-2009

FOTO: a famosa Palm House de Kew.

A DIFFERENT SHADE OF GREEN

Arboretums and Botanical centres are now targeting homeowners

The Arnold Arboretum, one of ­Frederick Law Olmsted’s better preserved landscapes, could easily be described as a 265-acre research facility. Run jointly by Harvard University and the city of Boston, the landmark is where specialists can find detailed taxonomic organisation and labelling, a herbarium and archives stretching back well into the 1800s. Scientists use it to conduct important studies...and to observe pathogens and insects, including the wooly adeligid, which has destroyed much of the local hemlock collection.

But the arboretum also attracts average visitors. In winter, snow highlights the carefully orchestrated naturalism and draws a steady stream of urban skiiers and sledders. And then there is the Leventritt Garden, a recent addition set on a 4-acre parcel adjacent to Olmstead’s landscape . With linear gravel paths, stone walls and New England vernacular-modernist pavilion, this new space showcases shrubs and vines suitable for residential landscaping and it won the American Society of Landscape Architects 2007 General Design Award of Excellence,

“The garden has an educational component that’s just not possible in the rest of the arboretum,” says Peter Del Tredici, a senior research scientist and lecturer in the landscape programme at the Harvard Graduate School of Design, who worked on the climate change study. “It’s more accessible to the general public.”

In contrast with the main arboretum’s minimal signage, the terraced garden is dotted with placards describing the collection and plant maintenance. It also highlights species hardy enough to survive the increasingly erratic weather. This represents a significant broadening of the facility’s scientific and horticultural mission, a trend that can be seen in arboretums and botanical gardens throughout the the US. “In the 19th century arboretums were typically associated with universities. They did research and brought in exotics and adapted them to a given climate,” explains Steven Foster, a landscape architect in Brookline, Massachusetts, who teaches in the Arnold Arboretum’s Landscape Institute for professional designers. “Before middle-class, post-second-world-war subdivisions, there wasn’t a need for the average homeowner to learn about plants and landscape design.”

But today’s environment is quite different and arboretums and botanical gardens are responding, seeking wider audiences and acknowledging the eco-friendly movement by preaching sustainability, extolling the use of native and low-maintenance plants, teaching the fine points of composting and fostering urban gardens. They increasingly function as resources not just for scientists but also for professional designers, homeowners and community gardeners.

The Leventritt Garden was, for example, designed for minimal environmental impact and low maintenance, according to Douglas Reed, a principal with Reed Hilderbrand Associates, the Watertown, Massachusetts, landscape architecture firm that handled the project. “The primary purpose is for the curators to experiment with new introductions, compare new plants with other formerly developed species and have a way of bringing them to the public’s awareness,” he says.

Some institutions are investing in green buildings too. The Queens Botanical Garden in New York City last year opened a visitor centre, administrative building and maintenance facility boasting a green roof and water saving features. The new buildings add a deeper shade of green to the botanical garden’s community, college and professional development programmes, which include classes on composting and sustainable gardening, a seniors’ garden, a children’s programme and a farmers market, according to director of capital projects Jennifer Ward Souder. “Professionals come to get ideas and people inquire about native and drought tolerant plants,” she says.

The garden also banks native seeds and works on soil conservation and its demonstration plots include alternatives to conventional, chemical-intensive grasses and ornamental plantings. One goal is to help visitors choose the appropriate combinations. “They’re not always aligned – planting native species, using less water and designing sustainable gardens,” she says. “You don’t want to have people put stuff in the wrong place and wind up needing fertilisers or chemicals.”

In San Francisco, the California Horticultural Society maintains the San Francisco Botanical Garden at Strybing Arboretum, which caters to a varied constituency, including landscape designers and their clients, community gardeners and city dwellers with little or no arable land (with classes on container gardening), according to executive director Michael McKechnie. It is also adding a centre for sustainable gardening and expanding its curriculum, which currently includes classes in garden design appropriate to local and regional climates and a certificate programme in permaculture, using and copying natural systems. “I have seen a great demand, almost a mandate, about environmental gardening,” says associate director of adult education Fred Bové as well as an interest in understanding and adapting to climate change. “The idea has come to the fore,” he says. “You can’t garden and not notice it.”

As institutions, arboretums and botanical gardens have to adapt to survive. “They are in the midst of searching to re-establish influence, an effort to create relevance,” says Ann Kearsley, principal of Ann Kearsley Design, a landscape architecture and urban design firm in Portland, Maine.

The design process behind Olmsted’s archetypal landscapes, for example, can be difficult for non-specialists to discern. “They look like they’ve been there for ever. His reinterpretation of 18th-century English gardens have morphed into spaces that are now so stately and gorgeous,” she says. “It can be difficult teasing out that they are completely constructed.”

Although landscaping clients have fairly conservative taste, designers can introduce them to progressive environmental and aesthetic ideas through the arboretums and botanical gardens that have added contemporary designs, demonstration plots and classes.

Kearsley praises these institutions for leading by example. “I come from a long line of gardeners and there’s a strong sense that you’re passing plants to the next generation,” she says. “Few residential projects are expected to last as long as 25 years. If you can afford to have a 40ft tree brought in, you don’t have to have this kind of respect for time. And people don’t stay in their houses that long. There’s not the same sense of stewardship.”

in Financial Times, 29 de Novembro de 2008, por Ted Smalley Bowen

FOTO: Arboreto do Jardim Botânico continua em grande parte adormecido para o papel que pode desempenhar na sociedade portuguesa.